Then, this year happened. Not only has Bargnani improved on his rebounding, tying a career high in TRR and achieving a career high in DRR, he’s improved on defense.
Bargnani is allowing .59 PPP overall, according to Synergy, enough to rank him 21st among all players with 25 or more defensive plays. Digging deeper, he’s been even more spectacular in the post, allowing just .5 PPP, good enough for 2nd overall among all ranking players. And while Bargnani still isn’t the best pick and roll defender, allowing 1.18 PPP to the roll man, most of those points come because Bargnani is overaggressive in his hedges. On the spectrum of defensive mistakes, a tendency to overhelp is preferable to complacency. Casey’s team defensive concepts have worked magic, and as long as Bargnani continues to listen to his coach, we can expect him to improve steadily, although it’s unlikely he keeps up this defensive production.
And even with all the improvements in his defense and rebounding, the biggest change in his game has been on the offensive side of the ball. While his per minute scoring stats are similar to last year’s, his first year as a first option,
the efficiency with which he’s scoring is shocking. First of all, he’s putting up the best percentages of his career: 52.3% from the field, 56.3% eFG, and 61% TS. Secondly, he’s going to the line at a career high pace, averaging .38 free throw attempts per field goal attempt. And thirdly, add in the fact that the percentage of his shots that are being blocked are at a career low, and you have a picture of a scorer having a breakout year.
While it’s still too early in the season to be certain that Bargnani is really breaking through, it’s fair to ask what he’s been doing that has let him score at such a torrid pace. His shot locations can provide valuable information to determine this. Andrea is averaging as many attempts at the rim as he has in his career, and he’s shooting a career 75.8% there. He’s also been assisted on a career low 59% of his at the rim field goals. From the looks of it, that means he’s been more consistently attacking the rim, and he’s become better at finishing there. Bargnani is also shooting a career high 52.2% and 54% from 10-15 and 16-23 feet, respectively, two numbers that are likely to regress to normality. And finally, Bargnani is shooting fewer threes than any year before the last, and ALL of them are assisted, meaning he’s not shooting threes off the dribble.
Those numbers tell us quite a bit about the results, but I want to go even deeper. Luckily, Synergy Sports, a service that tracks every single play in every single NBA game and records the data, exists. We’ll go there for information and video on Bargnani’s game this year.
Looking at the Synergy numbers, we see that Bargnani is ranked 18th overall on offense by PPP, and that includes a rank of 5th overall in isolation, 2nd overall in the pick and roll as the roll man, and 3rd overall in spot up plays. He hasn’t had enough plays to be ranked in the post, but his very robust 1.13 PPP is very close to LeBron James’ 1.22, which ranks 2nd in the league. So, he’s been good. What else, though? What does his video show us about him?
http://worldthroughsports.wordpress.com/2012/01/10/something-is-fishy-in-the-state-of-canada/
.. io assist a voi, voi assist a me. non potevo non tirare 
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