New Orleans Pelicans: In Appreciation of Derrick Favors

New Orleans Pelicans: Derrick Favors makes the offense better.

Ok, So What About His Offense?

When discussing players in any sport oftentimes the sexy stats are the most talked about. In football, that’s yards, touchdowns, sacks, and interceptions, in baseball its home runs and strikeouts, and it basketball its points and three-point shooting.

I even wrote a piece earlier this year about how the Pelicans should trade for a new center. My main thinking was the team needed a floor-spacing center who could also hold his own defensively and that would allow Zion more freedom in the paint.

However, that didn’t take into account all that Favors does for this offense. While he only scores 9.2 points per game, he does this in a very efficient way, Favors is shooting 62% from the field this year on just 6.8 shots per game. That shooting percentage is second on the team (Hayes is first) and his attempts per game are all the way down at 8th on the team (behind E’Twaun Moore).

Let’s look at how those numbers compare to the rest of the NBA. For starters Favors ranks 43rd in Effective Field Goal Percentage across the league, sandwiched between Hassan Whiteside and Christian Wood. Most of the players high up on this list like Favors are big men, who because they typically play closer to the basket, have shorter distances to shoot from.

The downside to being Favors in this situation is that he takes fewer shots than a lot of the guys near him on the list. Whiteside averages more makes per game (6.9) than Favors averages attempts (6.8). There’s a case to be made that Favors should get more shots for the Pels because of this efficiency.

Derrick Favors sets picks that lead to points.

Now that we’ve touched on his shooting efficiency, let’s see how he helps the other players on the floor. NBA.com has a cool leaderboard that tracks what players do on the court that doesn’t show up in the box score. One of the stats they track is screen assists, or how many times a player sets a screen and a basket is scored because of it.

Favors is a good pick and roll partner averaging 3.3 screen assists per game, that ranks as 25th best in the league. Now having your starting center rank in the 20’s doesn’t seem very good but this stat is influenced by minutes. Nearly every player ahead of Favors averages more minutes per game than he does.

It would track that if he were given more playing time he would also get more screen assists. The problem with that is that the Pelicans have so many different ways to attack teams that Favors will always play about half the game and leave the rest for different lineup combinations.

He has one final skill that leads to wins for the New Orleans Pelicans.