🏀 Ricky Rubio is back in EuroLeague. How much has it changed?
My Week in Sport(s): a Spanish star returning to Barcelona, Iga Świątek and Shafali Verma's touch
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
🏀 How the best men’s basketball league outside the NBA has evolved
🎾 Iga Świątek’s serve
🏏 Shafali Verma, combining touch with power
🏀 Ricky Rubio is back in EuroLeague. How much has it changed?
In last week’s newsletter, we talked about Barça Femení head coach Jonatan Giráldez planning to leave Barcelona for the US this coming summer — but one of Spain’s most iconic basketball players of the 21st century has just come back in the opposite direction.
Ricky Rubio — who played his first professional game in 2006, at age 14 — is one of the first sportspeople whose career I remember following pretty obsessively.
At a time when there remained a bit of mystery around European prospects who entered the NBA draft, there was still enough to make the point guard an early social-media sensation:
It was a thrill to watch him pass a basketball then, and still is now.
But he’s almost the perfect example of why I always try and separate two questions in my head when I think about a team or athlete I’m watching. How much do I enjoy watching them play? And — distinctly — how good do I think they are?
Rubio’s entry into the NBA as a pass-first point guard was followed shortly after by a fundamental change in how teams approached scoring points1 — and he couldn’t quite keep up.
Before the 2017-18 season — in what should have been his prime — ESPN analyst Zach Lowe summarised Rubio’s game as a “combination of horrid shooting and genius passing”.
That combination made him a fascinating — and joyful — player, but it wasn’t enough to make him a star.
Rubio still comfortably managed a long career as a useful NBA contributor, though. By Basketball Reference’s Box Plus Minus metric, he was basically a slightly above-average player over the course of his 12 seasons.
Despite his passing skill, most of the value he provided — at least according to this particular model — came on the other side of the ball. He was an above-average defensive player by BPM for 11 out of 12 years in the league — but a below-average offensive one for nine out of 12.
Rubio’s scoring was simply never enough of a threat to add significant value to his team when they had the ball. No matter how good your passing is, you won’t thrive as a primary ball-handler in the NBA unless you possess a competent shot — or can get to high-value areas of the court with ease.
As Lowe put it in another piece on the Spaniard:
According to the preferred all-in measure of Cleaning The Glass — Points scored per 100 Shot Attempts, or PSA2 — he never ranked better for his position as a scorer than the 61st-percentile mark he recorded in 2017-18.
And even treading water as a scorer in nominal terms — as Rubio more or less did for a five-season stretch between 2015-16 and 2019-20 — wasn’t good enough for the 2010s NBA.
In the chart above, you can see the distribution of data points move further and further to the right as scoring efficiency among guards increases over time.
106.3 points per 100 shot attempts was good enough to make Rubio a 57th-percentile scorer during the 2015-16 season; by 2019-20, 107.2 points per 100 shot attempts only ranked him in the 35th percentile.
And now he’s back in EuroLeague — bookending his career with a second stint at Barcelona, where he played for the two seasons following his selection in the 2009 NBA Draft.
But what state will he find the league in? Has elite men’s basketball in Europe changed as fundamentally as the NBA has over the length of Rubio’s professional career?
One practical aspect of the game has stayed the same since his last EuroLeague season: the shorter distance of the three-point line compared to the NBA3.
2010-11 was the first season Europe’s top men played with a 6.75m line — an increase from 6.25m in the prior year, but still about half a metre shorter than the NBA’s.
The relative ease of the three-pointer in Europe meant that the shot type actually made up a significantly larger share of overall field goal attempts in EuroLeague than in the NBA at the time Rubio crossed continents.
The tactical changes which have swept through the NBA over the last decade have basically eliminated that gap, though.
While the share of three-point attempts in EuroLeague has risen from 33% of all attempts in 2010-11 to 40% so far in 2023-24, the NBA’s share has gone from 22% to 39% over the same period.
The two leagues are now roughly equal in their reliance on longer-distance shooting — but the shorter line still makes the EuroLeague a more sympathetic environment for weaker shooters like Rubio.
As it happens, though, that will be kind of immaterial. He’s attempted only six three-pointers in 63 EuroLeague minutes4 since his return to Barcelona — a rate of 3.4 per 36 which is well below the 5.2 mark he reached in his final NBA season5.
After several months away from the game, Rubio seems happy to have assumed a bench role that suits his real strengths: coordinating play from point guard, making neat passes and playing effective on-ball defence6.
It’s a role he could fill for the Spanish national team in this year’s Olympics, too — if they manage to qualify for a tournament that is expected to be highly competitive.
Rubio’s impact on his country’s chances this summer likely won’t be all that significant — at least, not compared to those of his European peers who have ascended to heights in the NBA that the Spaniard was never able to reach.
But after all the joy that he’s given basketball fans on both sides of the Atlantic — and after what he’s apparently been through over the last 12 months — there will be plenty of people who’d love to see him pick up a third Olympic medal for his country in Paris.
🎾 Run the Numbers
The website Tennis Abstract — run by Jeff Sackmann — is incredibly useful for keeping an eye on the performance levels of the world’s top tennis players.
This year, Sackmann has returned to writing frequently about the contemporary game “between the white lines” too — and is producing some of the best data-driven coverage of the sport that I’ve read.
Over the last week, he’s written about both winners of the recent singles tournaments at Indian Wells: Carlos Alcaraz, who featured briefly in last week’s newsletter, and Poland’s Iga Świątek — who is close to her all-time peak in the website’s WTA Elo ratings.
In the space of a single paragraph, Sackmann manages to capture what is distinctive about Świątek’s current statistical record concisely and accessibly — and hint at what the future might hold:
🏏 Watch the Games
Unlike in last year’s edition, it was domestic batters who took advantage of the WPL’s short boundaries in 2024 — and no one enjoyed the favourable layout of this year’s competition more than Shafali Verma.
The 20-year-old Indian’s game is renowned for its “brute force”.
As she got Delhi Capitals off to a fast start in last Sunday’s final, though, Verma paired that with some supreme touch.
Bowling the fifth delivery of the game’s fifth over, Australia’s superstar all-rounder Ellyse Perry tried to mitigate the impact of Verma’s power in two ways: by taking more than 10kph off the speed of the ball, and by pitching it short of the batter’s optimal hitting zone.
Facing this slower delivery at hip height on a fourth-stump line, Verma keeps her body well inside the ball and expertly decelerates her bat on its downswing. All it takes is a subtle rotation of the wrists on impact, and the ball swiftly disappears between two fielders to the offside boundary.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here7.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday April 6th.
A smaller court area overall and more defence-friendly rules are other notable practical differences, as this recent piece in the Sporting News highlights.
Through Wednesday’s loss to Fenerbahçe.
He attempted more than 3.4 three-pointers per 36 minutes in each NBA season from 2017-18 onwards.
He remained a comfortably above-average defensive contributor by Box Plus Minus in his final two seasons in the NBA.