FanPost

Around the NBA - Brooklyn Nets vs Utah Jazz edition



So I am flipping through the box scores and I noticed an interesting stat line.

Player A - Min - 37/ 10-30FG/ 2-12 3FG/ 5-5 FT/ 3 RB/ 5 AST/ 1 ST/ 1 BL/ 4 TO/ 4 PF - 27 pts

Player B - Min - 24/ 7-16 FG/ 2-6 3FG/ 5-7 FT/ 1 RB/ 4 AST/ 0 ST/ 0 BLK/ 3 TO/ 4 PF - 21 pts

Player A is Kyrie Irving and Player B is Spencer Dinwiddie. Now on the surface, Irving is having a pretty stellar season so one game where he shot 33% from the floor and 16% from 3 is not a big deal. He has a PER of 27.5 a TS% of .572 on a usage of 34% (which is ridiculous). However, he is only sporting a VORP (Value over replacement player) of 0.6. Think about that. His value over Dinwiddie (who sports a 0.0 VORP) is only of a player who is 0.6 better than him. Even with all of those stats! Irving is making the max while Dinwiddie makes $11 million or about a 1/3 of his salary. Now obviously there a number of factors involved in their stats and how they have played but I just found it fascinating that Irving gets so much love when he continuously under performs compared to Lowry. For example, just using VORP, Irivings highest VORP came last season when he had 4.7 and his second best came 2 seasons ago with 4.0. Lowry has been over 4.9 4 times in his career. BPM numbers favour Irving offensively but he is pretty bad defensively. He is also a high usage player. Lowry's highest usage was in 2015 when he had 26.1, Kyrie has never had a usage lower than 26.2 even in the years where he shared the court with Lebron (which shocked me).

It is just really weird to me that Irving gets so much respect considering his limitations and attitude problems.