NBA Study: Who is the best combo guard in the NBA?

Key Highlights:

• Tyrese Maxey, Terry Rozier, and Anfernee Simons are all having great offensive seasons. Meanwhile, Jordan Poole is struggling heavily.
• CJ McCollum is having a surprisingly good defensive season. Simons is having a rough defensive year.
• Maxey has a strong case as the best offense-first combo guard in the NBA.

They say that the more time you spend thinking, the more you learn about yourself. Well, the more time I spend thinking about basketball, the more I realize that I’m obsessed with the combo guard archetype. So much so that I thought it wise to dedicate the latest edition of our NBA Study column to answering the question of who the best combo guard in the NBA is right now.

So, without further ado, here we go.

What Is A Combo Guard?

Before we start, we need to establish what I mean when I use the term combo guard. For the sake of this study, we aren’t talking about players who simply oscillate between the point and shooting guard positions. That would be way too many players for a study like this.

Here, we are talking about players who can play the nominal point or shooting guard position (meaning they can play on and off the ball), are offensively slanted, but not good enough to be a high-level team’s primary creator. That means we won’t be including any players who have made All-Star/All-NBA teams (or Jamal Murray because he should have an All-Star appearance to his name).

We also won’t be considering guards who lean more toward defense. So, that removes guys like Marcus Smart, Immanuel Quickley, and Derrick White from the experiment.

To be frank, this exercise is a lot more arbitrary than the defensive study we did a few weeks back. To compile our list of offensive-first combo guards, we looked at things like Cleaning the Glass’ position classification, basketball reference position data, and Offensive and Defensive Estimated Plus-Minus (to see if a player was more offensively/defensively inclined).

We also eliminated rookies and players with less than 300 minutes played in 2023-24 from our list, as it is rare that rookies are super high-level contributors (although Craig Porter Jr. is awesome) and small sample sizes always come with a lot of noise.

Even with those considerations, this player archetype we’ve carved out is pretty subjective. So, if you see a player on this list that you wouldn’t consider in this group or if there is someone you think we are missing, feel free to DM me on Twitter (@matissa15) so I can try to explain why I included them/left them off.

In total, we came up with 18 non-rookie offense-first combo guards with at least 300 minutes played in 2023-24. With all that squared away, let’s dig into the data.

Offense First

As the archetype suggests, being a strong offensive player is an important part of the job description. While data alone doesn’t offer a perfect answer to questions like this (data plus film study plus anecdotal intel does the trick), it does give us a pretty clear picture of where each of these players stands in comparison to one another.

For this section, we are going to look at each player’s scoring volume (measured by points per 100 possessions), scoring efficiency (measured by true shooting), passing prowess (measured by Passer Rating), playmaking volume (measured by Box Creation), global offensive impact (measured by team offensive rating when on the floor and change in offensive rating when on/off), and their performance in one-number metrics (here we will use Offensive EPM).

Here is where all 18 players rank league wide (by percentile) in those categories. In parenthesis, we also include where they rank (by order) among each other.

Combo Guard 2023-24 Offensive Stats By Percentile (Ranking)*

*(Points per 100, True shooting, Passer rating, and Box Creation all came from the Thinking Basketball database. Offensive Rating on and Offensive rating on/off came from Cleaning the Glass. And Offensive EPM was provided by Dunks & Threes).

You may be wondering why Tyrese Maxey is included in this group since he looks like he’s on his way to his first career All-Star nomination this season. However, as I discussed earlier this season, even if Maxey is selected to an All-Star team, he is performing more like a top-50 player than a top-25 player.

With that said, Maxey still seems to be the strongest offensive player in this group. He’s leading the pack in Box Creation and overall Offensive EPM. He’s also the only player to be in the top 5 in all seven categories featured in our study.

Anfernee Simons also appears to be having a strong offensive year. As it stands, Simons is first in points per 100 and second in Box Creation and Offensive EPM. He’s also fifth in true shooting.

Terry Rozier and Malik Monk are other positive standouts. Despite the Charlotte Hornets’ underwhelming start to the season, Rozier is third in the group in Passer Rating, Box Creation, and Offensive EPM. He’s also sixth in points per 100 and fifth Offensive Rating On/Off.

Monk is having a strong passing season. He’s fourth in Passer Rating and Box Creation. Monk, Rozier, Maxey, and Coby White are the only offensive-first guards to not place in the bottom five in any of these seven categories.

On a more negative note, Jordan Poole (a player once compared to guys like Maxey and Simons) is having an awful offensive season. He’s in the bottom third in every category except points per 100.

Defense Still Matters

While this archetype’s main duty is to help their team put points on the board, defensive value still matters. What good does it do to have a really good offensive combo guard if they completely kill you on defense? The whole point of this archetype is that these players aren’t good enough on offense to make up for significant defensive shortcomings. So, to be the best offense-first combo guard, you need to not be an absolute negative on that end of the floor.

For this section, we are going to compare each player’s steal rate (measured by steal percentage), block rate (measured by block percentage), deflections (measured by deflections per 36 minutes), global defensive impact (measured by team defensive rating when on the floor and change in defensive rating when on/off), and their performance in one-number metrics (here we will use Defensive EPM).

Again, we show you where all 18 players rank league wide (by percentile) in those categories. In parenthesis, we also include where they rank (by order) among each other.

Combo Guard 2023-24 Defensive Stats By Percentile (Ranking)*

*(Steal percentage, block percentage, and Defensive EPM all came from Dunks & Threes. Deflections per 36 minutes was provided by NBA.com. And Defensive Rating on and Defensive Rating on/off came from Cleaning the Glass). 

As was to be expected when we eliminated the better defensive players from this pool, none of the offensive-first combo guards are of the All-Defensive Team variety.

With that said, one can’t help but notice how good CJ McCollum looks in comparison to his peers. Akin to what Maxey did in the offense category, McCollum was the only offensive-first combo guard to rank in the top 5 in all six of the defensive categories above. Still, his offensive numbers are just middle-of-the-pack compared to his peers. So, he’s not really in contention for the top spot.

Tyler Herro also fares well compared to the rest of the group in many of these areas (he’s top 3 in every category except block percentage and deflections per 36). However, a lot of this can be attributed to the Miami Heat’s incredible defensive ecosystem.

Maxey, the frontrunner based on his offensive numbers, doesn’t look too bad on defense either. He’s fifth in block rate (a byproduct of his springness) and first in defensive rating when he’s on the floor (he also benefits greatly from being on a team with sound defensive infrastructure).

Who Is The Best?

So, who is the best offense-first combo guard?

While I’m still not ready to say he’s a true top-25 player in the NBA, I do think the data we have here clearly shows that Maxey is the current best player in this archetype. He’s got the best offensive numbers, and his defense isn’t damaging enough to completely cancel out his offensive impact.

Simons and Rozier (the two players having the best offensive seasons outside of Maxey) don’t do enough on defense to warrant leapfrogging him in this debate. In fact, based on the numbers above, Simons has a case as the worst defensive guard in this group.

Monk is very solid on both sides of the ball. But he lacks the gaudy scoring/efficiency numbers to truly hang with Maxey.

The more interesting question here may be who the second-best player in this archetype is. Is it Simons or Rozier? Is it Monk? Is it someone else? Let me know what you think (again, my Twitter is @matissa15). And let me know what archetype you want to see me look at next.

***All these numbers are reflective of each players statistics through December 29th, 2023.