Suns Squared: Offensive Lineup Analysis

The NBA All-Star break is a good time to dive into different lineups for the Suns.

This week I’m going to look at the best and worst offensive lineups for the Suns. I used NBA.com/stats lineup tool to find the best lineups. I used the condition that the lineup had to have played at least 10 games and at least 5 minutes total. To put that into perspective, the Suns only have 3 lineups that have played more than 100 minutes on the season.

I’ll start with lineups based on offensive rating (points per 100 possessions). The Suns overall offensive rating for the year is 106.6.

Net Rating

Booker-Chandler-Knight-Tucker-Warren

21

137.7

36.0

Bledsoe-Booker-Chandler-Tucker-Warren

156

118.0

2.7

Bledsoe-Booker-Chandler-Knight-Tucker

51

117.5

5.7

Worst:

Booker-Knight-Len-Tucker-Warren

40

68.1

-32.6

Bledsoe-Chandler-Knight-Tucker-Warren

13

70.9

-3.3

Bledsoe-Knight-Len-Tucker-Warren

19

84.3

-42.7

Booker being involved in all of the top-3 offensive lineups is no surprise here. A couple low sample sizes here which mean that the top lineup would more than likely regress closer to the team overall number with more time, same with the worst lineups.

The bad lineups are all less than 50 minutes of playing time and so another run will likely improve their numbers significantly, especially given the worst offensive lineup has just a one player difference with the best offensive lineup.

It isn’t much of a surprise that the best/worst overall lineups are the same as the best/worst shooting lineups. Booker clearly pulls up the shooting on the floor as he is involved in only one of the bad shooting lineups. Another big takeaway is Len’s presence on all of the bad shooting lineups and his presence is the main difference in them as Chandler is on the floor in all the better shooting lineups.

Min

Offensive Rating

AST%

AST/TO Ratio

AST Ratio

Bledsoe-Booker-Chandler-Chriss-Warren

295

105.4

55.8%

1.47

16.1

Bledsoe-Booker-Chriss-Len-Warren

85

102.1

54.5%

1.59

17.1

Bledsoe-Dudley-Knight-Len-Tucker

33

109.7

53.8%

2.80

14.7

Worst:

Bledsoe-Chandler-Knight-Tucker-Warren

13

70.9

25%

0.25

6.4

Bledsoe-Booker-Chandler-Knight-Tucker

51

117.5

32.4%

0.73

8.6

Bledsoe-Booker-Len-Tucker-Warren

26

100.5

33.3%

0.88

9.2

The final way I wanted to look at offensive lineups was through the lens of assist percentage, AST/TO ratio and AST ratio. Moving the ball usually gets the offense going and should be an indicator of offensive success. AST% is the percentage of shots that are assisted on, AST/TO ratio is assists divided by turnovers, and AST ratio is the number of assists per 100 hundred possessions. For the Suns, it is not necessarily the truth that more assists help the offense as these lineups don’t have positive net ratings and only one (Bledsoe-Dudley-Knight-Len-Tucker) has an offensive rating greater than the team’s total number.

The worst three for assists is where the numbers get even more interesting and seem to indicate, as was touched on with the Devin Booker deep dive post, that the Suns are isolation heavy, specifically with Booker, Eric Bledsoe, and Brandon Knight. The third best overall offensive lineup is one of the worst AST% lineups.

Lineups are a great way to learn more about the team and can lead to some statistical deep dives. Often I’ll jump in and suddenly realize its been three hours.

The Suns’ lineups biggest takeaways are the difference between Tyson Chandler and Len. It seems Chandler facilitates the offense much more than Len does. The other factor is the un-importance of assists to the Suns’ offense. Next week, I’ll look at defense and rebounding stats for the Suns’ lineups. The Len/Chandler dichotomy should become even more pronounced through those numbers.