What Patty Mills’ on/off numbers say about the Spurs

Advanced stats can by finicky. Sometimes they say more about what’s going around a player than what he himself is doing. A key example of that is Spurs guard Patty Mills leading the league by a considerable margin in On-Off Court NetRtg differential (a comparison of how a team does with and without a certain player on the court).

Below are the league leaders (as of Dec. 5) from stat guru John Schuhmann’s most recent Friday Notebook:

Schuhmann gives a few reasons why Mills’ differential is so high, and none should be too surprising when watching the Spurs so far this season:

But Patty Mills is at the top of the list, because the Spurs’ starters have been bad.