Dominic McGuire is Even More Unselfish Than You Thought

by Jake Whitacre on May 28, 2009 11:26 PM EDT in Player Analysis

Anyone who's ever watched Dominic McGuire at work knows that he's not ever going to be mistaken for an offensive powerhouse in the NBA. Thankfully, he's well-aware of this and does what he can to help the team in other areas. Especially in a season that was lost early on, he could've tried to do more to help his own cause, but he didn't and probably kept the Wizards from being an even worse outfit this season.

It's hard to get recognition for the doing the little things right in a season where so many of the big things are going wrong, but his play hasn't gone unnoticed. In a post over at Hardwood Paroxysm, Jon Nichols broke down the "selfishness" of every player in the league. Here's how he came up with his calculations:

To come up with the rating was actually quite simple. First, I divided a player’s total field goal attempts by their number of assists. I then found their ranking among players of their position. Finally, I translated this ranking to a stat on a 0-10 scale.

Once all the stat-crunching was done, the player who came out with the best ratio at small forward and earned a 0 rating for selfishness was none other than Dominic McGuire. He joins Jason Kidd, Mike Miller, Fabricio Oberto, and Ronny Turiaf on the All-Unselfish Team.

For those of you wondering, here's how the rest of the team fared with their respective selfishness ratings, from least selfish to most selfish:

Juan Dixon = 0.46
DeShawn Stevenson = 0.93
Darius Songaila = 1.47
Caron Butler = 1.53
Andray Blatche = 3.10
Javaris Crittenton = 3.18
Mike James = 7.10
Antawn Jamison = 7.35
Nick Young = 9.02
JaVale McGee = 9.82

Sadly, Oleksiy Pecherov didn't get enough minutes for his numbers to be calculated, but that might be a good thing since I'm sure it would've thrown Jon's curve completely off kilter.

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Comments

Interesting statistic but

I’m not a fan of it. Basically it rewards bad shooters who are aware that they are bad shooters. Antonio Daniels probably ranks fairly high also.
Now that type of player is much better to have than a bad shooter who thinks he’s a good shooter, but a team needs guys who are willing and able to take (and make) shots. So yeah, I want Jamison taking lots of shots and I want Taser limiting his shot selection (until next year when he becomes a deadly open jump shooter).

by hotplate on May 29, 2009 9:37 AM EDT reply actions

With their respective reputations

I wouldn’t expect to see Dixon and McGee where they are.

by Pryme on May 29, 2009 10:36 AM EDT reply actions

Hmmmm.

I am not entirely sure I see the relevance of this statistic… at least of and by itself.

Where it might get interesting is if you looked at the relative selfishness of given individual groupings of five players (total scores, mean scores and standard deviations)…. I mean you don’t want five totally unselfish players on the floor, since nobody would be interested in scoring (or possibly even ABLE to score)…. Nor would you want a team with a cumulative score of, say, 18.00, if it was made up of an Iverson and four guys with less that 1.00.

Plus you get some interesting anomalies when a player who really should be more selfish about scoring (stand up, please, Mike Miller), for reasons that remain a complete mystery to me at least, suddenly decides to give up shots and act as a facilitator.

It would be interesting to run those numbers on last night’s Cavs game. Regardless of what has happened before that game or what will hapen tomorrow in Orlando, we were treated last night to a really complete effort from LeBron James… it was his lowest scoring (i.e. least selfish) game of the 5 game series, but hands down it was his best total effort of the lot. It helped that his supporting cast finally was able to score some baskets, too!

by khrabb on May 29, 2009 11:15 AM EDT reply actions