Remember the end of There Will Be Blood?
(Spoiler Alert)
Daniel Plainview, wonderfully played by Daniel Day-Lewis, is all alone with all of his wealth and accomplishment. His son has abandoned him because Daniel became an insufferable curmudgeon. Any potential business partners have been long disassociated with him and he is left to his own demise – eating overcooked steak in a bowling alley lane in his own house. It’s a depressing scene in the sense that he’s seemingly accomplished so much but has very little to show for it.
And of course, he awakens from a drunken stupor to antagonize his nemesis who tries to extort a business plan into his own favor. Except the nemesis finds out that Daniel Plainview has sucked his land’s oil dry in some sort of parallel milkshake stealing scheme. Shortly thereafter, Daniel beats him to death with a bowling pin before announcing, “I’m finished†as you’re left wondering if Daniel is happy with what he’s accomplished.
(Spoiler End)
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I was pretty adamant about certain All-Star Game perceived snubs and who the injury replacements were. Ultimately, I just didn’t care because it’s more about the spectacle these days, rather than awarding and recognizing those NBA players who truly deserve All-Star treatment after the first half of the regular season. But as certain stars dropped out and were replaced with commissioner-approved selections, I grew more and more perturbed by who was going to be playing in the All-Star Game.
I thought David Lee over Josh Smith was completely absurd and I was much happier to justify the addition of Jason Kidd to the West team due to the inclement Dallas weather. It just didn’t make sense bringing in a power forward who was all offense and no defense rather than a guy who was in the running for Defensive Player of the Year. Josh Smith was the victim of already having two teammates on the East team while the New York market wasn’t represented at all.
With Jason Kidd, it was more of a matter of safety in bringing players into Dallas, in my opinion. Guys like Marc Gasol and Tyreke Evans were at least as deserving as Kidd was and were already in Dallas. With Evans you would have had one of the best rookies of the last 20 years (in terms of production and numbers) getting a shot at hanging with the big boys much earlier than we expected. With Gasol 2.0, we see a beast of a man who throws the label of “Soft Euro†back in the face of the coddled US-born centers.
One question that kept coming up with the fans I was talking to was, “why isn’t Monta Ellis being selected as an injury replacement for the West?†And for me, I never considered him to be truly All-Star worthy. He was putting up pretty nice scoring numbers. Actually, he’s putting up REALLY nice scoring numbers. In 48 games played this season, he’s averaging 26.2 points per game (sixth in NBA) on 46% shooting. Those seemingly are All-Star numbers. Throw in the fact that he’s averaging a career-high 5.4 assists per game and he’s made a nice case for himself.
But something has been lacking from Monta Ellis in what he’s doing. It’s definitely not the scoring and the playmaking has been pretty nice with the assists and steals he’s garnering (third in the league at 2.19). The minutes he’s been playing this season also seem to be preposterous. In ten games this season, he’s played every single tick of the clock with one of those being an overtime game. He played in three straight games from January 15th to January 20th in which he didn’t sit out for a second. Just think about that for a minute.
He played 149 straight minutes of basketball in a three-game stretch. Vince Carter would rather play Russian roulette than be subjected to putting out that much effort. And yet, Monta did it on a terrible team going nowhere. He did it with a few D-Leaguers as his teammates instead of the bevy of promising players he thought he was getting the past two seasons.
And this is the conundrum that has been Monta Ellis this year. He’s been putting out superhuman efforts on many nights in which most stars would be mailing it in because they had little chance to win. He’s been willing to sacrifice his body in order to do the one thing he was put on this earth to do – score the basketball. However, when you look deeper into the numbers, you see he’s having truly unique season.
Let me just start off by saying that based on the numbers basketball-reference.com has, no one has ever averaged more than 25 points per game, more than 20 field goal attempts per game and had an offensive rating under 100 while having a defensive rating over 110. If Monta Ellis finishes out this season on the pace he’s going, he’ll be the first. I know it seems like a weird set of parameters to find similar NBA seasons but it’s a good glimpse into how wildly inefficient Monta has been for his team while being so awe-inspiringly impressive.
Here is a list of some stats to consider for Monta that show he’s kind of all over the place:
- 26.2 points per game (sixth)
- 5.4 assists per game (16th)
- 22.3 field goal attempts per game (2nd)
- 46.2% field goal (sixth amongst guards)
- 4.2 turnovers per game (first)
- 17.29 PER (71st, 15.0 is league average)
- 99 offensive rating
- 114 defensive rating
While his scoring has been incredible and his ability to create turnovers with steals is also near the top of the league, his ability to efficiently score the basketball and defend his opponent have been quite subpar. We marvel at the scoring because that’s the name of the game – outscore your opponent and you win. With Monta, his supporters will be quick to fire back that his defense can’t be that bad because he is near the top in steals or they’ll wonder why you aren’t raking Steve Nash’s defensive liabilities across the coals in the same way. But that’s just a way of avoiding the issue at hand.
By the numbers, the Warriors are much worse off with him on the court than with him on the bench. The Warriors’ team offensive rating of 106.7 falls nearly eight points when Monta is out on the court (99 offensive rating mentioned above). And their defensive rating as a team is 110.6 but three to four points worse when he’s on the floor. While it seems like his scoring exploits make him an All-Star consideration, far more stats prove that he wasn’t snubbed at all.
While looking back at similar seasons and trying to fudge the parameters as much as I could to find an apt comparison for what Monta is doing, I found the 1977-78 campaign of Pete Maravich to be closest to what Ellis has done for the Warriors this season. Pistol put up 27 points on 44% shooting with 6.7 assists and 5.0 turnovers per game. He also had a PER of 17.6, an offensive rating of 96 (to his team’s 98.9) and a defensive rating of 103 (to his team’s 100.6). Maravich too was on a less than stellar team putting up gaudy superficial numbers while the efficiency and turnover numbers showed he was less than spectacular. And yet even then, he didn’t have as drastic a gap in the offensive and defensive ratings as Ellis is putting up this season.
So what does this all mean?
I’m not quite sure, to be honest with you. Ellis does some special things on a basketball court. He does the noble basketball deed of trying to carry a dog excrement team on his back while trying to outscore everybody by himself. And I don’t think he’s given much of a choice to the contrary. At the same time, how much does he really help his team if the efficiency numbers show that he’s actually hurting them when he’s on the court?
While trying to find the balance between what we see on the court and what we see with advanced stats, one thing is certain – Monta Ellis is unique in the way he’s playing basketball this season. He’s left alone to his own demise because he has no other people around him that are capable of carrying the load. He can’t rely on a rookie guard despite how much promise he shows. And he can’t rely on Corey Maggette and his band of merry D-Leaguers to provide proper support on most nights.
So he’s left out there in his big mansion all by himself – eating steak on the floor and waiting for another soul to show up and hopefully wake him out of his current purgatory.  Let’s just hope he isn’t completely ruined by the time this person shows up and he doesn’t bludgeon that person to death with a wooden bowling pin.