Phoenix Suns: Is Gary Harris better than Devin Booker?

Shooting

Given that the position in question is shooting guard, it seems like it would be malpractice to not start by investigating shooting. Additionally, there will be no generic “scoring” category in this article, with scoring instead broken down into its components.

It is worth noting though, that Booker’s highest scoring total (70) is nearly double Harris’ (36)

Anyway, before beginning, it’s important to note the context of each player’s team, as it will crop up repeatedly throughout this exercise. Gary Harris is more of an off-ball player and is not his team’s leading scorer, whereas Devin Booker is the Phoenix Suns’ clear alpha.

Usage rates are particularly illustrative of this point. Devin Booker’s usage rate is a massive 31.7 percent (top 10 in the league). Gary Harris is just barely above 20 percent, sitting at 20.7 percent.

As a result, it should be generally expected that Harris will have better efficiency, and Booker will have better counting stats. That’s OK and we’ll search for ways to find who’s truly better.

In the case of shooting, those assumptions hold true.

Booker holds the better free-throw percentage, clocking in at 87.8 to Harris’s 82.7, but Harris was more efficient everywhere else. Gary Harris shot 55.3 percent on 2s and 39.6 percent on 3s, which is definitely an improvement over Booker’s 46.0 percent on 2s and 38.3 percent on 3s.

Of course, as previously implied, Booker takes a lot more shots, to the tune of 6.1 free throws, 12.4 twos and 7.1 threes compared to 2.4 free throws, 7.7 2s and 5.9 3s.

Even though Booker is a less efficient shooter (56.1 percent overall true shooting to Harris’ great 59.7 percent), a drop-off of this magnitude is to be expected considering his higher offensive burden.

However, a question worth addressing is the type of shots that each player is taking.

Everyone knows that it’s more difficult to hit a contest pull-up than an open corner shot, so let’s dig into more granular data from NBA.com and try to stratify the stats based on the variety of shot being taken.

On catch-and-shoot opportunities, Booker is actually more efficient: he shot 42.4 percent from the field and 41.0 percent from deep, whereas Harris shot 40.6 percent in both categories.

Harris had a slightly higher effective field goal percentage (60.2 to 58.7), but that’s only because 4.4 of his 4.5 total catch-and-shoot attempts (read: all of them) were 3s, while only 3.4 of Devin Booker’s 4.3 catch-and-shoot attempts were 3s.

This is a lot of data to soak in at once and it’s still unclear who’s the better pure shooter. The next slide will look at a bit more data and give a final conclusion on shooting.

Shooting Edge: Incomplete