Devin Booker is viewed as one of the best scorers and young stars in basketball. Last season, he averaged 26.6 ppg, putting him 7th in the league in scoring. However, most of these points were just empty numbers. A dive past the superficial stats reveals that Booker may not be as good as he is hyped up to be.
First up is his shooting percentages. At 46/33/87 (FG%, 3P%, FT%) he didn’t shoot terribly, but these numbers certainly don’t resemble the budding superstar he is deemed as. He ranked 75th in effective field goal percentage, behind players like Terrance Ross and a rehabilitating Gordon Hayward. Booker was also 8th in field goal attempts. Thus, the only reason he scored so many points is because he took an alarming amount of shots.
More important than his shooting percentages is his defense. Booker’s defensive rating was an absurdly bad 115.1, causing his net rating to be -5. Plays like these show why Booker's defensive rating was so atrocious. When he’s playing on-ball, he often gets beat off the dribble and ends up committing pointless fouls.
The Suns can’t hide him off-ball either. In this example, he falls asleep and gives up a backdoor cut, leading to an easy dunk.
His defense (or lack thereof) was the main factor of his lowly .076 win shares per 48 minutes. Booker’s win shares also indicate that his inefficient, high-volume scoring doesn’t do much to help his team win. Booker is in the top 100 all-time in scoring through 4 seasons.
Only one player in the top 100, Darrell Griffith, had a worse ws/48. Even LUOL DENG (.101) was better in that regard last season.
Of course, being in the losing environment that is the Phoenix Suns doesn’t exactly help Booker. Hopefully, as the team becomes more competitive, so will he. Nevertheless, the Suns made an awful decision to give Booker a long-term extension. After inking a massive 5 year, 158 million dollar extension last summer, Booker certainly has his work cut out if he doesn’t want to become known as having the worst contract in the NBA.
Edit from September 2020: Looking back on this after Booker lead the Suns to an 8-0 record in the bubble, boy was I wrong. He's looking like a future superstar.
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