How Far Away Is John Wall from Being NBA's Best Point Guard?

Thanksgiving may be well behind us, but that hasn't stopped John Wall from carving up opposing point guards and pretending they're made of turkey as he flat-out feasts on them. 

Tuesday night was no different, as the dynamic floor general torched the Minnesota Timberwolves in an easy 109-95 victory for his Washington Wizards, finishing with 21 points (on 9-of-17 shooting), four rebounds, 17 assists and a steal while orchestrating the vast majority of his team's offense and basking in MVP chants. According to Basketball-Reference.com, it was the second time this season that a player had recorded at least 21 and 17. 

The first? Some guy named John Wall, who dropped 26 and 17 against the Boston Celtics just 12 days before he went all Liam Neeson on the Wolves. 

But these performances are pretty darn rare. Only four such games were recorded last season—Chris Paul, Aaron Brooks and Ty Lawson (twice)—and Monta Ellis, then with the Milwaukee Bucks, was the only player to hit the necessary marks in either 2011-12 or 2012-13. 

As you can probably tell, Wall is playing some pretty special basketball lately. 

On the season, he's now averaging 17.8 points, 4.8 rebounds and an NBA-best 10.6 assists per game, doing so while playing some fantastic defense and shooting 44.8 percent from the field, 34.4 percent from beyond the arc and 75.2 percent from the charity stripe. He's put up a career-best player efficiency rating of 21.1, he's leading the league in assist percentage and most advanced metrics tend to look upon him with favor. As does his coach. 

"I think he still has the best ahead of him," Randy Wittman explained to The Associated Press, via ESPN.com, after Wall was given a nice little award. "He deserved to win Player of the Week. I told him, 'That's no big deal, you deserve it.' There's nothing surprising here, let's just keep doing it."

The thing is, he'll have to if he hopes to keep moving up the point guard hierarchy. After all, that position is loaded with elite talents who steer their teams to victory on a nightly basis, and the luminaries at the top of the totem pole are rather difficult to knock off. 

USA TODAY Sports

In my most recent set of player rankings, four point guards found a home within the top 10 spots. First of all, that's absolutely insane. Secondly, it underscores just how difficult it is to ascend to the positional throne without threat of a subsequent dethroning. 

But of those four, it was Wall who came in as the caboose, finishing at No. 9 overall. He trailed Kyle Lowry (No. 6), Chris Paul (No. 5) and Stephen Curry (No. 2). So for all intents and purposes, those are the primary point guards he's chasing, though we can't forget about Russell Westbrook, who was omitted only because he hasn't played enough games during the 2014-15 season. 

Mike Conley, Damian Lillard and Kyrie Irving deserve mentions as well, but none of them have exhibited quite as much two-way prowess as Wall and fall just behind him in the rankings. 

So, how do the five notables stack up thus far? 

	PPG	RPG	APG	SPG	TS%	PER	WS	VORP
Stephen Curry	23.5	5.2	7.6	1.9	61.6	26.4	4.6	7.5
Kyle Lowry	19.6	4.7	7.6	1.4	55.1	23.0	4.0	5.9
Chris Paul	17.4	4.5	9.7	1.8	60.3	25.2	4.5	6.0
John Wall	17.8	4.8	10.6	2.2	52.6	21.1	2.8	4.8
Russell Westbrook	26.4	5.8	6.8	1.9	60.1	34.5	2.2	4.4

Even though he compares favorably, let's go ahead and strike Lowry from the equation. He's been absolutely fantastic, especially since DeMar DeRozan suffered a major injury, but his production doesn't feel as sustainable, and he's receiving more opportunities to run a virtual one-man show at times. Lowry is a bona fide MVP candidate thus far, but just as Kevin Durant's award didn't automatically push him above LeBron James, that doesn't mean he's one of the league's four best point guards. 

No, that's a group made up of Curry, Paul, Westbrook and Wall. 

USA TODAY Sports

That said, Wall is still fighting an uphill battle to surpass any of the other three. Paul and Curry have engaged in a battle for the top spot throughout the season, and Westbrook is crashing the party while playing at historically excellent levels. As it stands, that PER you can see up above would beat every other mark in NBA history (even Anthony Davis' unbelievable current number), assuming he can keep it up throughout the season and play in enough games to qualify for the leaderboard. 

If he's looking to ascend further up the ladder (which he presumably is at all times), Wall need not focus on defense. He's already playing excellent ball on that end of the court, shining whether we're looking at metrics or using the eye test. 

Wall's defensive box plus/minus, which shows how the Wizards defense fares per 100 possessions with him rather than a league-average defender, is a solid 2.1, meaning simply that it's 2.1 points better over that time. To put that number in perspective, Andrew Bogut's 6.6 DBPM leads the league, and Danny Green comes in at No. 20 with a 2.4.

Washington is also allowing 13 fewer points per 100 possessions when the starting point guard is on the floor, dipping the defensive rating down to a stellar 98.8. Basically, when he plays, the team defense functions like the No. 2 unit in the league, worse than only the Golden State Warriors. But when he sits, it suddenly becomes the fourth worst, better than just the Minnesota Timberwolves, Utah Jazz and Los Angeles Lakers. 

Obviously, that's a big difference. 

Ned Dishman/Getty Images

82games.com doesn't look upon him quite as favorably, showing that he allows opposing point guards to post an above-average 16.1 PER. But that can be easily explained, as Wall spends a lot of time wreaking havoc with his off-ball work, sometimes at the expense of playing tight to his man.

There's a reason his work on the less glamorous end has earned rave reviews, like this one from Mark Giannotto of The Washington Post right after Wall helped the Wizards earn a win against the red-hot Los Angeles Clippers: 

"

Wall's defense again proved to be a catalyst on a night when the Wizards never trailed against one of the NBA's hottest teams, continuing a trend that has taken root throughout the first 22 games of the regular season.

Coach Randy Wittman noted after the game that 'when John’s engaged defensively, it just kind of filters right on down' to the rest of the team. But it hadn't always been like this. This season, Wittman added, Wall has received the highest ratings of his career on the defensive charts the team keeps for each player.

"

But if defense isn't the area in which he needs to improve, what is? 

Efficiency, broad and sweeping as that term may be. 

Wall still hasn't developed a stellar outside shot, and he can often put up poor shooting performances that hold his team back a bit on the offensive end of the floor. For someone who's scoring less than 18 points per game (an impressive number, but not when compared to the scoring exploits of Curry and Westbrook), that's an issue: 

That's not good news for Wall. 

Not only does the volume of his scoring output trail two of his competitors by a significant margin, but he's nowhere near as efficient as any of them. It's also testimony to Curry's rise to the top spot, as the Golden State Warrior is scoring in bulk and doing so in remarkably efficient fashion, thanks primarily to his three-point exploits and incredible work at the free-throw line. 

But efficiency is about more than shooting. How about passing, when we factor in both assists and turnovers? 

Wall may be leading the league in assists per game, but he's also No. 4 in turnovers per contest, trailing only Tony Wroten (4.1), James Harden (4.2) and Michael Carter-Williams (4.8). That doesn't allow his assist-to-turnover ratio to stand out in an undeniably impressive way, unlike Chris Paul's ridiculous number. 

The Kentucky product is definitely starting to live up to the expectations that accompanied him out of college when the Wizards took him with the No. 1 pick in the 2010 NBA draft. He's a huge source of offense for his team, and his defense is only getting better and better. 

Jared Wickerham/Getty Images

"There's plenty of great defenders out there—Mike Conley, Chris Paul and Kyle Lowry just to name a few—but none that come close to being the destructive force that John Wall is," Umair Khan wrote for Bullets Forever at the end of a fantastic breakdown of Wall's defensive prowess. "He's on another level right now and is poised to spearhead the Washington defense to yet another strong season."

But, even with point-preventing excellence taken into account, he still finds himself looking up at a few names on the point guard leaderboard. And until he hones his jumper further, becomes a more efficient all-around scorer and shows more care for the ball, it'll be tough for him to leap past any members of the established guard. 

There's no shame in finishing fourth, especially during this golden age of NBA point guards. But something tells me Wall won't be satisfied until he's left no doubt about his supremacy. 

If he keeps trending in this direction, even that might not take too long. 

Note: All stats, unless otherwise indicated, come from Basketball-Reference.com and are current heading into Dec. 17's games.