WFNY Stats & Info: Luke Walton’s passing excellence

Walton has definitely been able to shake off the rust and play better over the last month or so. The passing is a nice bonus, but the fact that he’s been able to knock down a few shots here and there is what really matters to me. He’s still only sitting at 42.6% FG and 28.6% 3FG for January, which probably still isn’t good enough to balance out his solid passing game, but it’s certainly better than it was.

Named my Kid Price called this about a week ago and had some guys grilling him over it… The old goat looks like he was right!!!

i was one of the guys grilling and while the assist% was up with Walton on the floor, every single other number was worse. that was my point.

Walton has had a couple decent games in the last couple weeks, but I still want no part of him on our team after this season.

Haha, love it. I also enjoy thinking of him in a D’Antoni offense. He left the Lakers too early, we almost had it!

well, we get to see the Dwight&Pau floor combo as a consolation prize. where is Odom when you need him?!

I agree that on a good team Walton is buried at the end of the bench, but I don’t think he’s as bad as the stats you listed are suggesting. I realize the stats take into account the entire season and I’m probably thinking about the last month or so, but still, I’m curious about the possibility of those stats being affected by the people he tends to be on the floor with during his minutes. Even though his time on the floor represented the worst and not just bad, but is it possible his minutes tend to be shared with the worst combination of players, or he plays fewer minutes with some starters on the floor than others? It just seems like the second unit – the whole second unit with no starters – is less inept at running the offense and making defensive rotations when he is in there with them.

I’m not sure if the info is available without doing a ridiculous amount of work, but I’m curious what percentage of each player’s minutes are spent with at least 2 starters on the floor. (including said player if a starter)

This is, of course, completely academic since I would sincerely hope that regardless of his relative worth, we’ve improved enough next year that there is no point in considering retaining his services.

Thanks for having my back BT!

There is a reason he’s a journeyman

the worst dropoff numbers were when he was on the floor with mostly starters (including Kyrie) per 82games.com

just as a snippet, here’s his 2 most used 5man units (couple weeks old):
Irving-Waiters-Gee-Walton-Zeller
0.74-offense / 1.35-defense where 1.0 is league average.

Irving-Gibson-Gee-Walton-Zeller
0.96-offense / 1.02-defense

The Gibson-for-Waiters substitution between those lineups is interesting, but that’s another topic….

Here’s what I wonder about the “Walton Effect” on those lineups. What if the falloff is more about the loss of Thompson than the addition of Walton? Here’s a less used lineup that has significantly different results:

Irving-Waiters-Gee-Thompson-Walton: 1.61 offense / .71 defense. Win% goes from 0 to 80.

I realize this lineup was used little enough that it could be a statistical anomaly, and there are other lineups used more where Walton is replacing Zeller instead of Thompson that show a similar change but to a lesser degree, but I wanted to focus on just the swap of one player for comparison’s sake. It’s also worth noting that in his Player Floor Time Stats by Position, he looks dramatically better at C than at PF. He also looks better at SF, but it looks like that amounts to <1% of total time so it's not worth considering.