Johnny Davis vs. Malaki Branham: Efficiency, usage, and questions without answers
Two of the best scorers potentially available at the Knicks’ range in the draft, Johnny Davis and Malaki Branham present an interesting conundrum: how much should degree of difficulty and volume be valued from one prospect in the face of overwhelming efficiency from another?
This is a piece about statistical questions I do not know how to answer.
This is a piece about shooting guard prospects in the 2022 NBA Draft.
Cool? Cool. OK. Next step: take Jaden Ivey out of the picture. When you think of scoring guards in the 2022 draft, who do you think of? Maybe Bennedict Mathurin? OK. Entirely fair.
Ben is nice. Blue chipper for sure. But put him aside, too, for now. I want to talk about two of the players who, in my estimation, are the prize bucket-getting guards of the lottery. You can make a case for others — Jaden Hardy’s stock has rollercoastered all over the place over the last two years. Some people like Ochai Agbaji and Blake Wesley in the lotto (not Prez, though). But put them all aside. Let’s talk about two 2s who too remain: Wisconsin’s sophomore Johnny Davis, and Ohio State’s freshman Malaki Branham.
Johnny boy was the talk of college in the early going when he was an early favorite for National Player of the Year:
He was cooking early on.
Contrast him with the younger Malaki, who became a draftnik darling in the late part of the season when he took on a larger role for Ohio State and absolutely caught flame.
The college season is short. Would you prefer to start the season ablaze and end cooled off by an injury, a la Johnny? Or be minimized and off radar for a couple months and then end up with people wondering if you are the real deal or had a hot 10-game stretch, a la Malaki? Well, the lowest I've seen Johnny mocked is late lotto, and Malaki still gets some post-lotto projections, so I guess we do have some sort of an answer. My point is, these are two talented shooting guards, who are fascinating foils. I do in fact have Johnny a tier higher, but a conversation with my fellow Strickland scribe Stacy Patton the great some months ago made me wonder: should Malaki be in the same conversation with Johnny and Mathurin? Much has been made of Branham’s skillset since his hot streak, his buttery smooth jumper, etc. … in some ways, it is an odd mirror to Johnny’s own skillset. Consider:
Both of them share the same top three play types per synergy: pick-and-roll ball handler, spot up, and transition, making up around 60% of their possessions
Both of them absolutely go to work in the midrange
Both are about the same height, have slithery ball handling, use their physical strength quite a bit on offense, and have caught a few opponents at the rim on posters with sneaky explosiveness
And yet they differ in a key way, particularly when you look at the numbers: Malaki was incredibly efficient.
Let’s compare pick-and-roll possessions, which made up 27% of Branham’s shots and 29% of Davis’ shots: per Synergy, Davis was ranked "very good," in the 79th percentile (meaning only 21% of players were better), shooting 39% on those possessions. Malaki was ranked "excellent" in the 94th percentile, shooting a ridiculous 59%. He also was a very impressive passer out of those possessions. Synergy has him passing out of pick-and-roll possessions 38% of the time, and his teammates shooting 50% on those passes, good for an “excellent” rating (84th percentile). Synergy also subcategorized actions within play-types, so we know that Branham, for example, upon receiving a screen, almost never rejected them (a Davis specialty), opting to use them 88% of the time. What did he do after using the screens? Only shoot 19-40 on pull-ups (48%), 7-11 on runners (64%), and 22-28 (79%) at the rim. Truly ridiculous stuff.
Davis, on the other hand, gets knocked for his inefficiency. You’ve likely heard some of the shooting numbers in particular: 43% from the field, 30% from three. His shooting numbers are a bunch of solid-but-not-great grades — from midrange, at the rim, from distance. Some exceptions include his unguarded catch-and-shoot shots, where he graded out pretty well, hitting them at 47%. More common, though, are stats like his half court FG% around the rim: 57%, which is good for college, but low for a top pick who is considered a “bucket getter.” Or his 31% on pull-up jumpers, on many attempts. Not sparkling for someone whose offensive appeal revolves around getting buckets.
And yet…
Those of us who have watched Jonathan know he shouldered a ridiculously high usage rate — 32.5%, far higher than Branham’s 24%. Significantly higher than Paolo Banchero’s, Jaden Ivey’s, and Keegan Murray’s, in fact, none of whom topped 30%. For NBA comparison, Paul George, Donny Mitchell, and LeBron had USG% similar to that this season in the NBA. RJ Barrett and Ja Morant both had about the same usage in college as Johnny, and they were top five (top three, arguably) pick shoo-ins. Anthony Edwards was at 30% in college. Jamal Murray and De’Aron Fox were around 27% in college. Johnny’s 32.5% is a lot of usage. Most guys who put that kind of usage up and end up lotto picks are highly thought of.
I made this chart to compare the PnR ball handler usage of a few prospects in this year’s class. You can see Malaki lap the field in terms of efficiency, and lag way behind the field in terms of how often he was tasked with performing pick-and-rolls (though it may have gone up a hair late in the season as his role increased). Meanwhile, Johnny’s volume was pretty high — and if you change the filters so that it is PnR reps without passing (i.e., scoring only), his rank in frequency of possessions is even higher because he didn’t pass out of the possessions quite as much as other guys.
(Whether that was because Johnny had to score more, or didn’t trust his non-shooting teammates, or just plain was a ball-hog is up for debate.)
Anyhow, my point is, Johnny had a lot on his plate as a high usage guy. As a result, many Johnny shots looks like this:
Hilarious Mamba Mentality energy.
Those are four different plays!
Anyhow, Wisconsin didn’t have shooters — they were 219th in the NCAA in 3PA/game (21.1) and 320th in 3P% per game (30.6%). He also didn’t have another talented offensive player on his team, with apologies to capable fifth year shooting guard Brad Davidson. Even Johnny’s dunks are in crowded paints:
Let’s take it back to Synergy and look at the sheer difference between him and Malaki in volume of shots. Recall that both players’ top play type was pick-and-roll ball handler. Malaki was Ohio State’s lone perimeter ball handling threat, had a ton of PnR reps, and had 114 possessions of PnR — and Davis had 193.
Another example: Davis was sneakily great off of screens, shooting 15-29. He had more FGA off screens than Malaki! For Branham, shooting off screens was his fourth-most common play type. For Davis? His ninth. Davis’ fourth-most common play type was the most difficult one: isolation, where he shot a fine-if-not-unimpressive 34% on 56 possessions. Malaki had a mere 13 possessions on the season categorized as isolations.
Davis suffered an injury about two-thirds of the way through the season, but it wasn’t severe enough to have him sit out. He played, and he shot, because Wisconsin needed it. His already somewhat inefficient stats became more inefficient as a result. You can find tweets about his sparkling synergy percentiles in January, and most of those disappear in the months after that. Johnny Hoops shot 44% from the field for the first three months on about 17 shots a game, and in February and March his FGA/game ticked down to 14 per game at around 40%. He was probably feeling the combo of cumulative workload, injury, and conference tournament competition in March, as his minutes ticked down to ‘’just’’ 30 a game, and he shot below 40% for five games. His stock drop was completed, and most mocks had him somewhere in the 10-15 range instead of the top 10, as was the case early on.
Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the other role difference between the two: there was no other no-doubt NBA player like Malaki’s running mate EJ Liddell on his team, no Batman to his Robin nor a Robin to his Batman. He was Nightwing, toiling away in Bludhaven, a city no one even knows anything about. What happens in Bludhaven when Nightwing sprains his ankle? He doesn’t have an extended Bat-family to back him up!
/end forced metaphor/ I always preferred Marvel, anyway.
So what do we make of the role of volume, difficulty, usage, and age in relation to projection?
I don’t know if the answer is necessarily to curb Malaki’s elite efficiency in our evaluation, or to assume Malaki’s volume would go up if he returned for a sophomore tour as The Man, a la Jaden Ivey. After all, Malaki’s FGA per game ticked up every month: 6.5 per game in 2021, 11 in January, 11.5 in February, and almost 13 a game in March, all with his FG% increasing every month rather than decreasing, which is kind of insane.
That is some serious NBA-level off-the-dribble and off-the-catch jump shooting. As you might guess, his minutes went up each month, too — from 20 his first month to 33 a game in his final one. Maybe he was just scraping the surface as he embarked on this upward trajectory! We’ve seem teams buy into that theory before with young guys — in the last two years, we’ve seen a number of high picks who weren’t top five, who were 18-19 years old in Josh Primo, Josh Giddey, Killian Hayes, and Moses Moody. So it’s no surprise his stock appears to be rising as theirs did:
He was recently mocked by Jonathan Wasserman to the Knicks, in fact. So the upward trajectory plus age plus stats bet seems like a sensible hypothesis for a front office to subscribe to these days, but I don’t know exactly where I stand. I can’t find the answer clearly laid out it in the stats.
Similarly, I also don’t know if the answer for our questions about Johnny is to assume Johnny is guaranteed to see an efficiency boost with real spacing and usage that isn’t Westbrookian. This too seems like a good bet, but who knows?
So you wrote this whole thing without a defined conclusion, Prez?
Basically, yes!
I do feel like diving into their Synergy stats has helped fortify what I've seen through watching their games in terms of assessing their skillsets. But that is kind of like understanding the colors in a painting — you can articulate the colors, but that doesn’t mean you are able to describe the painting with that alone. They are but a component, albeit a critical one. I am still trying to figure out how best to use some of these stats, be it the simple stuff like eFG% and TS%, or bespoke granular Synergy play type data, to paint the whole picture, or at least describe the painting. When and how to use what stats will probably always be an unsexy, less discussed topic, but will always be relevant, especially as tracking data improves.
I don’t have answers here, just questions. I still have Davis ahead of Malaki, because of his phenomenal defense and because I do like how I project a lot of his offense in a different context, but that is more art than science. Maybe this time two years from now, Malaki will be a killer and I'll look back and wonder: should I have accepted the numbers at face value instead of over-contextualizing them? It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made that mistake (Tyrese Haliburton and Obi Toppin both say hello). Guess we will have to wait and see. What do you think?
