FanPost

Suns Mythbusters: Eric Bledsoe, Turnover Machine?

Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

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The latest post-game thread is full of comments stating that "Bledsoe must go! He's a turnover machine!". I've watched the games, and I have just watched every turnover Bledsoe has made this year (thanks to nba.com and their handy sortable player stats), and not surprisingly, I don't agree. Allow me to make my case.

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Bledsoe does turn the ball over a lot. At 3.5 turnovers per game, he's 9th in the league - behind such scrubs as Russell Westbrook, DeMarcus Cousins, LeBron James, Michael Carter-Williams, James Harden, Tony Wroten, John Wall, and Kobe Bryant. Okay, I'll give you MCW and Wroten. But of the other guys, and the 5 that are just ahead of Bledsoe, (Dwayne Wade, Tyreke Evans, Rajon Rondo, Derrick Rose, and Stephen Curry), you find the three top MVP candidates, a few future hall of famers, and a lot of playoff bound players. Still, turnovers are bad, m'kay? Perhaps there is an explanation for this phenomenon.

If you're doing a lot, you screw up a lot. Bledsoe is doing a lot. His highest turnover games are also typically the ones in which he put up the best stat lines across the board. Turnovers are mistakes, and are made more likely with faster pace and more possessions. They are not a function of talent or ability, but more a by-product of taking risks.

I started by looking at the game logs. Bledsoe's turnovers were pretty constant for a lot of the season. Until February 20th, Bledsoe had 3 games that exceeded 4 turnovers. One was the second game of the season vs. Milwaukee, where he had 5, and one was January 2nd, again vs. Milwaukee, where he had 7. (coughBrandon Knightcough). The 3rd was February 5 against Portland with 5. The first was without Dragic, and was a loss, and the second was a win. The third was a blowout loss. So, 3 games out of 29 were 5+ in the turnover column before the trade deadline. Since Goran and IT left, he had 13 games of 5+ turnovers (in 21 games). That's a major increase in turnovers, and it's led to a lot of people here drawing the conclusion that Bledsoe sucks, that he's not talented enough to lead a team. That is faulty logic. The mitigating factors that might be affecting his performance include:

1) Being the only point guard on the team. Yes, yes, I know this ignores A.J. Price, as well as Seth Curry, and it even discounts Archie. It also ignores the 9.75 games that Knight played for us. The games with Knight don't really seem to change anything, though - Bledsoe turned the ball over a lot whether Knight was playing or not.

2) Our spacing changed. Pre ASB, Gerald Green played about 1100 minutes, and shot 36% from three. Post ASB, he played 264 minutes, and shot 26.4%. Pre ASB, Tucker shot 36.5% from 3, post ASB he's shot 29.9%. Marcus Morris was at 39.7% from 3 pre ASB, and is at 31.4% since. Knight has shot only 35.7% for us, after shooting 43.5% from three with Milwaukee. IT and Dragic were our two best 3 point shooters, and they left. When you watch the turnovers Bledsoe has committed, it's pretty easy to see that a lot of them occurred when the opposition packed the paint because they didn't have to defend the perimeter.

3) Familiarity breeds contempt ball movement. The type of ball movement, passing, and assisting that everyone seems to want doesn't come without familiarity and continuity. Unless someone has perfected the art of reading minds, repetition is the only way to develop the synergy and teamwork to anticipate where a team-mate (and the opponents) will be on the court at any given time. This is a luxury we haven't had since the trade deadline, and it has showed.

Watching the turnovers confirmed what my impressions were from review of the game log stats. The bulk of his ball handling turnovers come from either dribbling into traffic, in which one or two extra players switch on to him for a double or triple team, or from trying to do too much. His bad passes were split between out of control bailout attempts and receivers cutting to the wrong spot or not cutting to the right one. Quite a few early TO's involved Miles Plumlee not being able to handle a pass that was off the mark.

In any experiment, the preferable way to conduct it is to have only one variable. That way, you can be sure that the results correlate to the conditions that actually change. In this case, the parameters can't be reduced to one - too many things changed. Our spacing changed. Our shooters stopped shooting. We had a lot of new players. Our competition got tougher. We had fewer ball handlers on the floor.

There is also the matter of correlation - Bledsoe's turnovers don't necessarily correlate to losses. He turns the ball over .5% more in losses, We were 5-3 in games with 7 or more turnovers from Eric. We were 4-5 in games where Eric has 1 turnover. We are 5-5 in games after Knight went out of the lineup, Of those ten games, 5 were 5+ turnover games, in which we went 2-3. While turnovers were a contributing factor, most of them occurred late in the game, where Bledsoe and the team were attempting a comeback.

Since the trade deadline, and particularly since Knight's injury, the formula to beat the Suns has been to stop Bledsoe. Stop him from penetrating, and you render our perimeter shooters ineffective, you close the passing lanes, and leave Eric on an island. Unless you can trade for Steph Curry, that is not something you can fix with different personnel. No one can function one-on-five. Bledsoe has elite skills, but he needs space to use them - his crossover, his hesitation moves, change of speed - those are not effective when the paint is totally packed. We saw the same phenomenon when Dragic was the sole PG in 2012-13. The return of Frye was the factor that got him the space he needed to operate. I will be examining this in a future article, btw.

So, here's what we know. Bledsoe started the season with a bit of familiarity with his team-mates, and didn't turn the ball over much. When the lineup changed drastically, the turnovers went up. Ergo, Bledsoe sucks, right?

That seems to be the conclusion that a bunch of people have drawn. It's also the type of logic that saw Dragic and a first round pick traded in 2011 for Aaron Brooks. (The pick became Mirotic, btw). Dragic was first paired with Turkoglu and Vince Carter, then with Pietrus and Hakim Warrick, and surprisingly didn't thrive. See, that's sarcasm, but the sarcasm font isn't available in fanposts.

Remember last summer? Bledsoe was a money grubbing cancer. He didn't want to be here. He wasn't a team player. That's what a lot of you said, anyway, and it turned out to not be right. Even now, I see constant references to Bledsoe making the max - when, in fact, he is getting $13 million this year. Even in 2018/19, the final year of his 5 year contract, he will make $15 million per year - still not even the mini max, and by then, the mini-max is likely to be upwards of $21 million, due to the massive revenue increase from the television contract. Overpaid, right?

There have been many articles written about NBA career arcs, and one of the most constant themes of these articles is that point guards and centers take the longest to develop - an average of 4 years. Contrary to what a lot of people say here, Bledsoe is a point guard, and as such, he is just completing his first year where he started and played in more than half of the available games. He has played just over 7800 minutes in his career. John Wall has played just over 12,000 minutes. Westbrook has played about 19,000 minutes. Even Lillard, in his 3rd year, has played over 8700 minutes. Yet all three of those guys turn the ball over more.

One other conventional wisdom that seems to have taken hold in these parts is when a player peaks. I've seen it repeated over and over that players peak at 25 - that's just not true, especially at PG. They peak at 27. These numbers are skewing higher, as advances in sports training and sports medicine take root. This is particularly true of big men and guards - in fact, there is empirical evidence that if they peak too soon, their careers go into decline sooner. Of course, these numbers are averages, and can vary widely on a case-by-case basis (Steve Nash comes to mind). But court vision takes a while to develop, and it takes practice. Lots and lots of practice. Bledsoe hasn't had enough experience yet to see the defense develop, and he's not been in the position often enough to know which option to go to. In fact, a lot of his turnovers are bad passes to a place someone was supposed to be. 91 of his turnovers are bad passes, and 51 were ball handling turnovers.

Historically, that's what happens. Chris Paul's turnovers peaked at year 4 (and he was a starter all 4 years) before declining over the next 3 years. They're back up this year, though.That might have something to do with the prolonged absence of Blake Griffin - familiarity and continuity is good for turnover numbers. Likewise, Tony Parker's numbers were highest in year 5 before declining over the next 4 - then they spiked. Nash peaked in turnovers as a Sun - his lowest yearly average in his second tenure here was 3.3 per game. John Stockton? Peaked in year 5, and averaged 3.2 per game for his career. Man, those guys sucked.

Let's keep in mind that I'm not saying that it's OK that Eric turns the ball over as much as he does. What I'm saying is that he will get better at taking care of the ball with experience. He will also get better when there is a secondary (or bi-primary) ball handler on the floor with him.

Eric Bledsoe is going to be fine. So will Brandon Knight, who suffers from much the same affliction. What is required for them to get better is more experience, more repetitions, and more continuity. There is only one way to get those things.