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[h2]http://www.mercextra.com/blogs/kawa...torically-to-kevin-johnson-and-george-gervin/[/h2]
[h2]Monta Ellis compares historically to… Kevin Johnson and George Gervin[/h2]
By Tim Kawakami
Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 4:25 pm in NBA, Warriors.
Basketball is harder than baseball to compare great players-the style of the game changes so much from era to era, there are 10 players who can touch the ball at any moment and are dependent on each other to perform or be stopped, and the sizes and skill-sets of players are so varied.
OK, we could do baseball steroid jokes here but I'll leave that for many other times.
Monta Ellis is forcing me to do this, however. He's doing special stuff and I am not the only one searching for some historical comparison. Who the heck does he remind us of? What's his top-end career projection for the Warriors or whoever?
When I've typed Ellis-related blog items in the recent past, I've come up with: Sleepy Floyd, George Gervin, Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant (not really, but a play here or there), maybe Nate Archibald.
Others come up with other names. That's all fair. Maybe Ellis is comparable to nobody, and that's fair, too. But I always try to get a fix on a blooming player's potential future by lining him up with some historical semi-twin.
But other than the stylistic comparisons, what about the statistics? Can we do a Baseball-Reference.com-style comparable chart to try to find somebody or a few somebodys who have had stat-runs like Ellis?
It's not easy. He's so young and obviously his stats are moving in a huge curve upward, so it's a moving target. But this is the time when it's fun to try to peg him, knowing we can be terribly wrong makes it more fun…
I only spent a few hours on this, so it's not anything I'm claiming as comprehensive, but I did do some research, admittedly based on subjective areas of my memory with subjective rulings.
My conclusion: If we assume Ellis is growing and growing, the future prime stat lines I think he most compares to are… George Gervin, the Ice Man himself, and Kevin Johnson.
Now it's tricky with a lot of these guys: At Ellis' current age, Gervin, for instance, was in the ABA scoring crazy; KJ was 1+ year out of Cal; Bernard King was missing time due to substance abuse… that sort of thing is tough to align with Ellis, who is already in his third NBA season.
So I'm just taking some numbers and laying the spread sheet over what I think Ellis might do to finish this year and over the next few… and it's Gervin and KJ that hit the mark best.
Let's run the lines (acknowledging that Gervin is 4 inches taller and KJ a little shorter than Monta)…
* Gervin, 21 season: …… 23.4 scoring avg, 48.5% FG. (1973-74)
* KJohnson at 22: ……….. 20.4 scoring avg, 50.5% FG. (1988-89)
* Ellis at 22 …………………. 18.7 scoring avg, 53.2% FG. (this year)
* Gervin quirks:
-Never made more than 32 3-ptrs in a single season; had a four-year FG% run of 54.4, 53.6, 54.1, 52.8, played at a very high level through his early 30s.
* KJ quirks:
-Played 4 yrs of college (Gervin played 2, Ellis 0); 12.2 asst/avg his 22-yr-old season, started getting hurt around his 25-yr-old season later and never quite was the same, though he stayed in the league.
* Ellis quirks:
-Shot 27.2% from 3pt last year, if you remove 3pt-shooting from last year's stats, would've shot over 50%; if you shoot over 50% before age 23, good likelihood you will shoot over 50% for your career; only has taken 35 3-pt attempts this season; low career asst-totals (3.2).
So I did a little estimating on Ellis' career compared to what we know about Gervin and KJ:
* Gervin career: …………………. 26.1 scoring avg, 51.1% FG.
* KJ career: ……………………….. 17.9 scoring avg, 49.3% FG.
* Ellis projected career: …….. 24.5 scoring avg, 52.0% FG. (somewhere in between on the scoring, above Gervin on the FG%, hard to say on the longevity)
I can't exactly tell you how I got to those Ellis totals, other than I looked at a bunch of other guys and Ellis' early FG% stats were better than most of them. So I gave him a nice projected total.
I'm not giving you projected assist or rebound totals because we just don't know where his career's going to go-early in his career, he has been asked to score, so we have an idea on his abilities there.
I also liked the stylistic comparisons to Gervin and KJ… You think of Gervin as a long-bomber, but that's wrong-he never shot that many "3s." He got his points in transition, "the finger roll," and in the mid-range at incredible angles. Just like Ellis.
KJ was an open-court dart, just like Ellis, and didn't shoot the "3″ much or well, just like Ellis, and had his struggles on defense against bigger shooters, just like Ellis.
But KJ was much more of a play-maker for his teammates. Ellis will never be that kind of passer, I think we can tell that already.
I wonder if KJ's brittleness and quick disappearance as a major player once the legs wore down is any omen for Ellis, who has gotten dinged up a lot in his early NBA life.
The only specific conclusion I'm prepared to make is that Ellis is one of the few guys other than Kobe-LeBron-Carmelo-AI you can circle for a potential scoring title at some point in his career. (Gervin won 4 NBA scoring titles.)
Ellis is going to approximate Gervin's scoring level for a prime period maybe in two or three years-from about 24 to 27 years old-and the premium will be on keeping Ellis healthy for longer than that.
Ellis' size limits him three ways-more likely to get hurt, theoretically easier to defend near the rim, must maintain his speed to keep his edge on bigger players (that's the very tough one for little guards).
Ellis' size helps him in a few ways-tougher to guard on the perimeter, less crashing around on defense. (By the way, his defense is right there with Gervin's-not good. If his defense and passing skills get better, Ellis will become an All-League player in a flash. He's already more than half-way there.)
But other than Kevin Durant, LeBron James and Carmelo Anthony, I don't see a lot of players around Ellis' age group who can be put down for a 28-point season average at some point in their careers-once Kobe and Iverson slow down.
Maybe O.J. Mayo and a few others in college, maybe some International players not yet here. But that's a big level to predict. Ellis doing it here and now for a month-long span is a much better predictor than anything in college or Europe.
I think we can say that Ellis, if he remains healthy, safely projects to a 27 to 30-pt season average at some point in his prime. (Gervin went 27.2/29.6/33.1/27.1 in his four-year prime run. Different, looser NBA then? Yep, but that's the style the Warriors play now.)
Plus, I'll say this for my Gervin/KJ comparables for Ellis. It's hard to find high-scoring guards/wing-finishers who shoot near or better than 50%. Ellis is one.
I'm sure more are out there, but are there any more whose styles fit closely to Ellis?
Here are a few I checked out and discarded…
* Sleepy Floyd had good FG% numbers early in his career (but not as good as Ellis'), when Floyd was just becoming a mainstay for the Warriors, but they fell off precipitously as he got into his late-20s. I don't think the same will happen to Ellis.
* Baron Davis career FG%: 41.2%.
* Allen Iverson career FG%: 42.4%.
* Nate Archibald career FG%: 46.7%. Quite short career-only three prime seasons before a leg injury in his late-20s. The smaller the player, the shorter the projected career. We'll see how long Iverson goes-he's 32.
* Bernard King had great FG% numbers (51.8% career) but I just thought he was too dissimilar to Ellis as a player to put in here.
* Tony Parker has very similiar numbers to Ellis at a similar age (Parker is 26 now with a 48.6% career FG), but he's only a career 15.9 scorer and I think Ellis go zooming past him in that category in no time.
I realize the Spurs' style forces a limited number of shots, and maybe once Duncan is gone Parker's numbers will go up… but that won't be for a while and we really don't know how that will affect Parker. For instance, his FG% could go way down.
* Sidney Moncrief fits a lot of the stat line (50.2% career FG), but he was only a 15.6 point career scorer and was much more of a defense/ rebounding type 1980s bad *$% guard. Faded when he hit 30.
* This has nothing to do with Ellis, but since I was looking up FG%: Rick Barry career FG%? 44.9%. Much lower than I would've expected.
