Nylon Calculus

Nylon Calculus: Projecting Jimmy Butler back into a lead offensive role

What will Jimmy Butler’s role in Miami look like now that he’s back as an offensive centerpiece?

Over the offseason, Jimmy Butler signed a four-year, $142 million max deal with the Miami Heat. This included a sign-and-trade that sent Josh Richardson to the Philadelphia 76ers. Combine that with Dwyane Wade’s retirement and Butler is the logical replacement to fill the massive usage hole left behind from last year’s Heat team. The offense will have a completely new look built around Butler, but what kind of realistic usage rate and role can we project for him with this Heat roster?

Usage

Throughout Butler’s career he has evolved in terms of role and scoring behavior. The plot below shows Butler’s usage rate over his career with each label as the percentile rank in usage rate among all players with at least 700 minutes (his rookie season is omitted because he didn’t meet the threshold).

Butler’s usage rate had taken on a steady increase in his career until he demanded a trade out of Chicago in 2016-17. In 2017-18 for Minnesota, he took a slight decrease while he adjusted to playing with Karl-Anthony Towns and Andrew Wiggins. Last year with Philadelphia, he experienced one of the lowest usage rates of his career since 2014-15. Transitioning roles into more of a secondary creator on offense led to actually a slight decrease in efficiency. Last year, Butler shot a 56.7 true-shooting percentage.  In 2017-18 for Minnesota, he posted a 58.5 true-shooting percentage.

While knowing about his usage career arc is useful, this doesn’t convey how much of the team’s offense he was carrying. We don’t actually know if he was the true offensive lead for any of these teams. To figure out if Butler held the highest usage rate on the team, we find the difference between Butler’s usage rate and the second-highest usage rate. If Butler didn’t have the highest usage rate, we then find the difference of the highest usage rate and Butler’s. This will tell us how much Butler either carried or shared the primary creator role.

Despite having the highest usage rate of his career in 2016-17, he actually didn’t hold the highest rate on his own team. That belonged to Dwyane Wade with 29 percent. The only year Butler held the high mark on his team in usage was 2017-18 with the Timberwolves. The second-highest was Jamal Crawford at 23 percent. A healthy amount of offense is naturally going to flow through Butler. He’s too talented for it not to. However, the interesting facet of his game is he has not consistently required the highest usage on his team to remain an offense centerpiece.

Shot distribution

Let’s take Butler’s 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons where he showed the usage rates of an elite offensive lead, as well as last year in Philadelphia, to gauge how his shot profile was affected. Below are shot chart heat maps generated from finding the density of his shot attempts, per shot data from NBA Stats API.

Butler lives at the rim. When he’s not driving to the basket, he’s more likely taking pull-up mid-rangers than 3-point attempts. However, notice the differences between 2016-17 and 2017-18 vs. 2018-19. Butler not only attempted more shots in the former years but was more spread out and balanced. He wasn’t confined to the left side of the basket like he showed a propensity to do last season. Per PBPStats.com, we can view how efficient he was in each granular location on the court. Below is a chart detailing his frequency and efficiency as percentiles among wings with at least 700 minutes, with the positions coming from Cleaning the Glass.

As more of a complementary scorer last year, Butler actually attempted a higher frequency of shots at the rim than the previous two years. He was much more efficient on these shots too, sitting in the 83rd percentile among wings. He was also more efficient at 3-point attempts above the arc last season. Areas of noticeable decline in efficiency occurred in short mid-range and corner 3 attempts. With most of the defensive attention focused on containing Joel Embiid in the post, stopping Ben Simmons full steam to the bucket and Tobias Harris stretching the floor, Butler found easier opportunities getting to the basket.

In 2017-18, 47 percent of his rim attempts were assisted on. Last year that number jumped to 60 percent. He also evolved his role to become more of a floor-spacer from the top of the arc. In 2017-18, 66 percent of his top of the arc 3s were assisted on. Last season, that bumped slightly to 70 percent.

Overall, in terms of pull-up vs. catch-and-shoot shots, he scored 5.6 pull-up points a game on 41 percent shooting in 2017-18 to go with 2.6 catch-and-shoot points per game on 33.7 percent shooting. Last season, he averaged 3.9 pull-up points per game with 34.7 percent on those attempts and 2.4 catch-and-shoot points per game on 37.3 percent shooting. His role change can be seen clearly here. Butler pulled up less with lower efficiency, while taking a similar amount of catch-and-shoot attempts but at a higher efficiency due to the easier looks he saw.

Situation in Miami

How can we use his usage and shot behavior data to project how he will function in Miami’s offense next season? First, what kind of opportunity is available to Butler? The chart below details the turnover on Miami’s roster with accompanying usage rates.

Essentially, we can look at Miami’s offseason moves as trading Wade, Hassan Whiteside and Richardson for Butler, Meyers Leonard and Tyler Herro (only identifying rotation players). The losses of Wade, Whiteside and Richardson leaves a 69 percent usage hole.

Now usage rate isn’t net-zero and shouldn’t be viewed as a statistic that can be summed and subtracted, but the main point here is that some major proponents that Miami’s offense flowed through last year are gone. Of the additions coming in, Leonard never had a consistent, high-usage role and his usage never strayed far from 15 percent. He’ll be asked to backup Bam Adebayo this year so the same role he had as a backup in Portland is safe to project for next year. Herro is a rookie and despite wowing in NBA Summer League play, expectations should be tempered and he should realistically not go near Richardson’s usage from last season.

Of the returning players, Dion Waiters (27) and Goran Dragic (33) seem to have found their roles. At their ages, it’s unlikely to see much of a jump in production and usage. That jump, however, can come from younger players like Adebayo and Justise Winslow. Bam is poised for a big breakout campaign next year and Winslow really discovered himself as a playmaker mid-season. These players can absolutely take the necessary jumps in their development and playing alongside Butler should help.

In terms of projecting Butler’s usage next season, he should see one of the highest rates of his career. Per FiveThirtyEight’s CARMELO projections that uses a k-nearest-neighbor algorithm to find historically similar players and average out their future seasons, Butler will start declining in wins above replacement. But he finds himself in a unique situation on a team starved of a central piece. While his impact can certainly start declining, he should be the main offensive weapon.

Butler is expected to command one of the highest usage rates of his career and will be the top scorer on the Heat. This will be especially true when operating out of the pick-and-roll, which has been his main source of offense year after year. According to Synergy, last season he ran 25 percent of his offensive possessions in the pick-and-roll for a modest 0.835 points per possession (54th percentile in the league). In 2017-18, he ran 31 percent of his possessions as the pick-and-roll ball-handler for 0.912 points per possession (77th percentile). Next year we should see him run more pick-and-rolls more in tune with his 2017-18 season, especially with a great roller in Bam. This will create more pull up opportunities leading to a more balanced shot distribution as it was in the 2016-17 and 2017-18 seasons as well.

While he’ll take on a primarily ball-dominant role again, he finds himself surrounded by sound playmakers. Last season, Dragic, Winslow and Bam averaged 8.4, 7.1 and 4.8 assists per 100 possessions, respectively. In Bam’s case, per CTG, he held a 0.92 assist-to-usage ratio good for the 91st percentile among centers. Miami plans to run more of the offense at the top of the key, taking advantage of his decision-making there.

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Butler hasn’t been around this many playmakers in his career so that should lead to easier looks for him, similar to what he saw last year in Philadelphia. KAT averaged 3.45 assists per 100 possessions in 2017-18 and Butler had no playmaking bigs in 2016-17 in Chicago. Having a playmaking big in Bam comparable to what he had in Embiid last season, combined with Winslow and Dragic, should allow Butler to maintain high rim shot numbers. While he’ll be the focus and be asked to create offense on a nightly basis, he will also have the luxury of playing more off-ball.

Jimmy Butler’s career has been a whirlwind so far. From getting barely any minutes his first two years in the league to developing into one of the best two-way players in the league, to requesting a trade (twice), to now finally entering free agency and getting a max contract with one of the teams he always had pegged. He’ll be the main cog of the offense and still operate as the primary creator and pick-and-roll ball-handler, but with other quality playmakers he should find himself playing more off-ball. It’s going to be a good season. Jimmy’s back.

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