Thoughts On Ante Zizic

As the season begins to wind down, the Cleveland Cavaliers are in a surprisingly good place for a team with a record of 19-53. Finally healthy, the return of Kevin Love has allowed the rest of the team to slot into roles more appropriate for their current skill sets. The team is still engaged and playing hard, and the young players have shown solid development throughout the season.

When talking about the Cavaliers’ young players, the two names that come to mind are Collin Sexton and Cedi Osman, and with good reason. Both players have made tremendous improvements to several areas of their games. Osman’s shooting, passing, and ball handling are far superior than they were a year ago, while Sexton has shown surprising accuracy from deep while steadily refining his shot selection as the season has gone on. While they are both deserving of the praise, there is one player who may deserve a closer look, center Ante Zizic.

I’ll freely admit that I’ve been a Zizic skeptic for most of the past two seasons. Say what you want about the Boston Celtics, but Danny Ainge has rarely given up on a young player that has thrived elsewhere. Al Jefferson may be the exception, but that trade got the Celtics Kevin Garnett and a championship. When Zizic struggled during the 2017 Summer League with the Celtics, it looked like he might not have the athleticism to hang in the NBA despite solid projections from both draft and analytics experts.

Watching Zizic during his first two seasons with the Cavaliers allowed me to form a few opinions on the big man. His greatest strength is undoubtedly his touch around the basket, despite bobbling some fairly easy passes from teammates. He’s also a solid shooter from the line, which I thought might lead to him expanding his range, but that hasn’t happened yet. He’s decent enough on the boards, but nothing special. The bigger concerns were on the defensive end. Zizic doesn’t block shots, or really protect the basket at all. He’s also slow-footed for an NBA player, and subsequently struggles with defending the pick-and-roll, not to mention being completely unable to defend in space. Because of his lack of shooting, passing, and defensive ability, I figured that Zizic’s future would be as a situational center who saw action only against certain matchups, a fourth big in the rotation at best. He seemed like the kind of player teams could play off the court by going small and/or playing fast.

Then, while looking at his stats on Basketball-Reference.com, I noticed some interesting things about Zizic’s advanced numbers. The negative numbers are on his player page, and aren’t pretty. His Defensive Box Plus/Minus sits at -1.2 for the second year in a row, meaning that not only is he seen as worse than league average on that end, but he’s shown no noticeable improvement in his second year either. Perhaps more alarmingly, his Offensive Box Plus/Minus, which was a respectable 1.3 as a rookie, has slipped to -2.3 this season. This leaves Zizic with an overall Box Plus/Minus of -3.5 on the season, meaning that he makes his team 3.5 points worse than league average per 100 possessions when he is on the floor. Even worse, he is Value Over Replacement rating of -0.4 means that the Cavaliers are 1.08 points per 100 possessions worse with Zizic on the floor than they would be with a random replacement player. Remember that replacement players are typically worth league minimum deals, and Zizic is rated as worse than that.

This seemed to confirm my thoughts on Zizic’s play, but then I looked at his on-off numbers, and found them to be contradictory to the other measures. With Zizic on the court, the Cavaliers’ offensive rating jumps from 107.5 points per 100 possessions to 109.7. Considering his touch around the rim and true-shooting percentage of 57.6%, this was mildly surprising, but certainly not a big shock. The big shock came on the defensive end, where the Cavaliers allow a very bad 112 points per 100 possessions when Zizic is on the court, but an absolute flaming train wreck rating of 119.7 points per 100 possessions with him on the bench. All told, the Cavaliers are outscored by 2.3 points per 100 possessions with Zizic on the court and 12.2 points per 100 possessions with him off. This means that the Cavaliers are 9.9 points per 100 possessions better with him on the court than off! This is an enormous number. While the other analytic measures shouldn’t be ignored, and the lineups both the Cavaliers and their opponents have used during games is certainly part of the context of offensive and defensive ratings, for the Cavaliers to be that much better in the 975 minuts that Zizic has played this season (a small sample in the scheme of things, but certainly not insignificant) must mean something, right?

For further context, I decided to look at the on and off court numbers for the Cavaliers other big men who have played regular minutes this season. Larry Nance Jr. tends to rate well by most analytics measurements, but the Cavaliers have actually been 0.4 points per 100 possessions worse with Nance on the floor than off. In Tristan Thompson‘s case, the Cavaliers’ net rating is 2.5 worse with him on the court, and, to the surprise of no one, are a whopping 13.9 points per 100 possessions worse with Marquese Chriss on the floor (Chriss playing ahead of Zizic in the Cavaliers last two games is absurd on any circumstances). The only big man on the squad with a better net rating is Kevin Love, as the Cavaliers’ have been 10.3 points per 100 possessions better with Love on the court than with him off.

There is little doubt that Larry Nance Jr. and Tristan Thompson are better players than Ante Zizic despite the differences in on and off court numbers. As stated before,  the amount of lineup variability for both the Cavaliers and their opponents causes net rating to be an imperfect way of looking at a player’s impact. This is especially true for a Cavaliers team that has dealt with a multitude of injuries this season. Still, that can be said of most methods of player impact, and there is no doubt that the Cavaliers have been better with Ante Zizic on the court this season than with him off. How much of that is due to his play is up for debate, but he has certainly done enough to merit a longer look as the Cavs try to determine which players are part of their core going forward.