There has been some spirited debate about the value of Carlos Boozer and Andrei Kirilenko to the team lately. I just wanted to elaborate on statistics that have been provided by myself and Yucca man about the Jazz's performance with and without Carlos Boozer. I promise that this is the last post I will publish about Carlos Boozer until he signs his name on the dotted line and gets himself a new contract with whatever team it may be.
Here are the facts, plain and simply. Carlos Boozer, Paul Millsap and Andrei Kirilenko have played together for the Jazz for 4 seasons now. I went through game by game and found all the games that each of those players have missed. I wanted to find out what each of those players' absences meant to overall team performance. To do this, I singled out the games where either AK, Millsap, or Boozer were the only one of the three absent. If Boozer is out of the game, it is only fair to judge his absence if the other key Jazz players are there. So these game results are with an otherwise "healthy team" just minus the Power Forward in question. Here are the results.
Paul Millsap- Millsap has only missed 6 games in his 4 year career. Enough has not been made of this. You can discredit Paul Millsap's game all you want and pretend that he isn't as talented as Boozer, but the fact is that Millsap has always given his best effort, improved and been super loyal to the Jazz. And healthy. There are no games where he was the only power forward out, so I have no data on him to share with you.
Andrei Kirilenko- Andrei has missed 61 games over the last 4 seasons. To say he is unhealthy is fair. Forty-five of those games, Andrei has been the only absent player of the best Jazz players. In those 45 games, the team has gone 30-15 for a win percentage record of 66%. It might be important to note that 26 of those 45 games were home games.
Carlos Boozer- In the last 4 seasons, Boozer has missed 58 games with 45 of those coming in the 08-09 campaign alone. Boozer has been the sole missing piece in 35 of those games. The Jazz went 25-10 in those games for a win percentage of 71%. Only 20 of those 38 games were at home. In closing, I stand by my assertion that you can't say the Jazz will be much worse if Boozer leaves this offseason. They will be in trouble if they lose Boozer and can't sign a cheaper power forward to be injury insurance for Andrei. A guy like Hakim Warrick or Craig Smith would do the trick and probably come cheaper than $3 million a year. I just saved the team about $12 million by replacing Boozer with Warrick or Smith. But maybe the bottom line is that we don't give enough credit to Paul Millsap for the way he has played and come to play almost every night of his career.
That is all. I rest my case.