Detroit Pistons’ Blake Griffin is among the NBA elite

Blake Griffin has been a dominant force since entering the NBA. He’s coming off a career year with the Detroit Pistons and is among the NBA elite.

Blake Griffin is doing something that hasn’t been done in the NBA for 20 years and he keeps improving his game.

The Detroit Pistons forward is in the same breath as Larry Bird. They are the only players to average 21.9 points, 9 rebounds and 4.5 assists per game during their NBA careers (credit Bleacher Report’s Andy Bailey for pointing this out).

Even more so, Griffin is 33rd All-Time in career box plus-minus (4.0) and has a career net rating of +7.5, which Bailey said is better than Kevin Durant.

Griffin was very good entering the league, reaching the All-Star game in his first five seasons as a pro. Then came the injuries.

He only played 35 games during the 2015-16 season while dealing with a partially torn left quadricep and right hand surgery. In the middle of the 2016-17 season he had minor surgery on his right knee. He was ruled out of the 2017 playoffs after suffering an injury to a plantar plate on his right toe. The following season he suffered a MCL sprain.

With the Pistons, Griffin missed the final eight games of the 2017-18 season with a bone bruise on his right ankle.

Remarkably, through all of that he managed to have his best season yet last year, playing 75 games and scoring a career-high 24.9 point per game. He reached his sixth All-Star game and has had an incredible comeback.

Bird was a much better shooter than Griffin was in the early stages of his career but the Pistons forward is closing the gap. Last season he converted a career-best 36.2 percent of his attempts while taking 522 such shots. To put that in perspective, in Griffin’s previous eight seasons he had taken 590 total 3-pointers.

Griffin has always been a good passer but he didn’t see a bump in usage rate until the 2014-15 season. In his first three seasons he was between 25.4 and 27.3 (rookie year) in usage rate. But the 14-15 season saw it balloon to 29 percent, and it hasn’t dipped below 28 since. That slight bump caused for an increase from shy of 4 assists per game to 5 or better.

Next to “point forward” in the dictionary is a picture of Griffin. Last season, he had a career-high 30.3 usage rate under first-year coach Dwane Casey.

Reggie Jackson saw his time with the ball in his hands dip from an average of 27 percent down to 24.5 percent last season.

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Jackson recently admitted that he’s a better shooter off the ball and the results concur. He shot a career-high 471 3-pointers and converted a career-best 36.9 percent.

It’s possible that Griffin’s usage sees a slight decrease with the signing of Derrick Rose. In his healthiest year since leaving the Bulls, Rose had a resurgence. He had a career-best 55.7 percent true shooting percentage and saw an up-tick in usage rate at 27.3 percent, his highest since his final year in Chicago.

While Rose is more likely to come off the bench, the duo will have minutes overlap at some point. Rose has thrived off driving and penetrating to the lane to score but last season he shot a career-high 37 percent from 3-point range, which caused the spike in his true shooting percentage. If he proves that he can hit at a similar pace, than Griffin may use the ball more when they share the floor, but Rose has always been a ball-dominant point guard.

As long as Griffin remains healthy during the 2019-20 season, he could post a similar stat line of 24.9 points, 7.5 rebounds and 5.4 assists per game. Doing so at the same pace as last season, he’d near 15,0000 career points, 6,000 rebounds and 3,000 assists. If he reaches all three, he’d become the 34th player in NBA history to accomplish that feat and the fifth active player, joining LeBron James, Pau Gasol, Vince Carter and Carmelo Anthony.

It’s safe to say that Blake Griffin is on a Hall of Fame track and remains among the NBA’s elite.

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