Today in ridiculousness:

Yeah? Well, we don’t have any easy statistical way to determine how many times Brunson has received a whistle in the open court, or in transition with T.J. McConnell riding him, for instance, but we can look through the numbers to draw some other conclusions.

First, total fouls drawn in the playoffs:

  1. Jalen Brunson – 76 (8 games)
  2. Luka Doncic – 57 (8 games)
  3. Joel Embiid – 54 (6 games)
  4. Donovan Mitchell – 50 (9 games)
  5. Nikola Jokic – 44 (7 games)
  6. SGA – 41 (6 games)
  7. Jayson Tatum – 35 (7 games)
  8. Franz Wagner – 34 (7 games)
  9. Paolo Banchero – 34 (7 games)
  10. Pascal Siakam – 32 (8 games)

He’s clearly ahead of the other high-usage players still alive, but we can look closer at those numbers to address the Knicks fan narrative of “Brunson gets fouled more because he plays a lot of minutes and always has the ball in his hands” –

Playoff usage % (minimum 150 minutes) –

  1. Joel Embiid – 35.8%
  2. Jalen Brunson – 34.9%
  3. Donovan Mitchell – 34.1%
  4. Paolo Banchero – 33.2%
  5. Luka Doncic – 32.5%
  6. SGA – 31.5%
  7. Anthony Edwards – 30.9%
  8. Jaylen Brown – 30.8%
  9. Damian Lillard – 30%
  10. Jamal Murray – 28.9%

The discrepancy isn’t as large as Knicks fans would have you think.

For instance – Donovan Mitchell has played 9 games, Brunson 8, yet despite a 0.8% usage difference, Brunson has been fouled 26 more times. It’s similar with SGA and Luka, who have usage rates within 3.5% of Brunson but aren’t getting whistles at nearly the same rate.

Now to total foul shots attempted, because we want to compare the number of fouls drawn to how many times a player actually got to the line. It’s not perfect, but helps differentiate from the foul types the Knicks are complaining about, vs. the whistle Brunson gets while actually shooting:

  1. Jalen Brunson – 83 FTA
  2. Joel Embiid – 78 FTA
  3. Donovan Mitchell – 62 FTA
  4. Jayson Tatum – 60 FTA
  5. Luka Doncic – 59 FTA
  6. SGA – 52 FTA
  7. Paolo Banchero – 49 FTA
  8. Anthony Edwards – 44 FTA
  9. Franz Wagner – 44 FTA
  10. Devin Booker and Nikola Joke – tied for 41 FTA

You can run various per-minute filters here and not much changes. Per-36, per-48, per 100 possessions, whatever – Embiid and Brunson are either 1, 2, or 3 in every extrapolation you can create.

In terms of the shooting foul/non-shooting foul splits, we can dig a little deeper by play type. In terms of isolation, Brunson currently has the second highest and-1 frequency of these playoffs (8.6%). He’s got the 9th-highest iso shooting foul frequency (15.7%), so there’s a bit of a drop off. He gets a ton of and-1 calls in those elbow/guard post sequences, but fewer straight up shooting fouls than some of the other top players on these lists. And then if we go to pick and roll plays, he gets shooting fouls 14.4% of the time (5th), while the and-1 frequency is much lower (1.9%).

You can dig through the numbers all day, but the guy is getting fouled a ton, more than anyone this postseason as far as raw totals. The Knicks are complaining about grabbing and being hit while moving up and down the floor? Okay, but the guy isn’t exactly hurting for whistles in these playoffs.