Jamal Murray’s ascension from regular-season sidekick to playoff demigod is unprecedented. And it isn’t being talked about enough, johnhollinger writes. More:
To review, it is unusual for any player to see his stats go up in the postseason, where the competition level increases and there are no Rockets or Tank Blazers on the schedule to pad the numbers. This is slightly less true of high-usage players, who tend to see their responsibilities escalate in the playoff crucible as lesser teammates fade from the offense, but even those players tend to tread water in overall impact stats rather than see an increase.
But, in Murray’s case, it goes much deeper. Murray’s playoff number improvement, as the chart above shows, has been across the board. Literally every category gets better: Shooting, passing, rebounding, foul-drawing, free-throw shooting — all of them go up. Only his fouls and turnovers decrease.history among players with at least 30 playoff games, an insane 8.5 points per game jump.
At first, it seemed like maybe this was an artifact of the shooting environment in the NBA bubble, where several players rained fire with the help of a favorable shooting background. But Murray’s postseason jump this year has actually been nearly as large, going from a 18.0 regular-season PER to 22.9 in the playoffs, despite facing the league’s seventh-, eighth-, 10th- and 11th-ranked defenses in the postseason.
Somehow, this gargantuan leap isn’t getting nearly enough attention beyond, “Hey, Murray’s pretty good.” For starters, I can’t emphasize enough what exalted company Murray is putting himself in. It’s easy to lose sight of his performance when Jokić churns out some crazy, “This is the first time since Wilt Chamberlain in 1957…” type stat line nearly every game and has the top playoff PER of all time, but Murray’s ascension from regular-season sidekick to playoff demigod is unprecedented.
If you look at the players with a career playoff PER above 21.5, at least 50 playoff games and at least 30 minutes per game, the list is basically all the greatest players in NBA history … and Jamal Murray.Murray ranks 25th in PER on that list, with the 24 guys ahead of him being absolute no-doubt-about-it Hall of Famers; theplayer ahead of him is Tracy McGrady. If you’re curious, the list doesn’t change if you lower the games played threshold to 40 games or even 30 games.
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