The Big 12 is the best conference in college basketball this season. The league has an average KenPom rating of .8507, by far the best in the country. 8 of the 10 teams in the league are in the KenPom top 50, and 9 are in the top 100. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that the league is riddled with great point guards.
West Virginia senior Juwan Staten was named preseason player of the year, Monte Morris is one of the best assist/turnover guards in the country, Kyan Anderson led a rebirth at TCU, and players like Kenny Chery at Baylor, Isaiah Taylor at Texas, and Frank Mason at Kansas are putting up good numbers without a lot of corresponding ink.
But who is the best? There are a lot of ways to compare point guards. Assists, turnovers, shooting, defense, etc. Some people want their point guard to be more of a passer who defers to others. Some coaches want their point guards to be a main cog in the offense. Your interpretation may vary, but fortunately we can at least approximate how valuable everyone is using offensive rating (note: all stats herein will be via Kenpom.com and will be in league play only. Even though some players have played easier schedules than others in league play, the gap isn’t as big as comparing non conference schedules)
Morris comes away as the leader here, with Mason not far behind. It’s worth noting that while Staten is stuck under a point per possession, he has been very good when taking his full season into account, and I don’t see him staying at 36 percent shooting on twos for long. While Offensive Rating is great, it doesn’t really mean anything without usage. Usage rate is simply the percentage of possessions ended by a player (either via a shot, turnover, or free throw attempt(s)), which gives credit for players being a bigger part of the offense.
The previous graph now makes a bit more sense as guys like Chery and Taylor who didn’t have as high of offensive ratings have much larger usage rates to make up for it than guys like Morris and Mason.
However, while usage rate is the standard accepted definition for how involved in an offense a player is, I don’t like using it for point guards. I prefer to use percentage of shots taken. Recall that one of the inputs into usage rates is turnovers committed and while turnovers are bad for every player, it is especially a killer if a point guard is turnover prone. In general, turnovers are far more costly than assists are beneficial, so instead of usage rate, which hurts low TO guys like Morris and Mason, let’s use at percentage of shots taken (which is exactly what you would think it is, the percentage of a team’s shots a player takes while he is playing, not overall) to determine how involved in the offense they are:
Here we see that Taylor, Staten, and Anderson are pretty clearly the main shooters on their respective teams, and that is true to a lesser extent for Hickey and Chery as well, while Mason and Morris are sort of in a middle tier by themselves (likely due to having better teammates than the other guys except Taylor) and Woodard bringing up the rear. In fact, Woodard has attempted almost as many free throws as he has shots. Just two more charts, I promise. First, a look at how effective players are at shooting. The two ways to determine how good of a shooter a player is is effective field goal percentage, which takes into account the extra credit a three pointer is worth, and true shooting percentage, which adds in how well a player shoots at the line. I am going to use eFG here because I am mainly just interested how players shoot in the run of play, to borrow a soccer term.
Some ugly numbers here, as Mason and Morris are the only guards at 50 percent or higher. The big winner here is probably Anderson, who takes a ton of his team’s shots and makes a good percentage of him. If he raises his three point percentage (which was over 35 percent for his career coming into the year but just 26 percent in conference play) he will look even better here. Mason and Morris mostly shoot only when needed to, and the guy who could probably stand to shoot a bit less is Taylor, who has some decent options to pass to, but it’s likely not a coincidence Texas is currently just 5th in the league in offense.
Lastly, a chart comparing each player’s assist and turnover rates:
Monte Morris comes away as the big winner here, providing Iowa State with a ton of assists while also barely turning the ball over. Taylor, Staten, and Hickey also do a good job of racking up assists without turning it over. Meanwhile, Mason has done a good job of taking care of the ball even if he isn’t an elite assist man yet.
Unfortunately, all of these charts don’t get me too much closer to who the best point guard in the league is. Most of them are the perfect fit for their offense. I doubt Fred Hoiberg wants Monte Morris taking any more shots given who else is on the roster, Staten and Anderson are needed to make their teams go, and I bet Bill Self appreciates having a point guard who makes the smart, steady play, and knows when to take the big shot and when to pass it.
If I had to only take one, I would still go with Staten. He and Anderson are the only two who have shown the ability to both be able to carry the team scoring wise, passing wise, and not turn the ball over much. Staten’s shooting numbers are down from last year, when he shot 48 percent from two on an incredible 407 attempts, but his assist rate is still miniscule, he’s passing a lot, he’s getting to the free throw line, and he is probably the best defender of the group. But if you decided on Morris, Anderson, or Mason, I probably wouldn’t argue much with you. Any way it shakes out, it’s easy to see that the Big 12’s excellence starts at the point.
