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Comparing Utah Jazz point guards Dante Exum, Trey Burke, Raul Neto, and Erick Green

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John Stockton's legacy isn't in jeopardy any time soon . . .

By AllThatAmar
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Elsa/Getty Images

The Utah Jazz just signed third year guard Erick Green. (Press release here) It's hard to call him a third year guard, seeing how he has only played in two NBA seasons. But he was selected in the same 2013 NBA Draft that saw the Jazz bring in Trey Burke (a legit third year guard) and Rudy Gobert. Green did play a pro year (2013-2014) in Italy though; however, for all of our purposes we will view him as a second year player. The Utah Jazz have another second year player in Dante Exum, except he's still a rookie and will be up until his first game of his third professional season, thanks to injuries. This is getting confusing already. The current starter is Raul Neto, another player from that 2013 NBA Draft, but he's an NBA Rookie despite having played professionally outside of the NBA for seven seasons in Brazil and Spain.

So these four guards have a variety of experience playing pro ball, and all four are currently (at least for the next 10 Days) the Jazz point guard depth chart. So let's take a look at how they stack up with their NBA experience.

Player GS G Start% MPG PPG FGA PPS 3PT% APG A:TO RPG SPG BPG PRASB
1 Dante Exum 41 82 50.00% 22.16 4.79 5.07 0.94 31.44% 2.41 1.68 2.41 0.50 0.17 10.29
2 Trey Burke 111 190 58.42% 29.64 12.69 12.64 1.00 32.89% 4.44 2.68 2.64 0.71 0.14 20.63
3 Raul Neto 42 43 97.67% 19.00 5.70 5.33 1.07 38.46% 2.30 1.68 1.44 0.88 0.05 10.37
4 Erick Green 1 46 2.17% 9.07 3.17 3.54 0.90 29.17% 0.87 2.86 0.70 0.26 0.30 5.30
Player USG% AST% TOV% PER OWS DWS WS WS/48 ORTG DRTG O+/- D+/- Box +/- VORP
1 Dante Exum 13.8% 16.6% 21.5% 5.7 -1.1 1.0 -0.1 -0.003 90 109 -2.6 -1.3 -3.8 -0.8
2 Trey Burke 23.3% 25.9% 11.0% 13.2 3.1 2.1 5.2 0.044 101 111 0.5 -2.5 -2.0 -0.1
3 Raul Neto 16.9% 16.7% 19.7% 10.1 0.0 0.6 0.7 0.038 97 108 -1.3 -1.2 -2.5 -0.1
4 Erick Green 18.9% 15.1% 7.7% 8.8 -0.1 0.1 0.0 -0.001 95 112 -2.8 -2.6 -5.4 -0.4

If you open it up to high school, college, NBADL, and International play you get a slightly different picture. But as of right now two main ideas pop up. The first is that "A PG upgrade wouldn't be the worst thing for this team." The second should be "Everyone hates on Trey Burke, but if we're being objective and quantitative about it, shouldn't we hate the other point guards more?"

One thing these stats don't show are the things that don't show up on the box score. We love Dante's athleticism and defense. We love Raul's tenacity and pass first instincts. It's going to be interesting to see how long Dennis Lindsey keeps these four together. But the best producing member of this group is the one most everyone is ready to jettison. The eye-ball test is one we seem to embrace, when the data tells another tale.

Of course, this could just be the same argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy I seem to be falling over lately. Well, it's not specifically that fallacy, but it's an aspect of it. None of these four players are killing it right now. But on paper Trey Burke looks great in comparison to his peers (an injured Top 5 Lotto pick, a concussed 2nd rounder, and a D League call-up). The compromise here is to label him a good player. And when you marry both the quantitative data with what we actually see on the court, I don't think that we can come to that agreement just yet.

The next 10 days of Jazz basketball aren't going to make any of us forget John Stockton. And in the next 10 days we're probably only going to see two of these guys play regular minutes. I'm not expecting Green to get much playing time, I think we're all more comfortable with Joe Ingles handling things right now. But we'll see what Quin Snyder does.

Ultimately, if these next 10 days will help the team do anything it's that it could help them figure things out leading up to the trade deadline next month.

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