A quick look at the league leaders shows that CK is tied with All-World Center DeAndre Ayton in blocks per game at 3.0. Great! But I really wanted to examine deeper than that as DDSPB provides more statistics (but still not enough!) to evaluate players. And as we all know there is more to defense than just blocking shots as we all know the tall guy at the local gym who tries to block everything, ends up blocking very little, and is just a terrible defender. Also I wanted to add context to the statistics that the Unicorn was putting up by comparing them to the rest of the CSL bigs. Ie, 0.5 spg is ok (I think?) but how does that compare to other CSL bigs? Average, below average?
So here was my process. I decided to compare only “bigs”, this was fairly straightforward with just a few tweeners that I decided to call bigs. I determined that >1,450 minutes would be the qualifier as this was the total minutes for Timberwolves backup C Christian Wood (who played every game) and equaled ~35% total possible minutes played during the season. This left 88 “qualified bigs”. From there I identified the following statistics that I wished to examine, and then compare CK’s stats with the rest of the qualified bigs : DRB%, STL%, BLK%, Drive STP%, PA/SF, PF/36 (personal fouls), and lastly TS% (I wanted to gather this as kind of a quick way to see guys who have 2-way ability or are just Festus Ezeli on offense). Also - if anyone knows how to export stats from DDSPB let me know - that will make this process alot easier and I can do alot more articles like this!
Looking at each statistic I compared CK to the rest of the league and determined what percentile he ranked in each statistic shown here :
As you can see the “Unicorn” nickname really does hold up and scouts from coming out of college were accurate. CK ranks in the 95th percentile for BLK% and 94th percentile for PA/SF which is incredible for a 19 year old. His ability to block shots and limit baskets around the rim does not come without an above average rate of collecting personal fouls (24th percentile), with this also likely correlated to his putrid 5th percentile Drive STP% rankings (shoutout to Draymond Green for somehow STP 78% of drives while also averaging 6.1 fouls per36). Offensively CK ranks well above average in regards to TS% (80th percentile) as his mix of 3pt shooting and elite finishing lead to an efficient all around scorer. All of these statistics point to CK playing at an all-CSL level defensively, and with room to grow as just a 19 year old in his 2nd season he could become the best defensive C in the league.
After being ~90% done manually copying stats from the game I really wished I had also added to my review : Drives Faced/36 and Shots Faced/36 to add context to my statistics examined, as the # of opportunities a guy gets at defending a shot or drive likely impacts their overall effectiveness (and I think is largely an indicator of defensive strategy used by coaches).
I hope everyone enjoys my analysis! Are there any other “player cards” that people would like to see? Or perhaps a comparison of 2 similar players? Or questions on who’s the best/worst defender? Let me know!
