It’s been stated and restated the kind of impact Paul Millsap will have on the Nuggets defense, so there’s little reason to revisit that. However there have been concerns about what the loss of Gallo will do to the team’s offense. So I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at the kind of offense Millsap brings to the lineup vs. what Gallo brought to the offense.

I believe Gallo’s biggest impact on the offensive end came from 3 specific areas of the game. Gallo was excellent at using his size to his advantage and would frequently post up smaller players and score very easily. When he had bigger guys on him he’d use his ball handling skills to create off the dribble, often getting right to the rim and especially to the free throw line. And finally he brought to the table what he was mostly known for which was the spacing he brought through his excellent shooting. What I’ll now do is present various stats to show how those observations that I’ve made are represented in the stats and compare them to what Paul Millsap has done.

Post Ups

This is probably one of the most underrated aspects of Gallo’s game. He’s largely known for his skills in what has become known as Moreyball, his threes and frees, but his post up abilities are among the best in the league.

Amongst all players with at least 100 post ups last season Gallo was the leader with 1.2 Points Per Possession. However Paul Millsap is no slouch in this respect either. Let’s take a look at how they compare on post ups.

Gallinari has a clear advantage in efficiency, however it’s clear post ups are a bigger part of Millsap’s game. And while Gallo leads in PPP, Millsap comes in at 7th. If you narrow down your search to only players who had at least 200 attempts only 26 players remain and Millsap came in fourth in PPP behind only Jokic (the runaway leader), Karl-Anthony Towns, and Enes Kanter.

I include this chart to show how Millsap’s post up game is different from the other high volume post up players in that he gets to the free throw line at a much higher rate. And despite his less than ideal EFG% he scores at a similar frequency and efficiency as the other top high volume post up players (If you eliminate the freak of nature that is Nikola Jokic). There’s also a good chance Millsap’s efficiency in post ups was worse this year due to the lack of spacing with Dwight Howard in the lineup, in fact in 2015-2016 we can see a significant difference in his efficiency.

While Gallo was absolutely elite in the post last season we can see that with the space provided by a stretch 5 (Horford) Millsap puts up similar numbers in all regards outside of FT creation. I also think there’s something to be said for the fact that Millsap isn’t just posting up when he has the size advantage due to his position as a PF vs. Gallo as a SF Millsap spends more time in the post and remains effective even under a heavier workload.

So to summarize there is definitely a drop off in efficiency from Gallo to Millsap, Millsap is style quite effective in the post and does so more frequently than Gallo.

Off the dribble

Gallo is effective in a number of ways off the dribble, so we’ll take a look at how effective he was in multiple scenarios. Now Gallo does tend to be on ball more often than Millsap it’s worth taking a look at each of their effectiveness in different play types.

As the Pick and Roll ball handler Gallo had 106 possessions and scored 1.06 PPP, the only other player with at least 100 possessions to best that number was fellow Nugget, Wilson Chandler who managed 1.09 PPP on 115 possessions. Millsap managed only 21 possessions and managed .57 PPP. So there is definitely a loss there, but with Wilson Chandler still on the team there is still someone available to pick up some of Gallo’s vacated possessions. On top of that Barton, Murray, and likely Harris would be expected to take on more of those types of possessions as well. Barton and Murray managed .84 PPP and Harris .81 which put them in the 62nd and 53rd percentiles. While that isn’t spectacular we hope at least two of those will improve significantly in the pick and roll.

An additional concern in the pick and roll is that neither Millsap nor Chandler has been especially good as the roll man which could cause problems considering they are replacing Gallo and Faried in the starting lineup who were both excellent as roll men. This among other things that I’ll get into later brings up the question as to whether Wilson Chandler is really our best option as the starting small forward.

Another big part of Gallo’s game is his ability as an isolation scorer, the task of creating something from nothing at the end of possessions fell to him fairly often and he did an admirable job of doing something positive with those possessions. Let’s compare Gallo and Millsap and see what we can discover about their abilities as ISO scorers.

What we see here is that Gallo is more effective as far as points per possession, however Millsap shoots a higher percentage in Isolation, scores more frequently, and manages to get to the free throw line at a significantly higher rate. Gallo turns the ball over a lot less in these situations, but it’s clear Millsap can handle himself in isolation much in the same way Gallo always has.

Another thing to consider is how each player fared on drives to the rim as shown through NBA.com’s tracking information

The percentages in this chart are based on the number of that particular stat divided by the total number of drives. What this tells us is that Gallo is the much more efficient player on drives and a lot of that efficiency comes from his ability to draw free throws. That said Millsap makes more of an effort to use his drives to keep the ball moving and make the extra pass.

So once again, Gallo wins out in the efficiency department when it comes to his off the dribble play, but Millsap still manages to beat him out in volume.

Spacing

Now when I started my exploration into how the loss of Gallo and addition of Millsap would affect the Nuggets offense this is where I thought I’d find the biggest discrepancy.

As we can see here it is clear that a lot of spacing is lost when you go from Gallo to Millsap, however to fully understand how the spacing will be affected you have to look at the difference between Chandler and Faried as Wilson will be replacing Faried as the fifth starter. Chandler shot a pedestrian 33.9% however Faried almost never took 3s at all. The Nuggets starting lineup would lose the knock down shooter that is Gallo, but replace him and non-shooting Faried with two shooters just dangerous enough to keep defenses honest.

That said it bears wondering whether it might be wiser to swap Chandler for Juancho in the starting lineup this year to try and keep the kind of spacing that Gallo provided. Yes, Juancho was only a rookie and he didn’t get a lot of minutes, but he managed to take 105 3s and made 40% of them. There’s reason to believe he can increase his volume and still shoot better than Chandler’s 33.9%.

Once again it’s quite clear that Gallo is the much more efficient scorer over Millsap when it comes to his ability to space the floor. However Millsap has a history of shooting the ball well enough (especially from the corners) as to be dangerous and demand a close out.

The loss of Gallo was definitely a big one, as he is consistently one of the most efficient scorers in the league and provides a level of spacing we are going to have a difficult time replacing. That said, he and Millsap do end up doing a lot of the same things on the offensive end which means Millsap should be able to step in and handle a lot of the sets that were designed for Gallo. On top of that he also rebounds and assists at a much higher rate than Gallo, which should create additional opportunities for the rest of the lineup.

There will almost definitely be growing pains on the offensive end of the floor this year as the Nuggets work to include Millsap into their offense. They are fortunate enough to have offensive wunderkind, Nikola Jokic, anchoring that side of the floor and his ability to find his teammates in the right spots should help the Nuggets as they incorporate Millsap.