Comparing and contrasting Kyrie Irving and Mike Conley’s surprisingly similar analytics
By Ian Pierno
So, Why Does This Mean Anything?
It means that numbers never lie and while that’s true, they’ll bend the truth. When looking at only the duo’s advanced statistics on Basketball-Reference.com, they look like identical players. They both have the same numerical impact on games’ events, they’re just as efficient in terms of PER and they take similar kinds of shots. However, anyone who’s watched just one game of each player will tell you their ways of running their teams couldn’t be farther apart. There’s things that numbers can’t measure, like clutch factor (I don’t want to hear about FG% under a set of 19 different criteria), though both these players, Mike “Captain Clutch” Conley and Kyrie Irving have it.
Stepping away and looking at things above, numbers and the eye-test both being used, it’s hard to comprehend why Conley isn’t often considered to be in same tier as Irving.