Mike James of AS Monaco last week became the fourth and fastest player to score more than 4,000 points in Turkish Airlines Euro League history, but he also did it despite a higher lever of difficulty based on Synergy Shot Quality data.
Stats Review: Mike James makes the spectacular seem routine
Statistik
4 Lesezeit
Mike James of AS Monaco last week became the fourth and fastest player to score more than 4,000 points in Turkish Airlines Euro League history. This is a feather in the cap of one of the sport's most accomplished scorers, who this season is off to one of the hottest starts of his 10-year career. James has averaged 22.9 points per 40-minutes, pace adjusted, over that decade, has taken home the EuroLeague's Alphonso Ford Top Scorer Trophy, and has secured multiple All-EuroLeague honors.
What has long made James special and aided his climb to this milestone is not only that he is a dynamic scorer – with sharp footwork, deep range, incredible creativity with the ball, and unwavering confidence – but how often he gets hot and then stays hot – for weeks on end, even.
In the graph above, which covers his EuroLeague career, James's points per shot (the black line), doesn't merely rise above the expected value of his attempts according to Synergy Shot Quality data (the gray line). Indeed, for entire seasons, his per-shot production dwarfs what would be expected from the data-driven model, and features some truly massive peaks, as well.
Beyond his ability to go supernova on any given night – as when scoring 24 points on 16 shots in Monaco's Game 5 playoffs win over Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv last spring – James will often carry such momentum through several rounds.
"The spectacle of James rolling over defenses geared specifically to stopping him is surpassed only by the degree of difficulty that characterizes his game."
The spectacle of James rolling over defenses geared specifically to stopping him is surpassed only by the degree of difficulty that characterizes his game. He has been making the spectacular seem routine since he arrived in the EuroLeague during the 2014-15 campaign.
To put that in perspective, we can start with Synergy's new offensive roles – 11 unique categories derived from Synergy's logging data that define how a player tries to help his team score points.
Even if his passing ability has long been underrated, James is the prototype for a scoring ball handler at this level. Think Keenan Evans, Scottie Wilbekin and Kevin Punter – and before them, Vassilis Spanoulis and Vasilije Micic – a group that often carries the most arduous shot-making burden in any given lineup.
Across the EuroLeague, the Synergy Shot Quality sits at 1.02 points per-attempt over the last two years. For scoring ball handlers, that average is just 0.94 points per attempt. For his career, James has had an SSQ of just 0.92 points per attempt. The extra distance he covers on his step-backs, the volume of contested attempts he faces in key moments, and the impact of the immense defensive scrutiny he confronts make his likelihood of success more difficult, even compared to the best of his peers.
But you wouldn't know that from the start of this 2023-24 campaign, which has been a microcosm of who James has been his entire career and shows why he'll have a real chance to climb to the top of the EuroLeague career scoring list in the coming years.
Through five games, he has scored an absurd 1.21 points per shot to start the year on an SSQ of just 0.85 points per-attempt. The 33-year-old is as hot as he's ever been on paper while taking the toughest shots of his career. James is already in the highest echelon of 4,000-point scorers in his career. If he can keep this early-season virtuosity going, as he's done in the past, James will eventually be in pursuit of the title of all-time scoring king.