Originally Posted by
CDu
I appreciate your point here, but the same can apply in the other direction. ORtg is a nice metric, but it is just as flawed (perhaps moreso) than per-possession stats. It will inherently favor guys who take only high-percentage shots and who don't pass. A guy who does nothing but dunk is going to have a high ORtg. A guy who passes a lot or shoots more highly contested shots will generally have a lower ORtg. In short, ORtg isn't a great metric for effectiveness. "Effectiveness" is way more qualitative than that.
And again, I'm not saying that Johnson was better than Bagley. He wasn't. But his per-possession assists, steals, and blocks were much better, his 3pt% and A/TO ratio were better, and he had a comparable rebound rate. Bagley was much better in 2pt% and fouls (the fouls were in part due to Bagley not playing defense and then playing zone for the second half of the season) and notably better in points. ORtg really dings Johnson for turning it over more and taking more difficult shots.
And in aggregate, like I said, I'd definitely take Bagley's production over Johnson's due Bagley being much more consistent. But I do think people are underselling just how impactful Johnson was statistically in a variety of ways. He had foul trouble like many freshmen bigs have early in their freshman year and he quit on the team, and I think that has deflated some folks' opinions of his performance when he was on the court. Well, that and the fact that his teammates were really bad during that stretch of the season, in part because they weren't top-tier freshmen but were being asked to play like top-tier freshmen, and we just didn't have the amount veteran talent around him that we've more typically had.
You are more than welcome to your opinion. Based on the responses thus far "so-and-so shined in winning a title; so-and-so was ACC PoY; etc", I suspect that they were indeed not understanding what I was talking about. Either that or having glossed over the memories of the inconsistencies/warts of those earlier players and/or not been able to dissociate Johnson's on-court play from the rest of our experience with him.