Zion Is Trying To Break Your Chart
Plus an interview with knife_guy
Every data visualization involving Zion Williamson is a little like playing Where’s Waldo in that Zion is often set apart from the rest of the crowd, tucked away in a corner or far off near the margins of the graphic. Recently, Zion has been busting the axis limits on charts from ESPN’s Kevin Pelton and The Athletic’s Seth Partnow.
I first started to notice Zion’s chartbreaking tendencies last season when I was looking at the relationship between a player’s per game scoring average and their points per touch. Normally, players who can fill it up without dominating the ball tend to be catch-and-shoot specialists (i.e., Klay Thompson and Terrence Ross). But there was Zion, without a reliable jump shot, way out on the frontier of the chart.
At the time, I thought Zion had come along and invented a new player archetype — the catch-and-score specialist. But over the last month or so, the New Orleans Pelicans have found success on offense by upping Zion’s touches and (figuratively) feeding him more. As The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor and The Athletic’s Will Guillory have noted, the Pelicans have unleashed “Point Zion” by putting the ball in his hands and asking him to drive to the hoop and run more pick and rolls. Ever since the Pelicans started using Zion as more than just a catch-and-score machine they’ve risen from a league average offense to one of the most potent.
Unfortunately, the Pelicans’ offensive surge has coincided with a defensive nosedive, which is why they’re only 15-19. Still, I think it’d be difficult to find a more exciting player to watch than Zion right now.
Nerds and Pure Hoopers™ disagree about a lot of things, but both parties are in complete lockstep in their opinions of Zion. You don’t need to know Zion’s True Shooting Percentage (or even what True Shooting Percentage is) to be able to recognize how awesome he is. But his game doesn’t just look cool as hell—it’s also highly efficient.
Below is a chart showing a player’s scoring efficiency as a pick and roll ball handler as well as their scoring efficiency in isolation (as measured by points per possession). I’ve limited the chart to only show players who have at least 20 possessions doing both to highlight the league’s most threatening on-ball scorers.
Few players in the NBA combine scoring efficiency in the pick and roll as well as in isolation like Zion does. Even fewer can be reasonably classified as a Big on the positional scale. I count only one other big — three if you include DeMar De4zan and Thadgic Johnson — in the upper right quadrant of the chart. It’s just Zion, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and a bunch of traditional guards and wings.
One of the things that makes Zion special is that when he attacks the basket and is met by a defender he can usually jump and hang in the air long enough until the coast is clear. By the time Zion is ready to release his shot, the defender has already descended and the only option left is to foul. Below is a chart showing how often on-ball scorers draw shooting fouls in pick and rolls and in isolation. Once again, Zion is trying to break my chart.
I’m not the first to say it, but the more I watch Zion the more I’m reminded of Minnesota-era Adrian Peterson. I’m a lifelong-suffering Vikings fan, so many of my favorite football memories involve cheering for Peterson as he ran directly through would-be tacklers. Zion, like Peterson before him, has the speed and agility to blow past his man but also relishes in the fact that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line through the defender’s chest.
I’m A 1.2x Guy
For almost the entire time that I’ve been listener to the Bill Simmons Podcast I had no one to talk to about each episode. But a few years back I came across the Bill Simmons subreddit and had a similar reaction to Luke Winkie’s, who wrote about the forum for The Outline in 2020:
When I first stumbled onto the Bill Simmons subreddit, it was like reading an astral projection of a conversation I’ve been having with myself for a decade. Finally, other people who have a vested, entirely unjustifiable connoisseurship in bespoke Simmons weirdness! Living proof that I was not the only crazy one. That, my friends, was vindication. There’s even a thread about that MLK incident.
In the beginning, I only visited the subreddit after listening to a particularly good (or bad) episode to read what other listeners thought. But starting in the summer of 2019 I began visiting the subbredit more regularly to view the work of knife_guy.
knife_guy makes memes about Bill Simmons. I know how lame that sounds, but if you’re like me, and have heard Bill’s voice more often than just about anyone else’s over the last year during quarantine, then you understand.
One member of the Bill Simmons subbredit described knife_guy’s memes to me as, “just idiosyncratic enough that it fits the mold of being funny, but only being funny if you're really in the know, which somehow makes people appreciate it more.”
At first, knife_guy’s memes were just deepfried photos of Simmons overlaid with context-less quotes from his episodes. But lately, knife_guy has pivoted to video.
I recently messaged back and forth with knife_guy to talk about his memes, Bill Simmons, and r/billsimmons.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
OP: I once saw a post on r/billsimmons where a redditor asked if someone could explain who knife_guy was. The top reply was, "He’s basically an autistic homebrewer and cigar fan that might murder Bill Simmons one day in a Mark David Chapman type of thing." On a scale of 1 to 20, how accurate is that description of you?
KG: The murder part seems pretty unlikely. I don’t think I’m on the spectrum, but could be? The rest is exact. So, 12? My mom diagnosed my uncle as on the spectrum (she is not a doctor), and I consider myself more neurotypical than he, so, ipso facto, 13. I take it as a compliment though. I placed 7th in a poker tournament once.
OP: I think a lot of the confusion about who you are is that your post history on Reddit is bizarre. Ten years ago you were posting questions on r/homebrewing and r/cigars. Then there’s this eight year gap of silence before you re-emerge and start posting, for lack of a better way to describe it, deepfried memes on r/billsimmons. What's that all about?
KG: I guess I didn’t have anything to say. I used Reddit as a resource much more than I used it as a way to interact.
Then I started to really track some of the inane things Bill would say on his podcasts, the crutch phrases, malapropisms, tortured analogies and the like. At some point I thought it would be funny to point them out by juxtaposing his words with the kind of saccharine motivational phrases prevalent on Instagram at the time.
OP: Bill does this thing when he's interviewing actors & actresses where he pulls up their IMDB page and reads their filmography to them out loud while his guest stares blankly back at him. I'm not going to do that. But I do want to ask you about your evolution as a memer. Your first post was a really low effort meme before you started moving into more abstract areas and eventually into full on mini-movies.
KG: The first one was really rudimentary, about the Kawhi trade. It wasn’t a quote, just a meme to comment on what he thought was emergency pod worthy. It wasn’t really well received, and I was bummed. I’ve been reading Bill since at least 2003 or so. I was one of the cliché guys who would print his Page 2 stuff and read it in the commode at work. But, it was clear his quality was slipping. And, I thought, are all the people in this subreddit—not really knowing how the subreddit worked—just followers who show up to worship Bill instead of thinking about his work critically? That kind of stinks.
Some of the early memes were really legit fried. I like that aesthetic. The problem is, a good hard fry can reduce the legibility or clarity of the point. And, so I started backing away from frying the stuff, so you could see the quote or, later, his face or, most recently, the lips of the person talking. On the other hand, if the image or images aren’t a little fucked up, it’s like it’s too good. These aren’t meant to read as pristine.
Actually, that’s one of the things about Bill that gets on my nerves. He seems so un-self-aware. Others on the subreddit have pointed this out much more intelligently and elegantly than I have, but he seems to have no ability to view himself from his outside. So, I wanted to degrade the imagery to depict him in ways contrary to how I imagine he perceives himself. He doesn’t know it, but he’s Johnny Lawrence, he’s Stan Gable, he’s Troy from the Goonies. And I don’t like that, because he started as the outsider you wanted to throw shit with.
OP: There was a story from 2020 on The Outline about the Bill Simmons subreddit where the author described discovering the forum as "like reading an astral projection of a conversation I’ve been having with myself for a decade. Finally, other people who have a vested, entirely unjustifiable connoisseurship in bespoke Simmons weirdness."
Did you have a similar experience or did you show up and think, this place sucks?
KG: I started doing this podcast with my pal about the Bill Simmons Podcast. It was (and kind of still is) only about the Bill Simmons Podcast. We named it the Bill Simmons Podcast Podcast. That led to some issues with our then podcast host (Anchor) thanks to some legally dubious claims by Spotify.
But my buddy and I used to just bullshit about Bill and his podcast and make fun of him or debate (not “litigate”) his theories. Then we decided to make our conversations into podcasts. We were trying to figure out how to connect to other smark Bill Simmons Podcast fans, and I think my pal pointed me to the subreddit. The first time I read a post on an episode, I was like, yeah, that’s how I feel.
OP: I don’t think people who haven’t listened to your podcast will fully appreciate just how niche it is based on the way you just described it. It's basically just you and your buddy riffing on Bill's mispronunciations and recapping his latest podcast episodes. I think there was a period where you guys were clipping together Bill's on-mic swallows, half-burps, and other weird mouth noises.
KG: Yeah, we don’t post much, but we still argue about his logical conclusions or insult his comparisons and then it’s like, “listen to this loud gulp into the mic.” Or, “listen to how sinister his laugh sounds slowed down.” I’m an idiot. I’m a child. It’s funny when he says “load” over and over.
OP: You said you had some issues with your podcast platform, Anchor, due to some legally dubious claims by Spotify. What’s the story there?
KG: That was really disappointing. We had been using Anchor from around April 2019 to October 2020. It's a pretty foolproof platform and its built-in ads made us a few hundred bucks over that time. And, it was free! Then Bill sold the Ringer to Spotify and Spotify also bought (or formed some sort of affiliation with) Anchor. Anchor then sent us an email that reads as follows:
Hi there,
We have received a complaint that the following content infringes the intellectual property rights of Matt Lieber of Spotify. While this claim is under investigation, this content has been taken down.
Show Title: The Bill Simmons Podcast Podcast Feed URL: https://anchor.fm/s/a38ad88/podcast/rss
After a few requests, Anchor was pretty cool about paying us what we'd earned from the show, and they allowed us to migrate the feed to our current host, Transistor.FM, but the takedown was a complete capitulation.
OP: Did you ever try reaching out to Bill, The Ringer, or Matt Lieber to resolve the issue?
KG: No. It never occurred to me. It's a cool idea.
OP: Every now and then, when one of your memes doesn’t do well, someone in the comments will crack a "This is like watching Jordan on the Wizards" joke, but then you're back the next week with a Simmons / Indecent Proposal crossover (one of my personal favorites). When you're over there on your computer, doing knife_guy things, do you ever think to yourself, this is gonna be a top 6 or 7 post in the history of r/billsimmons?
KG: No. Never. Usually I'm just like, I guess I'm done. I do like any time Bill’s head is thrown back and his eyes closed. I also liked the “Rembert like compilation.” But I never know what people will think, and I'm always pretty anxious.
OP: Other people have recently started posting Simmons memes on the subreddit, but they’re not like yours. You can always tell something is your work without even looking at who submitted it based on the style. Simmons would probably call you a unicorn.
KG: I think unicorn implies greatness. I'm just a plugger. Also, not sure Bill would call me anything. I think he's loathe to admit the existence of criticism. "Stet all changes."
OP: Do you think Bill has seen any of your memes?
KG: I flatter myself by thinking maybe he has. Realistically, though, my guess is, at most, he’s scrolled by them without paying attention while keeping an eye on a soccer game.
OP: Yeah, I have a hard time believing Simmons browses the subreddit. I don’t think he would like what he would find. However, I’ve always felt that the subreddit is a fairly diverse place by Reddit’s standards.
KG: It’s really to Bill’s credit that the subreddit is diverse. He’s lost his fastball, but that muscle memory is there. He can still surprise us. I laugh out loud a couple times a week. I love seeing other memes or different approaches to criticism. Some people are really smart and thoughtful. The subreddit is cool in its self policing, too. You can disagree, but the assholes get rooted out. I recently started searching for this one poster's episode breakdowns, firewarner. He's doing a "thing" tracker and has his favorite quotes. Love it.
OP: If Bill came to you and asked what he could do to make his podcast better, what would you tell him?
KG: Hire an actual producer. Someone who can say, “try that take again” on botched ads (pronouncing COD as “cod” is a recent one), someone who can edit out or point out the crutches and weird words (I loved his brief flirtation with “centrifugal”), someone who can confront him with his sense of entitlement and self contradiction; mostly someone to rein in his negative (lazy, complacent) habits and get him to emphasize his outsider potshots. He should have been what Deadspin once was but as a podcast, the network TV version of Dr. Thompson, not someone who dreams of being accepted by the mainstream and eating lunch at the cool kids’ table.
I love the BS Podcast Podcast, Find Knife Guy pretty hit or miss, but when he hits they can be amazing. Great interview.
Knife guy >> '86 celtics