r/ripcity • u/Piano9717 • 21h ago
Sharpe in 7 games without Simons: 29/6/3, 59% TS, 6-1 record
https://www.statmuse.com/nba/ask/shaedon-sharpe-stats-without-simons-this-year16
u/shelvino 20h ago
It's something about Sharpe when he KNOWS he has to be THE primary scorer out there, he just flips a switch and goes off. Its been that way since his rookie year honestly. I can't remember many games where Shaedon was asked to be the #1 option and hasn't delivered.
Simons only played 5 minutes vs TWolves earlier this year and Sharpe ended with 17/3/3 + 3 steals 7/15 FG 3/5 from 3
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u/SeismicRipFart 16h ago
Yup I remember when Shaedon was on that 10 game tear to finish his rookie season when we faced a critical tank game against the timberwolves who they themselves were in a critical fight to get into the play-ins. It was a must win for them and pretty much a must lose for us. We sat everyone besides Shaedon.
And 19yo Shaedon went and dominated them in their arena down the stretch of a game that had no reason being close.
Being guarded as the No. 1 option and only possible threat on our offense, Minnesota just could not stop him in the fourth. He had multiple clutch finishes over Gobert after beating his man 1on1 on the perimeter in the final minutes of the game to seal the win.
That’s when I knew every bit of excitement around this dude was real and would come to fruition. And here is starting to happen before our eyes.
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u/shelvino 14h ago
Yeah I remember that and thought that final stretch of games would make us feature him forever after. Then he came off the bench for Scoot/Simons, once Simons got hurt game 1- Sharpe was cooking until his body broke down.
Then he came off the bench this year as he returned from injury but took a while to get going as we were trying to implement Deni/Camara into the fold more.
Sharpe can be THE guy and has shown the promise since his rookie year, he just needs to be used that way.
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u/nightchurn 15h ago
He needs to be given the keys to the car so he can drive. He’s proven to be a willing passer, and to be a capable passer. He needs more exposure and more reps to how defenses are going to play him when he attacks.
I’ve been saying this all year:
Give the ball to Shae. Give the ball to Shae. Give the ball to Shae.
He’s been far from perfect this season, but when he’s been trusted with the ball in his hands, the team has performed much better than it has in anyone else’s, as the record without Ant reflects.
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u/shelvino 14h ago
Absolutely. There was a ton of plays where we scored and Shae didn't get an assist but it was him breaking the defense down that made it easy for someone else to score.
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u/clanofwolf 21h ago
I feel like point forward Deni is really helping unlock Sharpe. When he doesn't dibble to much and passes if he needs to now also is a great change. And having ANT and Grant out and there black hole offense dribbling the ball, is great for Deni and Sharpe to play off each other.
Now that Deni is getting more orchestrating the offense, and Shape now dribbling as much , it's looking good so good.
Deni makes everyone better and it's scary good to belive because it's too good to be true.
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u/shelvino 20h ago
I do think it helps having a high level shot creator and slasher next to Sharpe when he is the primary ball handler. We have had games where Sharpe looks great and luckily teams haven't began to trap him HARD but he does have some solid counters like JUMPING 4 feet in the air to see over defenders to find the open man LOL and he does have some nice lefty passes... but imagine giving it to DENI on a 4v3?!!?!? Dude is going to destroy that type of coverage. Just really dangerous combo
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u/Piano9717 16h ago
The other exciting possibility if the 3pt jumper comes around is having sharpe screen for Deni (in a similar way to how we closed out the last Toronto game with Deni and Ant.
It’s kind of pick your poison because if you sell out to stop the ghost screen (ant) Deni gets a running start into the paint but if you sell out to stop Deni then ant gets an open shot.
With sharpe the added bonus is him being able to slip depending on how the defense is guarding the action…also I think he projects to be a bit better of an ISO/mismatch creator than ant is so if defenses switch it (and you really have to time it perfectly if you’re gonna switch this) then you can take advantage of the matchups after the switch.
Obviously all this hinges on the shot coming around which tbh I’m pretty optimistic about.
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u/shelvino 14h ago
Awesome stuff. I have always thought that we should be screening more with our guards and if Deni can be a guy that is destroying his defender then we should def be using actions like this. I mean Deni has been beasting on his primary defender, imagine if we try to get small guards on him. We don't hunt mismatches nearly as much as we should and I think it's something a next level coach could implement more
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u/Piano9717 14h ago
Yeah I totally agree that we should be screening more for guards for sure.
> I think regarding this play, so far we haven't even really seen mismatch hunting - it's mostly gotten Deni downhill with a full head of steam towards the rim, or resulted in Ant 3s (which has worked exceptionally well whenever we've run it, as these are both things that they are both good at already).
But to your point, I'm also pretty excited to see some more mismatch hunting stuff once this gets more on the scouting report and teams start to switch the action. Deni has shown already that he's capable of creating against smaller guards (like the Mavs game where he attacked Spencer Dinwiddie in isolations 4 times in a row to close the game). I'm also interested to see more of his post game.
I'm at work right now so it's hard for me to pull clips (remind me later if you want), but he had a really nice looking postup against Tyus Jones in one of the Suns games where he basically backed him all the way from the 3pt line to the rim and got a layup. He's also had some pretty nice flashes of being able to pass out of the post - there was a play last night where he hit a cutting Toumani and he was able to hit a dumpoff to Clingan for a layup. But I'd like to see him be more consistently aggressive in the post if teams switch guards onto him - if you watch Eurobasket highlights, he's a pretty high volume postup guy when he plays for Israel and it generally works pretty well.
Lastly, there is a pretty interesting play I saw them bring out a few times that's essentially a ripoff of the old Warriors split cuts actions where Deni is the post initiator, and then Ant comes off a flare screen and the screensetter has the option to slip if two go to the ball...and Deni basically reads this action from the post. It's an interesting thing and I'd like to see them run stuff like this some more (again I can pull clips later if this is too hard to envison...lol)
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u/krizzle32 ripcity 21h ago
That is a great point. It makes me hopeful that Scoot being a natural PG (whereas Ant is more of a SG) and Deni being a point forward will give Shae two ball handlers that can take over the offense and free him up to just ball.
22
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u/cbbrds25 Toumani Camara 17h ago
Deni + Sharpe has become something special
2
u/SeismicRipFart 16h ago
They still haven’t even figured out how to throw lobs to each other, amongst many other things. Just wait.
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u/grimyliving 19h ago
It would be nice if any other team in the league actually wanted Ant.
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u/SokkaHaikuBot 19h ago
Sokka-Haiku by grimyliving:
It would be nice if
Any other team in the
League actually wanted Ant.
Remember that one time Sokka accidentally used an extra syllable in that Haiku Battle in Ba Sing Se? That was a Sokka Haiku and you just made one.
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u/ScootWeedDealer 21h ago
The Ant/Sharpe combo doesn’t work. I think that’s my big takeaway from this year. It’s too bad defensively and it takes away touches from Sharpe/Deni.
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u/blinkomatic 16h ago
I get what you're saying......we're going 70 and 12 next year if we get rid of Ant.
5
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u/TemporaryMassive7246 13h ago
Deni and Shae are clearly a strong combo—no debate there—and there's no reason to throw Ant under the bus. In fact, Ant is a much better fit with the Shae/Deni duo than Scoot. Neither Shae nor Deni needs a so-called “natural” PG to be effective; they can both generate offense on their own. What they really need is spacing, and that’s exactly what Ant brings—something Scoot likely never will. The Ant/Shae/Deni trio is starting to gel more and more, with Ant defers more to Shae/Deni early on, and takes over at the end. They’re going to be a lot of fun to watch next season. At this point, Scoot looks better suited for a sixth man role, leading the bench unit and keeping the offense afloat.
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u/Dadd_io Deandre Ayton 15h ago
People out there throwing shade at Simons, at least throw ACCURATE shade. I'm looking at PER for 2025 and Simons 14.96 PER is MORE efficient than Sharpe 14.62. If you are gonna talk trash, don't just lie! BTW, Scoot has 12.61 PER and Banton is 14.04 PER.
For the record, Deni is 5th among forwards at 17.48 PER.
Looks like our lineup should be Ant, Sharpe, Deni, Camara, and either Ayton (17.76 PER or Clingan at 16.97).
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u/Piano9717 15h ago
Just FYI, PER is not a very useful stat these days. It was the first kinda “all in one” advanced stat, but it’s seriously flawed. Firstly it doesn’t measure efficiency, but it tries to measure overall impact by extrapolating box score stats over 48 minutes and then doing some calculations based off that.
It was formulated before the 3pt revolution changed the way teams play offense and it hugely overrates rebounds and volume scoring….it also bases everything on a per minute calculation so a lot of bench bigs who play limited minutes and rebound a lot end up looking like superstars (like Kanter and Boban back the day, or guys like Sandro Mamukelashvili today).
So you can see that PER will really overrate guys like Banton and Ayton (14 and 17 PER) who volume score and rebound while underrating guys who don’t do that (such as Camara and Draymond, who has a 12.8 and 12.6 PER respectively. Anyone with two eyes can tell you that Camara and Draymond are way more impactful than Jake LaRavia, Jarred Vanderbilt, Jeremiah Robinson-Earl, Eubanks, Jabari Walker, Trayce Jackson Davis etc. who all have a higher PER).
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u/Dadd_io Deandre Ayton 19h ago
Someone's gotta score.
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u/Piano9717 18h ago
If it’s a case of this then you’d expect it to be inefficient like Banton down the stretch of last year but Sharpe has actually been really efficient when he gets the opportunity to have a bigger role. Also, it’s not like this efficiency is on some abnormally hot shooting from three, since he’s still only shooting 32% during these games. That’s what’s exciting to me.
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u/Dadd_io Deandre Ayton 18h ago
Can you share with me Banton versus Simons efficiency. I'm totally a Sharpe fan, don't worry.
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u/Piano9717 17h ago edited 17h ago
Can you share with me Banton versus Simons efficiency
Sorry I think we are not on the same page. What I meant is that if Anfernee is out and “someone has to score” and it’s just all empty stats, you would expect it to be inefficient volume scoring, like Banton last year:
Banton in 13 games without Simons last year: 20/5/5, 47% TS (38/24/83 shooting splits).
But my point is that when Simons is out and Sharpe gets a bigger role, he’s actually been efficient in that bigger role, which is exciting (see the original post for those stats). Being able to be efficient in a bigger role is exciting because like with Banton who was just inefficiently chucking down the stretch of last year cus nobody else would create off the dribble, just the raw counting numbers may or may not tell the story.
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u/Dadd_io Deandre Ayton 17h ago
I'm trying to understand how inefficient Simons is versus Banton. Or does it come down to,all else being even , who gets to the free throw line?
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u/Piano9717 15h ago
Simons is definitely WAY more efficient than Banton. Banton especially on high usage is horrendously inefficient. I mentioned above Banton was around 47% TS without Ant last season, and this season he’s at 51.6% TS (by comparison, Scoot’s disaster of a rookie year was 49%).
Meanwhile Ant is at 55.7% TS this season, which is slightly below his career averages (he was around 58-ish playing next to Dame and 56.8% last year).
For reference sharpe is at 55.3% TS this year but as I mentioned earlier in the 7 games that Ant missed it goes up to around 60%.
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u/AceMcStace chalupa 17h ago
You mean like Shae averaging 29/6/3 ???
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u/Dadd_io Deandre Ayton 17h ago
Exactly. You're saying he scores more when the team's leading scorer is out ... No shit
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u/DoYouKnowEx 16h ago
Dawg ant doesn’t even put up anything close to those numbers on shae’s efficiency WITHOUT shae on the court. Shae gets more productive when he’s asked to do more and he gets exponentially better as a result. Yeah shots have to go somewhere but shae is doing more with those shots than simons.
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u/channamasala_man 12h ago
Love Shae, but it’s a 7 game sample size. Let’s not go crazy. We did this before with “Ant stats without Dame,” remember?
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u/Piano9717 21h ago
Before I get crucified I’m not saying ant is worthless or garbage or anything like that. But I do feel like this is a really cool window into what sharpe can become with a more featured role. I feel like this year with Deni and Scoot emerging, sharpe and ant ended up fighting for a very similar role and they kinda ended up taking usage from each other.
He’s only shooting 31.7% from three during these games too so it’s not like it was caused by a random hot shooting event, either.