
Let's start with the asterisk because it's important. Rarely do you hear the "yeah, but" before the full talk of the "yeah," but let's do that here after first acknowledging the primary fact:
Since the 1979-80 season, when the NBA adopted the three-point shot, no player in league history has played more than 5,000 minutes while making a lower percentage of field goals than Ricky Rubio. He has played nearly 7,000 career minutes and made just 36.5 percent of his shots from the field.
Noted baseball blogger and cat enthusiast Aaron Gleeman tweeted this a week ago. I had no reason to doubt its veracity (it's true), but I thought about it, checked it and tweaked it a little while I considered writing something on the subject. I kept the 5,000 minutes part because that's a healthy sample size that still allows the consideration of a lot of players. But I thought that while 50 years was a nice round number, the advent of the three-point shot was a better apples to apples comparison. Regardless, it's still true.
So first, the asterisk.
*To play 5,000 minutes in the NBA means you are doing some things right. Plenty of worse shooters haven't made it that far. For instance, if you change the criteria to more than 500 minutes played instead of 5,000 minutes played, there are 54 players from 1979-present who have a worse field goal percentage than Rubio.
*Rubio does more than just some things right. A fun advanced stat called "real plus-minus" finds Rubio 11th in the NBA this season among point guards. If you prefer Player Efficiency Rating (PER), Rubio is a respectable 17th among point guards.
On Wednesday against the Knicks, he had a turbo-charged "classic Rubio" game, flirting with a quadruple-double yet coming up short of even a triple-double because he didn't have enough points (8 steals, 9 points, 10 rebounds, 12 assists). He was the first NBA player since 2002 to reach 8 in all four of those categories in the same game.
He shot 3 for 10 from the field, and the Wolves lost by five. If you want a Ricky Rubio game to put in the Wolves time capsule, at least from the start of his career to right now, this is the game to put in it.