I am neither saddened nor delighted to see JCL go. It is what it is. Maybe he is making a mistake? Maybe he is doing what is best for him? We'll never know, and he probably won't either. I definitely feel like things could have gone differently for him were he to have had a different coach for his first couple years, but he did not. Like so many of you, i do wish him the best.
I have some stats i would like to share. I do not wish to deny that JCL an elite shooter, but i do want to get at what exactly it means when we say that. I am going to
use stats to try and maintain some neutrality, so if you are one of the 'eye testers' who feel that stats are misleading, feel free to move on to the next post.
Fun (potentially mind-blowing) Fact! JCL's conference true shooting percentage of .527 was an exact match with the conference true shooting percentage of another Illinois marksman in the 2014-2015 season... Jaylon Tate, who rode 36 of 39 (.923) free throw shooting to counterbalance the sub par field goal results. Obviously free throw shooting alone does not make for an elite shooter, because no one here has ever applied those words to Tate.
So perhaps we need to leave out the undefended free throw if we want to get a better idea of how a shooter is elite, and look at field goal percentage only. I'm sure it will surprise exactly no one that JCL's field goal percentage in conference games this year was 10th (tenth, not a typo) best on the team.
Ok, well I guess maybe the stat we need needs to factor in that third point that he got by taking 72.9% of his shots from behind the line. When we look at conference effective field goal percentage, we see that Jalen is now up to fourth best on the team, behind Finke, Nichols, and Morgan.
But focusing strictly on three point percentage leaves much the same order. Our best three point shooter during conference play, which was most of his play, was Nichols at 50% with an admittedly much smaller sample size of 20 attempts. Next up comes Finke at 44.9% with 49 attempts. Both of these returning players hit at a higher clip than JCL's 39.4% on 94 attempts, but preseason commentary on those two is, for other reasons, focused much more on who they can guard than if they can keep up their fantastic shooting.
Perhaps it is consistency that makes an elite shooter. Through the first dozen games or so, Abrams was one of the elite three point shooters in the country. He did not end the year that way. JCL gave us two solid year's of bombing from distance. Maybe if Kipper and Michael do maintain their results into next year, the conversation will change.
Maybe it's volume, JCL definitely shot the most threes. I hope it isn't just word association. Happy to be steered in the right direction. I will shut up now.
