Phoenix Suns: Is Gary Harris better than Devin Booker?
By Luke Swiatek
Playmaking
It would be easy to simply say “Devin Booker averaged 4.7 assists per game and Gary Harris averaged 2.9; Devin Booker is the better playmaker.” And while — spoiler alert — that’s not untrue, there are other stats that are even more indicative of the disparity.
Admittedly, Gary Harris has a better assist/turnover ratio, at 1.61 to Booker’s 1.31, but in other regards he fares much worse.
One tool that even statheads like myself often don’t know about is PBP Stats’s assist networks.
They’re a great way to visualize who gives and receives assists and it even breaks down how many points are generated from each assist and who they go to, and the networks are where the rest of the data on this slide comes from.
Devin Booker dished out 253 assists all season, with the most common recipient being T.J. Warren, who received 63 of those assists. In return, he received 194 assists, with his primary assister being Tyler Ulis, who delivered 44.
There’s not a particular name for this stat (as far as I am aware), but his ratio of assists delivered to assists received is roughly 1.30.
Gary Harris has a very different distribution. He racked up 194 assists, coincidentally the same number that Booker received. Fifty-one of those assists went to Nikola Jokic. Conversely, he received 303 assists from his teammates, a whopping 124 of which came from Jokic.
That means Harris’s assists delivered to assists received ratio is a paltry 0.64, less than half of Devin Booker’s. Translation: Harris relies on others to create shots for him, while Booker creates shots for others.
This is in line with what we discovered in the “shot creation” and “finishing” sections, and it will be discussed further under “supporting cast” later on. Everything in basketball is interrelated, it would seem.
Playmaking edge: Devin Booker