These days, sports agents are a lot like brand evangelists and political spin doctors. Part of the job is to trump up your clients’ achievements and potential. The bread is baked at the negotiating table, but you sure can put some pressure on teams by convincing the outside world that you have a client worth all of the dough.
Klay Thompson is world’s best at title made up by agent
It doesn’t matter whether Klay Thompson is the best two-way two-guard in the NBA, because he’s going to get paid. Plus, musings on stats that aren’t capturing the public imagination.
Ezra Shaw
That's what Klay Thompson's agent is doing when he claims to USA Today's Sam Amick that the Warrior is the best two-way two-guard in the NBA. Thompson is currently eligible for an early extension, with a Halloween deadline to get ink on paper. Without that extension, which would go into effect after this season, Thompson will become a restricted free agent on July 1, 2015.
Thompson's at a price point at which there's no reason for the Warriors to match the agent's demands right now. Team Thompson wants a max extension. If Golden State doesn't offer that by the deadline, the worst that can happen is that he has a great season and they have to offer the max in a year in order to keep him. There's basically no risk of losing Thompson if Golden State is willing to give him the max. As such, there's little reason to make that leap now.
Thompson’s agent clearly wants to make the max seem like a foregone conclusion, though, and that’s what the “best two-way two-guard” claim is all about. What struck me, as I discussed in Tuesday’s Good Morning It’s Basketball, is that once you start thinking about it, the agent’s claim (Klaym?) becomes difficult to dispute!
It is not a great time for two-guards in the NBA. The old guard -- Kobe, Wade and Manu -- have faded to varying degrees. The youth -- Bradley Beal, Victor Oladipo, Andrew Wiggins -- remains relatively unproven. The two-guards currently in their age-based prime are either horribly deficient on one end (James Harden) or sub-spectacular, if still pretty good (Wesley Matthews and Jimmy Butler, who still has immense potential).
The one exception I'd come up with was Lance Stephenson, a strong defender and clever playmaker who might be Klay's equal. Other names mentioned in response to the story: Arron Afflalo, DeMar DeRozan and Eric Bledsoe. Andre Iguodala would be a candidate if Thompson's presence hadn't meant that Iggy is basically now a full-time small forward.
But then the question is what being a "two-way" player even means. Is being just above average on both ends enough to qualify you? Do you need to be well above average on both ends? A player who used to get the "best two-way player" treatment was Ron Artest, who was a brilliant defender and an OK scorer/playmaker. I'd always felt that people really meant to say that Artest was the league's best defender who also had a balanced set of offensive skills (unlike the other "best defenders" of the time, Ben Wallace and Bruce Bowen).
What I feel Thompson's agent is doing is conjuring up a way to make Klay superlative when he's frankly not. You can't say Thompson is the best scoring two-guard, because Harden has him lapped. You can't say Thompson is the best defensive two-guard because Avery Bradley, Lance, Tony Allen and Butler are out there. By insisting Klay is the best of the two-way two-guards, you're basically just stating that Harden can't defend and Bradley can't shoot. Thompson can do both. Have a trophy.
Tom Haberstroh looked at the real plus-minus (RPM) numbers to determine whether the claim is valid, and he found a few candidates for the honor, the top one of which is probably a 37-year-old Vince Carter. Right.
(Tangent! Is it just me, or has RPM fully failed to capture public imagination in its ESPN infancy? For so long in the metrics world it seemed like regularized, adjusted plus-minus would be the go-to stat in basketball once a major outlet provided reliable, current data. ESPN has done that on the biggest platform in sports and ... maybe it’s just me, but it seems like RPM is still down the pecking order of advanced metrics for most folks. Even I, a backer of plus-minus for years and someone concerned with the underappreciation of defense, have trouble saying, “Well actually, Vince Carter is the best two-way two-guard in the league.” It’s going to take some time for RPM to be taken seriously by the metrics-light NBA crowd. Perhaps a looooong time. End tangent!)
Basically, what Thompson’s agent has done is introduce a debatable, vague superlative to boost his client’s case for a thicker paycheck. This is the agent’s job. No one knows Thompson’s strengths, weaknesses and potential better than the Golden State front office. So none of this really matters. But it does give us something to argue about, and what is sports if not something to give us something to argue about. Thank you for helping us continue the cycle, Klay Thompson’s agent.
