Robert Covington is One in a Trillion

Since the days when Philadelphia 76ers  longtime director of statistical information, Harvey Pollack, was inventing statistics like the blocked shot and separating rebounds into offensive and defensive, the ability to statistically measure an NBA player’s overall impact on the court has remained the elusive unicorn for basketball analysts.

Sure, John Hollinger came up with his Player Efficiency Rating, and Basketball Reference has it Win Shares, but any over-arching statistic out there is known to have its significant flaws.

Unlike baseball, which can more accurately be measured as an individual sport with discrete outcomes, basketball involves a great deal of interplay between both a player’s teammates and opposing defenders. Assigning particular credit or blame for a particular play can often be a difficult exercise. While the SportVU cameras now tracking the action in every NBA arena are helping unearth new ways to map gameplay, we’re still years away from knowing exactly what to do with this fresh mountain of data.

Maybe then, it’s wise to take a step back every once in a while, which is why I found Devin Kharpertian’s piece for Nylon Calculus last week interesting. I would encourage you to give the entire article a read, but in it, he proposed measuring the anti-trillion. Unlike when a player enters the game and records no box score stats (the trillion), the anti-trillion would signify a tally in each of the following categories: FG, FGA, 3P, 3PA, FT, FTA, ORB, DRB (and thus TRB), AST, STL, BLK, and PTS. Kharpertian nicely summed up why the anti-trillion is a good overall measure of performance:

“But an anti-trillion requires you to do everything. You have to play some disruptive defense. You have to make three-pointers. You have to get to the free throw line. You have to rebound on both ends. Some players can dominate within five feet of the basket, others can dominate within 25 feet of one particular basket, but an anti-trillion requires you to have an impact everywhere.”

One of the players highlighted by Kharpertian was the Sixers’ Robert Covington, whose percentage of anti-trillions is among the top-20 of all NBA players the past few years.

“Covington’s picked up 12 anti-trillions in just 110 games, despite not getting the same kind of minutes as the other guys on the list. It remains to be seen if he can do it on an NBA-quality team, but it’s worth keeping an eye on.”

First, I don’t understand the argument that Covington wouldn’t be able to consistently stuff the stat sheet on a better team, as his ability as a spot-up shooter would play anywhere. This season, he’s shot 43.4% on threes deemed wide open (no defender within six feet), after knocking down 44.8% of such shots last year. One would imagine he’d have even more of those opportunities when playing with teammates who commanded more attention from opposing defenses. Per NBAWowy.com, Covington has hit 38.9% of his threes in the 182 minutes the last two seasons when he has shared the court with Ish Smith, a couple of percentage points higher than his career average of 36.4%.

I suppose better teammates might mean Covington would be relied upon less to create plays for himself (meaning less free three opportunities), but every good offense requires multiple secondary ball-handlers. As Kharpertian himself mentioned, Covington hasn’t been playing a ton of minutes (averaging 27 and 26 minutes per game the last two seasons), so it’s not like when Michael Carter-Williams was playing 34.5 minutes per game as a rookie and racking up empty stats on a bad team.

I believe the same holds true on the defensive end, as Covington’s ability to guard multiple positions would be an invaluable asset for any team in defending today’s pick-and-roll-heavy offensive schemes. On the glass, his 21.0 DREB% this year is excellent for a player who still spends more than half his time as a small forward. Covington has also been an opportunistic defender, as a three-game stretch in late November where he swiped a combined 21 steals would attest.

All of which is to say, Robert Covington is a good NBA player, on or off the Philadelphia 76ers. The fact that the team has him under contract at just over $1M through the 2017-18 season is one of the most favorable outcomes of the Sam Hinkie era. For an organization known to put a high value on quantitative data, the anti-trillion might be a little simplistic as a measure of success, but I’m sure the Sixers will take their wins where they can find them.