Another game, another nine assist night for Malik Monk. The beloved combo guard turned in his second straight game with nine assists (a feat he has accomplished in four of his last six games) in the Sacramento Kings' win over the Brooklyn Nets.
This brings us to a larger trend taking form with Monk. Since the runner-up for the Sixth Man of the Year (6MOY) award got moved from the bench to the starting lineup (25 games), Monk has been averaging 6.8 assists per game. Meanwhile, in the first 471 games of his professional career (only 63 of those games were starts), Monk only averaged 2.9 APG.
Monk has always been a great passer
On the season, Monk has been averaging a career-best 5.8 APG. This, and the numbers we cited above, may lead many people to believe that Monk has taken a massive leap as a passer/playmaker. And while Monk has done a great job boosting his play to be worthy of his extension, he has always been a talented facilitator.
One of the best publicly available measures of a player’s passing ability is Ben Taylor’s Passer Rating metric, which is an estimate of a player’s passing ability on an “approximately” 1-10 scale.
This season, Monk has a passer rating of 7.3 (90th percentile, per Thinking Basketball). That is incredible, but guess what his passer rating was last season? It was a 7.4 (88th percentile). And the season before that, it was a 7.1 (85th percentile).
Raw assists can be misleading because they are heavily reliant on two variables that have very little to do with a player's actual passing ability: 1) playing time and 2) whether or not the player's teammates can hit the shots that are being created for them.
That is why someone could look at Monk's bump in assists and think he's improved as a passer. The truth is that he has always been a good passer. Now, he's just finally getting the chance to show it.