Player to Watch: Jose Calderon

FanHouse previews a player to watch from each NBA team in advance of the 2009-10 season.

The great thing about innately efficient players is that even in a down year, they can contribute. Raptors point guard Jose Calderon -- the man who vanquished T.J. Ford from the weirdest platoon ever -- dealt with nagging injuries and an unkempt coaching situation in 2008-09 ... but still provided value to the Raptors through excellent shooting and mistake-free playmaking.

While Calderon's gaudless production of 13 points and nine assists per game hasn't brought much acclaim, Toronto knows the value of the efficient manner in which Calderon gets those numbers. Specifically, 13 points on only 10 shots and nine assists with only two turnovers. If Calderon makes a play, there's a better chance than usual it will produce points. That's such a boon.

Only two guards who played at least 1,200 minutes last season turned out to be more efficient than the gimpy, discombobulated Calderon. They happen to be two of the brightest stars in the galaxy (Chris Paul and Brandon Roy). That says something. Something that will have to wait two paragraphs ...

Dean Oliver's Individual Offensive Rating measures a player's efficiency, incorporating shooting, assists and turnovers to build a sort of individualized points per possession metric. The idea is that for every 100 offensive possessions a player is involved in (most often as the shooter, but also as the passer), his team will score x points, with x being the player's Offensive Rating.

Offensive Rating is only part of the equation in measuring a player's offensive impact: there's also the matter of how many possessions he uses. Fred Hoiberg famously led the league in Offensive Rating earlier this decade, albeit taking only a few spot-up threes a game. If you're the most efficient player alive but only touch the ball five times a game, you're not much use to your team's offense. There's also an inverse relationship between usage and efficiency: when players expand their roles (adding to their usage rate), their efficiency typically decreases. In other words, a player is more likely to get five easy, efficient scoring opportunities than 30. So at some point, taking extra shots means taking inefficient -- or "bad" -- shots.

Back to Jose: by NBA guard standards, Calderon is rather low-usage. Guards tend to have higher usage rates than big men, and point guards usually go even higher. Calderon trotted out a usage rate of 16.9 percent last season, which means that when Calderon was on the court, he "used" (by FGA, FTAs or turnover) 16.9 percent of the Raptors' offensive possessions. For guards who played 1,200 minutes or more on the season, the average usage rate was 20.4 percent. So clearly, Calderon deferred more often than the typical guard. Part of that could be found in his assist numbers (nine per game is a ton) but mostly it's that Calderon is not nearly as trigger-happy as most of the league. Unlike some point guards, Calderon is happy to dump it into Chris Bosh or play off the ball a good portion of the time.

The efficiency-usage relationship always helps me sort out who is really helping their team the most on offense, so I graphed usage vs. efficiency (Offensive Rating in this case) for the aforementioned 100 NBA guards who played at least 1,200 minutes last season. This is basically made up of all NBA starting point guards and shooting guards, and all "third guards," whether those fellows are of the combo variety or not. The average usage rate for this group is 20.4 percent, and the average Offensive Rating is 109.6.



The most efficient guards can be found toward the right side of the graph. The top six are your Hyperefficient Playmaking Task Force: Paul, Roy, Calderon, Ray Allen, Chauncey Billups and (somewhat surprisingly) Jameer Nelson. Of those, Calderon has the lowest usage rate by far. In other words, Paul and Roy are even more efficient than the ultraclean Calderon while being responsible for quite a few more possessions. But that's elite company, and Toronto knows that with Calderon at the point, it's getting a substantial dose of scoring at oustanding efficiency.

The rest remains in question. Calderon's defense is not considered good. It's not clear whether Chris Bosh, Hedo Turkoglu and Andrea Bargnani complement Calderon well enough to turn this outfit into an elite offensive force (which it will need to be in order to become a contender, given the defensive problems of Calderon, Bargnani and Bosh). But at the very least, the Raptors know what to expect from Calderon at the offensive end, and that's a good place to start.