Blake Griffin looking like a silly goose while defending Gallo's shot attempt

I often peruse the internet looking for news regarding my favorite professional athlete of all time, the illustrious Mr. Danilo Gallinari, and today was no exception. However in contrast to the general rhapsodizing about his play I encounter from local beat writers to the surprised takes offered up by national columnists who find the concept that anyone besides Durant or Westbrook outside of a major media market could be a good basketball player to be metagnostic, I happened upon something different. It was this tweet submitted by the infamous Bill Simmons, and beneath it could be found the responses which instantiate a level of impudence toward Gallo that only contributed to the continuing attenuation of my faith in humanity. Some of the highlights include:

clippers should reject that. Blake is worth more than all that.

you do know who Blake is right? Those two (Gallo and Barton) are trash compared to him

garbage deal for the clips

not worth it...no one in Denver is worth Blake! not even Danilo, Faried, Mudiay, Barton combined!

Okay, so this is somewhat to be expected. Every team's fans vastly overvalue their own players, and Blake is obviously a superstar, right? Clearly he would be the best player in the deal and the Nuggets would be fools not to trade away the farm for a generational talent like Griffin. Except for the fact that I've seen Blake Griffin play, and was not nearly as impressed by him as most basketball pundits seem to be. I thought for certain I must be missing something, so I went ahead and did a comparison of Blake's and Gallo's numbers for the season. And I found the results to be somewhat surprising, although now that I think about it, not really surprising at all. Here is a side-by-side juxtaposition of each players' numbers this season. Some things that jump out:

• Gallo, despite his injury history, has managed to stay much healthier than Griffin this season
• Griffin is clearly the better rebounder and passer (though Gallo maintains a better turnover%)
• Gallo is the better and more efficient scorer of the two. He beats Griffin on TS%, FT rate, and scores only 3.4 fewer points per game despite taking 5.1 fewer shots
• Gallo's effect on his team is greater than Griffin's effect on his. Win shares/48 (.182 to .176), VORP (1.7 to 1.6), and Net Rating per 100 possessions (+12 to +7) are all in Gallo's favor. And let us not forget that win shares are calculated without at all factoring in the quality of a player's teammates, so Gallo accomplished these numbers playing beside the league's 20th best offense and the 22nd best defense (the Clippers' offense and defense rank 7th and 8th, respectively).

Next I thought I'd take a look at success in specific situations, particularly those which are ostensibly Blake's strong suits. Here I found more evidence that Gallo is a beast and Blake is an overrated nincompoop. For instance, Gallo is 7th in the NBA (98.3 percentile) in Points Per Possessions on transition possessions with 1.58 PPP. And that is before mentioning that he has done that on 79 possessions this season, while the highest number of possessions any of the 6 players ahead of him have had in transition this season is 26, possibly indicating an insufficient sample size. Blake meanwhile, despite his "Lob City" reputation, only grades out to the 91.5 percentile (1.35 PPP) in transition, which, while elite, is not nearly as good as Gallo's mark.

Moving on, I took a look at post-up possessions, another one of Blake's supposed fortes. Again we see that Griffin is no match for Gallo in the arena of post-up duomachy, with Gallo coming in at 6th (97.3 percentile) in PPP with 1.14, behind only Kevin Durant if we exclusively count those with sufficient sample size. Griffin's output of 0.86 PPP (58th percentile) pales in comparison, and once again belies his reputation as a low post juggernaut.

Of course we all remember Blake's baptism of one Timofey Mozgov in 2010, and that "dunk" in part was one of the instances which lent credence to the argument that Griffin was a pick n' roll monster; a perpetual lob threat capable of wrangling and subsequently stuffing even the most wayward of passes with puissant force. This season however, has been a different story in regards to his work as the roll man. Gallo comes in at 9th in the league (94.5 percentile) with 1.33 PPP, far superior to Blake's 0.90 PPP (25th PERCENTILE ON 148 POSSESSIONS!!!!!!!) C.J. Miles has scored more points per possessions this year as the roll man than Blake Griffin has.

I'm not going to delve into the character or contract value of each of these gentlemen (though Gallo wins handily on both counts in my estimation), as this is not a prospective trade post. I just find it silly that those who claim to follow basketball closely can carry on with the utmost confidence in their opinions despite failing to examine the empirical evidence. The Clippers are 18-4 this year without Blake Griffin and 17-13 with him. The Nuggets are 1-5 without Gallo and 21-27 with him. Does that in and of itself say nothing? Perhaps it's just that Blake's injuries have held him back this year, but somehow I think not. I'd like to keep going, but I got babies to kiss and bitches to catch.

Hats to all of you,

The Prince of Essex County