Yes i am going to be stubborn about this.
Which is why we could probably argue in circles about this and get nowhere so after this response I'm done talking about this.
And that's why it's bullshit. You can't count uncontested FT's in the same category as contested shots that come in a variety of angles and ways to get them off.
Again, TS% measures your efficiency as a scorer. FTs increase your efficiency, that's why they are included. If you score 15 points on 5 shots you would say that player was efficient regardless of if he was 5/5 from the field with 5 free throws or 0/5 from the field with 15 free throws. The difference between those games is that only looking at raw stats you might say he only had one good game because in one game he shot 5/5. TS% would say, correctly, that both those situations were good games.
Not true. You're supposed to look at FG% first and foremost because that lets you know how they did from the floor. FG% includes 3-point shots, because it's the total number of shots taken from the floor. Then you look at 3P% to see how they shot from 3. Then you look at FT%. TS% doesn't tell you what they did in those individual arenas, you still have to look at the raw stats, which totally nullifies the use of TS%
I never said you only had to look at TS% to get all your information. Raw stats are there for a reason, but your opinion will always be skewed towards the FG% which doesn't always tell the whole story. It's possible to still be reasonably efficient even if you only shoot 40% from the field. Sure you could say it "nullifies" TS% because the individual components of it are already there, but I could say the same for total rebounds. We have offensive rebounds and defensive rebounds, why bother having total rebounds?
The Iverson example is a good one, but the thing you forget is that Iverson was a volume shooter. He took a LOT of shots for his 24,000+ points. He wasn't a good shooter and because he was a good FT shooter, his TS% is very misleading. Even at 52%, that's still misleading.
I am not forgetting that Iverson was a volume shooter. You would have to not know who Iverson is to not know that. I know he wasn't that efficient of a scorer. What you're forgetting is that a TS% of 52% isn't that great. An average TS% is around 52-53%. So what this says is that Iverson was about average in terms of efficiency. You wouldn't think that looking at his 41% FG% and his 31% 3pt%. Remember what I said before about FTs increasing efficiency? AI got to the line A LOT. That increases your efficiency if you can knock them down like he did. Thus, what looks like horrible efficiency is actually average efficiency. It's not misleading, it's a fact.
D-Rose 3rd season was different from his first and second seasons because he started making a concerted effort to take more 3's which in itself lowers your FG%. He didn't start getting to the line until midway through his third season after making a fuss and getting a technical over non foul calls.
So what? He was still more efficient despite the lowered FG% which was the point. Yeah taking 3s lowers your FG%, but it also increases efficiency if you make more of them. Rose did exactly that.
So, he wasn't more efficient from the floor. I really hate it when people try to use TS% in place of the raw stats because the raw stats don't favor a player, like Kobe and Durant last season because he got to the line a lot for a guy that shot a lot of jump shots. TS% is such an easily manipulated stat, because a guy can not be aggressive and shoot a minimum of shots and and as long as he makes a decent amount of them and hit his FT's, it will look like he had a monster game, when in fact he played lazy and only played to protect his percentages, ala Chris Paul a few years back.
You don't get to the line 8, 9, 10, 14 times only by shooting lots of jumpers. These guys are aggressive scorers. Sure they shoot lots of jumpers, but they make a decent percentage of them for the most part. Sure you could look at 25 field goal attempts and say oh he shot 15 jumpers, but if he also has say 18 free throw attempts, you better believe that not all those were from getting fouled on jump shot attempts. They're efficient because of their ability to get to the line among other things, so yes, TS% for players who get to the line a lot will be higher. It favors players it should favor. Now I'm not sure which year you're referring to when Chris Paul did this stat protecting stuff, but looking at his stats it seems as though he puts up good efficiency numbers every year. Furthermore, his raw stats are good too so if he was doing as you said, raw stats are misleading as well.
