Overrated: Monta Ellis
Ellis is almost the perfect prototype of an overrated player: He's a low-efficiency player who plays a lot of minutes on a fast-paced team, so he ends up with gaudy per-game averages even though he's not advancing his team's cause much.
For starters, take the air out of his Golden State-generated stats and you're dealing with a much less impressive résumé. Ellis averages 26.2 points per game, which ranks sixth in the league and at first glance seems very impressive. But once you adjust for his league-leading 41.7 minutes per game and the hyper pace the Warriors play at, his scoring numbers look much more ordinary. On a per-minute basis, he's not even the best scorer on his own team -- that would be Corey Maggette.
Moreover, if you look at pace-adjusted points per minute, Ellis isn't 6th ... or even 16th. He ranks a mere 18th, placing behind former teammates Jamal Crawford and Al Harrington, among others.
Meanwhile, his efficiency numbers are brutal. Ellis ranks in the bottom half of shooting guards in true shooting percentage, but what's worse is that he doesn't create offense for others. Among shooting guards who have played at least 1,000 minutes, only one -- Denver's J.R. Smith -- has a worse pure point rating than Ellis.
I point out Ellis' startlingly poor offensive efficiency because it's of more than merely academic interest. I'm still dreading he'll be chosen as an All-Star sub (if his own knee injury suffered Monday night isn't serious) since about half of the Western Conference team seems to be on the verge of pulling out of the game, and the lure of the scoring average may be too much for the commissioner to resist.
(That said, an equally awful choice would be Houston's Aaron Brooks, and I've heard as much momentum for picking him as for taking Ellis. Baron Davis is still miles better than both of them even while taking every third night off; he's the obvious choice here. Unfortunately, the league may be reluctant to take a second Clipper, meaning the botched Kaman pick will lead to an equally idiotic outcome in the backcourt.)
