Andrea Bargnani is a bad player. He is a historically bad player. His assigned job is centre. Yet, he does none of the jobs expected of a centre. Some people defend Bargnani and it’s often with one of these two arguments:
- Bargnani isn’t your run-of-the-mill centre. Treat him like a shooting guard.
- Bargnani is an offensive centre [You can say that again!]. His scoring is his skill and any good team could use it.
Treat Bargnani like a Shooting Guard
Bargnani the shooting guard.
Recently I read a good article on Boris Diaw and his one good season. The following tangentially related comment stood out at me:
Andrea Bargnani may not be a star, but if he were 6 inches shorter, his style of play would be understandable. Once he broke out of the predetermined mold, he is deemed incompetent until he achieves success.
I disagree with the author Noam Schiller that Bargnani is deemed incompetent because he broke out of the “mold” of the typical centre. I deem Bargnani incompetent due to a consistent lack of productivity. I do like the idea that Bargnani plays more like a shooting guard, and if he was shorter, people like me – and everyone else at the Wages of Wins Network – wouldn’t be so hard on him.
We’re expected to let Bargnani pass as a shooting guard in a centre’s body. This brings up an interesting point. How does Bargnani stack up against shooting guards with similar skillsets? Because Bargnani is a centre lauded for his shooting ability, we looked for guards who posted a True Shooting percentage above 53.3% and grabbed at least 7.0 rebounds per 48 minutes (both figures are identical to the ones Bargnani posted during the 2010-11 season). That gave us the following six players:
That’s right: Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant, Thabo Sefolosha, J.R. Smith, Josh Childress, and Alonzo Gee all shot more efficiently and grabbed more rebounds than the Raptors’ starting centre. And that’s not all – the other parts of their games are better than the Italian’s too. To make matters worse is that even as a shooting guard (the position with the lowest overall productivity) Bargnani is still significantly below average. An average player posts a WP48 of 0.100 and in Bargnani’s playing time would have earned around 5.0 wins. At 2.9 wins our seven footer still comes up short even if we spot him 6 inches.
Bargnani is an Offensive Centre
Kevin Love knows numbers. Bargnani does not.
Nevertheless, Bargnani is a centre with a unique skill, right? After all, how many big men shoot as well and as often as he does? Well, thanks to Kevin Love (and others) here come some numbers:
Turns out there are seven other good-shooting big men who are better shooters than Bargnani: Kevin Love, Ryan Anderson, Dirk Nowitzki, Brad Miller, Channing Frye, Danilo Gallinari, and Vladimir Radmanovic. Here I’ve defined “big man” as any player 6’10” or taller. During the 2010-11 season, each of these players made 34.4% of their three-point attempts, hit over 81.0% of their free-throw attempts, and managed a True Shooting percentage greater than 53.2%.
Of these eight players, Bargnani ranked:
- 8th in 3P%
- 7th in FT%
- 6th in 3PA/48
- tied for 7th in REB/48
- 8th in Wins Produced
J.R. Smith can play big if needed.
Bargnani’s supposedly unique ability – his shooting – is something he doesn’t even do particularly well. As a shooting guard with a 6 inch edge Bargnani can’t even play above average. As a shooting centre Bargnani isn’t unique or even in the top five among his peers.
If the Raptors really want to stick with a guard-centre, there are cheaper and easier options. While the Lakers and the Heat probably won’t be cutting ties with Kobe or D-Wade any time soon, J.R. Smith is an unrestricted free agent and Josh Childress is potentially available through trade. If the Raptors are really interested in placing a shooting guard at centre, they could at least hire a better and cheaper one than Bargnani
– Devin w/ some help from Dre
*Luckily unlike Toronto Denver actually plays Danilo as a small forward and as such he is actually helpful to the team.
Wages of Wins Journal 
anthony franco (@francoburbank)
August 6, 2011
My guess is that if you expanded the shooting guard cutoffs even more say TS% of 50% or 51% and Reb/48 to 6.0 Bargnani would look even worse. There might be a few more players beneath him, but there would probably be a bunch more above.
Also does this make Chuck Hayes the Anti-Bargnani because he is actually a center in a shooting guard’s body? In fact he is listed at 6-6 which makes him exactly 6 inches shorter than Bargnani.
Man of Steele
August 6, 2011
Ha, too true anthony! The Raptors could have had Hayes and DeJuan Blair (similar game, similar build) for less than Bargnani made
Devin Dignam
August 6, 2011
anthony:
Yes! Chuck Hayes is the anti-Bargnani! And I love the guy – he was on my fantasy team. He’s also an unrestricted free agent, so he can be had.
As far as the cutoffs…if we make it players 6’6″ or shorter, TS% >50%, and reb/48 >7.0, we get 14 players. I don’t have time to look at their SG Wins though.
Scott Ziolko (@sziolko)
August 6, 2011
Hoping you guys can fix your graphs. The conditional formatting in the background in Excel is convenient but it gives a distorted comparison as the bars don’t start at zero. Thus the proportions are way off leading people to think differences are greater than they actually are.
For example, the REB/48 numbers in your image:
I created a set of comparisons that show how distorted those values are:
http://imgur.com/SLews
With the accurate comparisons you can still easily argue that Bargnani is not providing good value. I believe there are a few work-arounds, but the version of Excel I have handy doesn’t have these formatting options so I can only suggest making true bar charts instead of the background/conditional formatting charts (perhaps putting a value of “0” in a row that is not displayed in the image will help and force the bars to start from 0 so that the lengths are truly proportional).
Devin Dignam
August 6, 2011
Scott,
Yes, they are “distorted” in that they are relative, not absolute. There is actually a relatively simple way of changing this – just go into “manage rules”, edit the rules, and change from “lowest value” to “number” and write in 0. But I did not want to display it that way. The intent was not to create accurate graphs, but to highlight differences and make it easy to see than it would be with plain old numbers. For example, Kobe and Bargnani’s rebounding numbers are both (relatively) much lower than the other players, and I wanted to make that obvious just by taking a glance.
Thanks for the feedback.
classhandicapper (@Classhndicapper)
August 8, 2011
I generally agree with the conclusion but strongly disagree with idea that you should classify players by position. There are a wide variety of skills required to put together a very good basketball team. IMO thinking of players as Cs, PFs, SFs etc… is at best archaic and at worst misleading and foolish. While certain skills tend to be concentrated among players of certain sizes (and positions), that is not always the case and more importantly NEED NOT BE. Bargnani is one of MANY hybrid players in the modern NBA that does things not typically associated with men of his size without being able to do other things that are. He has to be judged on what he DOES bring to the table and not what he doesn’t bring to the table relative to traditional big men. If you want to call him overpaid, I wholeheartedly agree. But the level of criticism on this blog is borderline preposterous and reflects a misunderstanding of the modern game of basketball and the value of various skill sets.
Devin Dignam
August 8, 2011
classhandicapper:
“He has to be judged on what he DOES bring to the table and not what he doesn’t bring to the table relative to traditional big men.”
So what does he bring to the table? He doesn’t shoot particularly well, doesn’t rebound very well, doesn’t pass well, steal or force turnovers, block, defend…doesn’t do anything particularly well. That’s why that he doesn’t look good even when we move him to the least productive position of them all – shooting guard.
I somewhat agree with you that “[t]here are a wide variety of skills required to put together a very good basketball team.” Bargnani wouldn’t be so bad if the rest of the team was filled with above average rebounders and efficient shooters who could make up for Bargnani’s deficiencies. But those players would be the ones deserving of praise if we were evaulating them properly, and Bargnani would still fall short. So regardless of his position, he is not productive (ie: “good”). But his position makes it worse.