This post goes for a rough categorisation of Euroleague playmakers on a purely statistical level. But there’s lots of funny links¹ to click to make up for the author’s dry number-crunching and characteristically subpar writing.

If you’ve been around here for a while, you know I like displaying playmaking tendencies in a scatter chart plotting usage percentage (the percentage of all team possessions a player finished by himself while on the floor) versus assists to field goal attempts ratio. Tom Ziller (SB Nation) introduced this as The Black Hole Atlas two years ago, before Luke Winn (Sports Illustrated) coined the term “Mentality Matrix” with his college hoops charts. So here it is: The Mentality Matrix for the running Euroleague season.

The Mentality Matrix

I’ll be pointing out four groups of playmakers in this post, but these are only the extremes. There’s a lot of in-between players who tend towards one group or the other, or are not playmakers at all. I’m looking at you, Jaycee Carroll and Romain Sato.

(As a third additional dimension, I added colour for assisted field goals to total field goals ratio, a rough measure of how many of a player’s made shots are created by a teammate. Qualified are players who played more than 50 percent of their minutes on the one or two position and accumulated 150 or more minutes in total.)

The Passive Point Guard (Vangelis Mantzaris, Victor Sada, John Goldsberry, … )

The passive point guard is a by-product of our new-era tendency to field two or even three ballhandlers simultaneously. This guy usually advances the ball up-court and sets up the primary ballhandler for what Andrea Trinchieri calls a pick and roll “on the move” – a pick and roll on top of (for example) a flex, designed to create separation between pick and roll ballhandler and on-ball defender before the pick and roll has even been initiated.

Helps if he can make the three point shot and run a secondary side pick and roll once the ball is reversed to his side. In Victor Sada’s case, long range shooting is lacking but he’s a fantastic cutter and is known to be a threat on the offensive glass, too.

Additionally, these guys are usually tall and very good defenders, often tasked with defending the opponent’s key backcourt player.

The Pure Distributor (Omar Cook, Dimitris Diamantidis, Thomas Heurtel, … )

Top-level playmaking has historically been at home in Vitoria-Gasteiz, where Jose Manuel Calderon, Pablo Prigioni and Marcelinho Huertas were all seen fulfilling floor-leading duties within the span of one decade. Things looked unimpressive during the early part of the 2012/13 season, but the emerging late-bloomer² Thomas Heurtel, who Baskonia had unsuccessfully attempted to shop in the off-season, as well as Top16-acquisition Omar Cook have powered the Basques to a Top16-fifth 110.2 offensive rating.

Heurtel has been causing plenty of intrigue this season. Leading the league in assists to close range shots, assists to centers (the two share a strong correlation) and serving as distributor in the league’s top assist connection (Heurtel to Lampe with 39), the Frenchman now directs one of the best offenses in European basketball³.

Dimitris Diamantidis also features prominently among the league’s top assist connections (31 to Lasme, third) and ranks second in assists to close range shots. He’s always been turnover-prone, arguably a by-product of his risky penetration-and-kickout game (to go along with plenty of lobs to Lasme) that triggers Panathinaikos’ ball-movement.

Once suspected to be responsible for guiding Milano into unsafe waters, Omar Cook now leads the league in assists to field goal attempts ratio even when splitting his Milano and Baskonia numbers. Cook also ranks first in assists for three point shots, which make nearly half of his assists total.

The All-Around Playmaker (Marcelinho Huertas, Milos Teodosic, Zoran Planinic, Sarunas Jasikevicius, … )

These guys are fantastically creative passers, and they don’t trail the pure distributors a great deal in the assists category. They do, however, finish more than 20 percent of their team’s possessions with a shot, a turnover, or a trip to the foul line. This is as close as it gets to the “traditional” all-around playmaker who entertains the masses with a broad, spectacular skill set.

Milos Teodosic is a bit of a rarity here, having an assisted percentage of 44.67 percent. Most high-usage point guards create more than two thirds of their field goals on their own.

The playmaker of the Teodosic/Jasikevicius mold is a willing scorer but still distributes the ball often enough to not keep him off the ball for long stretches (by playing him alongside a pass-first guard).

The ridiculously talented Leo Westermann is showing some of those characteristics, but there is a long way to go. Westermann has not been efficient in using his possessions (neither in the Euroleague, where he finished at 0.788 points per play, nor in the Adriatic League) but he showed flashes of brilliance while playing the most difficult position in basketball at the age of 20.

The Score-First Playmaker (Vassilis Spanoulis, Bobby Brown, Marcus Williams, … )

The Spanoulis-type handles the basketball a lot (and therefore makes plenty of unassisted field goals), racks up a solid number of assists due to high usage and is usually among the league’s top volume scorers.

This type of player is often supported by a low-usage point guard of the Mantzaris type, see Daniel Hackett (Brown), Omar Cook (Langford) and Victor Sada (Navarro) as well as the Mantzaris-Spanoulis combo itself.

Whether Unicaja’s catastrophic offensive performance this year (they are second from bottom in the ACB in offensive rating, would you believe) is connected to a lack of ballhandling to support the point guard position is up for debate. They do employ the multitalented Krunoslav Simon as second ballhandler and their poor offensive output may well stem from their limitations on the four/five position.

Unicaja have a fantastic 113.1 offensive rating in 162 Euroleague minutes that Williams played alongside Calloway on the 1/2, which compares favourably to the disappointing 97.7 offensive rating in Williams’ 364 Calloway-less oncourt minutes. But this is still a small sample of minutes.

Score-first type players can greatly improve teammate performance without being skilled distributors of the basketball. Just as Carmelo Anthony makes his teammates’ lives easier, team effective field goal percentage is eight percentage points better with Vassilis Spanoulis on the court rather than off the court. Only Georgios Printezis and Pero Antic score on a better percentage (from the field or including free throws, either way) when Spanoulis sits. (rodhig had a must-read post on Spanoulis’ shot creation recently)

Random Notes

Sergio Rodriguez‘ assists to field goal attempts ratio has shockingly dropped from 1.05 (2011/12) to 0.45 (2012/13) in the Euroleague. Here’s a graph for Euroleague and ACB combined.

Vassilis Spanoulis has assisted on more than half (36) of Kostas Papanikolaou‘s 69 field goals this season, 19 of them three point shots.

Montepaschi Siena have built a fantastic stretch offense around the playmaking of Bobby Brown this season. Brown came off a poor season with Oldenburg and was given plenty of flak on this blog, but credit where credit is due. Their defensive rating is fifth from bottom in Top16, but they’ve been fantastic whenever they had Tomas Ress stretching the floor at the five position. The stretch four is a standard occurrence in European basketball, the stretch five, however, is still rare.