McFruity on Hoops

On Gerald Wallace, and recent free-ish agents

2011-03-11T11:08:00.001-08:00

In the past year, there's been much hand-wringing over players having "too much" power. Lebron James set off the talk, by choosing to move to Miami to work while he was not under contract with any other employer.

In response, Dan Gilbert, the owner of the Cavs, wrote an angry missive in Comic Sans calling James a "traitor" and various other names, and posted the letter to the front page of the Cavs website. Dan Gilbert, (ostensibly) an adult, directing other adults to be angry at an adult who was completely free and had no unfulfilled obligations, for exercising that freedom.

Message: players are supposed to be loyal to their teams.
Ok.

Sidenote: Carmelo Anthony didn't "force" a trade. He was decent enough to give the Nuggets warning that he might leave as a free agent (which Lebron was criticized for not doing), and used his impending free agency as leverage in trade and future contract negotiations, like any responsible smart person ought to do.

So what does all of this have to do with Gerald Wallace?

In the summer of 2007, Gerald Wallace signed a contract for 6 years and $57 million with the Charlotte Bobcats. This was the same summer that Rashard Lewis, who wasn't then and isn't now as good or productive a player at the same position as Wallace, signed a 6 year contract for $118 million. It was clear to observers that Wallace could have made much more as a free agent than the contract he signed with the Bobcats, and even that he could have received a bigger contract from the Bobcats, had he insisted. At the time, Wallace stated that he just enjoyed living and playing in Charlotte, and was interested in staying and not making a big fight over the contract.

It was loyal. It was admirable. It was understandable (not everyone likes moving). I'm sure Wallace thought that he could stay in Charlotte for the rest of his career.

In the years since signing that contract, Wallace has done everything a fan could ask from a favorite player. He's improved his game and become an all-star. He's played harder than anyone else. Even when he got injured, the injuries were from playing too hard, too often -- he didn't get wear and tear injuries, pulled muscles, etc.. No. He accumulated a collection of concussions, collapsed lungs, broken ribs, separated shoulders, and other violent injuries that resulted from his recklessly throwing his entire body and being into every small moment of play, for no other reason than to hopefully help his team, and to entertain the people of Charlotte.

Gerald Wallace showed us what it looks like for a professional athlete to love his team, his job, and his city.

Last week, the Bobcats traded Wallace to the Trailblazers. Understandably, sad Gerald is sad:

"I felt like it was a stab in the back, something I that I totally didn't see coming," Wallace said. "I was comfortable here. I thought everything was good. We were starting to get guys back healthy and we were starting to make a push.

"My heart was here. My heart and soul were here and it's always been here for the last seven years."

Pay attention Cleveland. "I was comfortable here." Gerald Wallace is the down-to-earth, passionate player who wanted to stay. He was everything you said Lebron was not. If this had been the Cavaliers, would you be out expressing your anger by yelling and booing, by burning things, by writing hateful letters in absurd fonts?

Welcome to 2009-2010

2009-10-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

Hello, world!

Fruithoopz is back, having put on 15 pounds of muscle in the NBA offseason. I apologize for the long time off, but it was much needed for a variety of reasons.

Before I get to any other business, I would like to recommend that you take in this important book from the good people of Basketball Prospectus as a way of preparing yourself as a fan for the upcoming season -- I've gone through it cover to cover, and still continue to page through it as a reference. It's a must-read. And it provides a better preview than anything I could put together.

Other notes:

- There are a couple of pretty interesting statistical issues to watch this season. The first is the "usage experiments" being carried out by Houston and Memphis, which should hopefully give us some pretty good data on the relationship between usage and efficiency, which we're always talking about.

- The second is Kevin Durant, whose ongoing development should teach us something about boxscore-based productivity metrics and plus/minus-based metrics.

- Joey had a pretty thoughtful reflection on the upcoming season, and the seeming changing of the NBA guard.

- Kobe Bryant is a fan of Ambrose favorite, Anthony Parker.

- I've expressed some appreciation of Andre Iguodala's game here, and have enjoyed him as a player since his rookie year. This post did a pretty good job of breaking down a lot of what makes Iggy good, statistically.

As far as fruithoopz, for the upcoming season, I'd like to spend more time doing game-by-game analysis. Overall, we'll stick to a similar schedule as we had last year -- with the first third of the season or so dedicated to looking at young or surprising players, the next third spent on under-the-radar teams that might find themselves fighting for a low playoff seed in the spring, and finally the last third of the regular season will focus on the contenders. I hope we have a great season together, thanks for reading!

Shannon

2009-07-01T19:09:00.000-07:00

I'm currently compiling some material for a proper offseason post, but I happened to run across a little something that seemed worth sharing. Shannon Brown (pictured above) does not lift weights, sticking "mostly to push ups and [doing] little to nothing with his legs":

In fact, late in the season, Brown explained to us that while he did do some lifting in high school and at Michigan State, he has basically stayed away from weight training since entering the NBA.

Sigh.

Making moves

2009-06-25T11:57:00.000-07:00

In un-composed bullet format:

From what I've seen, pundits love Minnesota's move to get the 5th pick in the draft for Randy Foye and Mike Miller. I am a little confused, though. All I've heard about this draft is that it's exceptionally weak. Now, I know the Wolves weren't going anywhere with Foye and Miller, but the Wolves actually picked up longer-term salary obligations, while sending away their best perimeter scorers, for the 5th pick in a supposedly weak draft and some serviceable bigs. I don't hate the move, but I'm not completely sold, either. I guess it all depends on what they do with #5?
And now the Wizards are really stocked with dudes who can score a lot and don't really defend -- Foye, Gilbert Arenas, Caron Butler, Antawn Jamison . . .. Flip Saunders has had some productive teams at both ends of the court -- this could be a fascinating team to follow next year if they're healthy.
I started out really disliking the Shaq move for Cleveland. And I still have issues with it. But last year, I said that Cleveland needed someone to create offense besides Lebron, and then Lebron went and had the highest usage rate of his career. One thing we know Shaq can still do at this point in his career, is create offense. Lebron could use the break.
Since I began writing this post, the draft started up. So, a couple of random draft thoughts: 1) Minnesota, enjoy the Ricky Rubio era. (and just as I write that, they pick Jonny Flynn also. Interesting . . .) 2) James Harden is going to be a great pro. I like him in Oklahoma City, I've decided. You heard it here first!
This required it's own bullet: I understand having concerns about Dajuan Blair's injury history, but his height? We know this: rebounding is a skill that transfers seamlessly to the pros. Also: Girth and wingspan can be just as (if not moreso) important to defending the post as height (Chuck Hayes, anyone?). If I know this, GMs should know this.
Does Sergio Rodriguez get minutes in Sacramento?
Get well soon, Yao.
So, my initial reaction to the Magic getting Vince Carter is very positive. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Hedo Turkoglu and Marcin Gortat, but Vince should work well on that team.
Apropos of nothing: I thought this was a useful case study regarding contract rules and the salary cap, particularly considering that the current Collective Bargaining Agreement will expire in 2011. It is an explanation of Kobe Bryant's contract options written by the always informative Larry Coon. (via Ramona Shelbourne)

Enjoy the draft, people!

Remains of the day

2009-06-23T22:35:00.000-07:00

The first rumors I saw this morning had to do with a proposed trade sending Rajon Rondo and Ray Allen to Detroit in return for Tayshaun Prince, Rip Hamilton, and Rodney Stuckey. Like Kelly Dwyer, I was mighty confused that the Pistons would turn down such a deal, and I continue to be confused by the ongoing assumption that the Celtics are looking to move Rondo. Why would they be trying to get rid of the conference's best point guard?

But then the real moves happened. Milwaukee moved to acquire Amir Johnson and Kurt Thomas (along with Bruce Bowen's contract, which is only partially guaranteed until August 1), with San Antonio picking up Richard Jefferson, and Detroit taking Fabricio Oberto (whose contract is also only partially guaranteed until July 1). These moves make a ton of sense for Milwaukee, who needed to clear up space in order to potentially re-sign Ramon Sessions (a very promising young point guard, who I've written about several times here) without going over the cap. They got rid of, essentially, an average but overpaid wing in Richard Jefferson. In other words, the Bucks are cleaning up after a mistake they made last year, when they inexplicably traded for Jefferson in the first place. The Bucks' financial outlook, and options, are laid out really clearly in this well-written piece. A couple of additional points: 1) I am one of the handful of people who still really likes Amir Johnson, and think the Bucks made a solid move in picking him up -- it's a low-risk move that could pay off huge if Johnson can get some minutes and play without foul trouble this year; 2) While the Bucks probably have enough room under the luxury tax limit to sign Sessions and still have money left over (not Charlie Villanueva money, but some money), I wouldn't be surprised, if the Bucks go over the tax line this offseason, to see them make moves to get back under the tax before the trade deadline. If that's the case, watch for a smart contending team to go after Charlie Bell: he's the sort of player - a versatile guard who can play either backcourt position and who defends - who contenders can really use down the stretch.

I was sort of down on the San Antonio side of this move at first -- mostly because I've never particularly cared for Jefferson's game. But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. Because of their smart planning and management, the Spurs have the luxury to overpay an average player for a couple of years. Meanwhile, given the ages of Manu Ginobili and Tim Duncan, it makes no sense for this team to be planning for any kind of future -- they are looking to win now. So, they pick up Jefferson, a capable defender who can hit the open 3's he'll see in the Spurs' offense. Additionally, Jefferson can still create his own shot -- not with a ton of efficiency, but still adequately -- and is the only Spur outside of the Big 3 who can do so. An inability to generate offense during stretches of games has plagued the Spurs for several years now, so Jefferson should provide a big boost (particularly if Manu Ginobili happens to miss some time again). And Richard Jefferson's tendency to stay on the court -- he's played in 78 or more games in 6 of his 8 seasons and all 82 games in each of the last two years -- shouldn't be overlooked as an asset to his team.

So all in all, a good trade for both teams. I'll try to put up some thoughts about the Wizards-Wolves deal tomorrow, once I've had a chance to digest the details.

Many Things

2009-06-16T22:38:00.000-07:00

I got punched in the face yesterday. The way it happened was instructive. I was sparring, and my opponent threw out a quick jab towards my head. I slipped it without a problem, shifting my hips and shoulders just enough to hear my opponent's glove whiz past my left ear. But then I made a mistake. See, I saw him throwing a second punch right behind that jab, and I just assumed it was coming towards where I was at that moment, so I moved back in the other direction. And Whack! See, my opponent saw the way I was anticipating, so he took advantage by throwing a punch not where I was, but where I would be. As it turns out, I should have just stayed where I was (and thrown a hook, but that's another story), and responded to the actual punch rather than trying to anticipate it.

So why is that informative? During this time of year, just before the draft, as basketball fans, it's easy to get caught up in unsourced rumors and speculation. For a couple of weeks it seems like everyone is going everywhere (Al Jefferson to Phoenix, Josh Smith to anywhere, and so on and so forth), and when everything settles, it's often the case that most of those players didn't get moved. It's better for us, then, not to chase every possibility, but rather to let things unfold and respond to things that actually happen, rather than to rumors. And that's what we'll do here. I'll respond to the occasional rumor when a writer makes a point that seems blatantly wrong, or, on occasion, something insightful, but if there's nothing to learn from a rumor, then it'll be ignored here.

Ok, so what's up in the league? Congratulations to the Lakers, first of all. Further, a couple of quick links:

This seems important, as a continuation of the narratives begun by Brandon Jennings and Jeremy Tyler in the men's game.

This basically summed up my own response to the "Shaq to Cleveland" rumros. Except that I would add one other complaint: if you claim to be looking for someone who can defend Dwight Howard without help, why on earth would you go after someone who can't defend the pick and roll?

I know nothing about the NCAA, and I readily admit it. That might be why I'm rooting for Ricky Rubio and Brandon Jennings to succeed. In general, though, the source I trust most for draft-related information is draftexpress. I recommend going there before the draft. For no particular reason at all, the players I'm most curious about seeing in the NBA are (and have the highest hopes and expectations for): Ricky Rubio, Brandon Jennings, Jrue Holiday, Tyreke Evans, Earl Clark, Omri Casspi, and Rodrique Beaubois. I also see no reason why Dajuan Blair and Darren Collison won't be solid pros, at the very least. What do you think?

Random musing on the Reggie Evans - Jason Kapono trade: good for both teams!

2009-06-11T23:00:00.000-07:00

Hey reporter! Do your job!

No more cliches!

Real Talk

2009-06-08T11:28:00.001-07:00

At what point are we allowed to say that Lamar Odom has officially arrived? I am voting for now. From this point forward, we don't refer to him as having "potential" or being an "enigma" or being "mercurial." He is who he is, right now, and it is great.

Links: A Bit of game analysis

2009-06-06T01:13:00.000-07:00

This first link is actually from before game 1, but it goes over a play that the Magic did run a bit in the first game, and wil surely run more. You'll need to log-in to view the full report, but the account is free and if you're a Lakers fan, why don't you already have one?

At Seven Seconds or Mess, Gian goes over a little bit of what the Lakers did defensively, highlighting a few excellent defensive possessions for the Lakers. He also shows examples of Rashard Lewis choosing to pull up when he could have been far more effective if he had attacked the basket. Make sure to pay attention to this video, and expect to see (and watch for) Lewis be more agressive in game 2.

And finally, at X's and O's the coach takes a look at the topic that everyone was going on about after the game -- Kobe's mid-range proficiency shredding the Magic defense. What sorts of adjustments should we expect from the Magic? Well:

I think for Game 2, you'll see Stan Van Gundy go with more traps and double-teams on Kobe. The key will be how the weak side defenders zone up and close out on the other Laker players. That is what the Nuggets couldn't do, they doubled, but they couldn't properly defend on the weak-side, allowing players like Ariza and Odom to get off good shots.

Hmmn. I can't wait to see how it plays out.

Quick Thoughts in Advance of Game 1

2009-06-03T22:37:00.000-07:00

There are all sorts of previews of this series and stories about each team out there that are worth reading. I won't recap all of them, but here are links to a handful that I personally found to be illuminating:

Kevin Arnovitz is a good of a basketball writer as there is out there, and luckily for us he's done quite a bit of work looking at the Magic recently. Three of the resulting articles which I found incredibly enlightening: Seven Reasons to Fear the Orlando Magic, When Orlando Has it Going, and It's not Magic, it's Execution. One point that really comes through in all of them: the Magic are really well-coached, as they are always executing flawlessly. There is more here than a superficial look would lead you to believe, which is why you should really check those pieces out, if you haven't already. Since we're already talking about Arnovitz, here's a nice little musing on why this is such an exciting series for basketball fans
A two-parter at Forum Blue and Gold, focusing on when the Magic have the ball and when the Lakers have the ball. The former includes a pretty detailed breakdown of the dangerous Magic high pick and roll, and the Lakers' options in defending it. Also, I also would like to see Kobe Bryant posting up Courtney Lee at every opportunity.
Kevin Pelton takes a look at the series, and sees advantages and disadvantages at both ends (though there seem to be more matchup advantages for the Lakers). One specific matchup to watch is the Rashard Lewis - Pau Gasol one, though how much we see of it depends on Odom's minutes and Bynum's fouls. Pelton, like many expect Gasol and Lewis respectively to light each other up on offense, assuming neither can defend the other. I'm a bit of a Laker homer, so take this with a grain of salt, but I think Gasol might do a serviceable job defending Lewis.
Tom Ziller brings up one of the more curious stories of the series: all season, the Lakers have played a style of defense that actually allows for a lot of weakside 3-point attempts. It has worked for them, as they had the 6th best defense in the league during the year, but Orlando's whole gameplan is trying to create open 3's. Will the Lakers continue to play a style of defense that seems to play right into Orlando's hands? My guess is probably not, but it is important to emphasize that the Lakers don't give up 3's willy-nilly, that they're smart about what they concede, which is part of why the Lakers were the third best team in the league at holding opponents to a low FG% from 3. Then again, the Cavs were first, and Orlando torched them from beyond the arc. The Lakers' perimeter defenders are longer and better suited to close out the tall Orlando shooters, but Orlando is still going to have stretches where they score in bunches from the 3-point line.
This interview with Lakers Advance Scout Rasheed Hazzard was pretty ineresting.

I would like to once again point out that the Magic defense was the best in the league all season. That seems to get lost sometimes in all the chatter about three-pointers and whatnot. The Lakers have an offense that is, at its best, completely unstoppable, but please don't call them soft or underachieving or anything if they have stretches of struggling to score. Orlando is as good of a defense as there is out there.

We'll have more time in the upcoming days, weeks, months, years, here at fruithoopz to dwell on Kobe Bryant's game. But it's worth reminding yourself that he's smart, and that's a big part of his success. That article is a little bleh and over the top idolizing, but pay attention to him on the court during this series, whether or not he has the ball. There are plenty of guys in the league who are bigger, taller, faster, stronger, quicker, and higher leapers than he is, but he's the "superstar" we're left with because he knows so much and because he prepares so well. He doesn't just put himself in the best positions to score (though he does that), but positions himself at both ends of the court in just the right positions to be most helpful to his team, just by being there. Trouble getting the ball into Gasol in the post? He'll cut and set up on the weak side, knowing he's taking defenders and attention with him, to clear a lane for the entry pass. Double team? He'll get as far back as possible to give his teammates room to operate 4-on-3. And if the Lakers send help, he'll be in just the right place to defend two guys on the weakside. These are all really basic examples, but he does a lot more. The assist is an incredibly cheap way to measure "making teammates better." Kobe Bryant changes the geography of the basketball court.

So does Dwight Howard, by the way, in his own way.

If, throughout the finals, you are limited in terms of the time you can spend reading up on what's going on, just limit yourself to pieces by Kelly Dwyer and you should be fine. (If you have more time, though, then come here and click on the links to the right).

I am really curious about Dwight Howard in this series. Are we supposed to believe after the Cleveland series that he's now arrived as a post scorer? Even though he's never shown it before? The pick and roll is one thing, but I'm guessing that in other situations the Lakers choose to single cover Dwight in the post and see what he's capable of. Make him prove it.

On a completely unrelated note: fruithoopz contributor Ambrose has an art exhibit opening at the mauve? gallery on Monday. Support!

Initial Finals Thoughts

2009-05-30T21:32:00.000-07:00

First off: congratulations to both the Magic and the Lakers. Both of these teams deserve to be exactly where they are, and together form an absolutely worthy pair of potential champions. Further, both teams have gone through an incredible amount to get to where they are now -- Boston, Cleveland, Houston, and Denver would be included in the top six teams in the NBA in every year that I can recall. On that note, Charles Barkley said something during the Cavs-Magic postgame that I think will be lost over the coming days -- that Cleveland's winning the most games during the regular season was a remarkable accomplishment. Take a look at that roster, 2 through 15, and then think about how much credit is due to Mike Brown, Lebron James, and the willingness of all of those role players to put everything into filling their roles perfectly.

Also, regarding the Magic: please ignore any talk that suggests that their being here is a fluke. Further, I would like to suggest the following statement for further discussion. It is currently an incomplete thought, but I think it is a starting point for something productive: Jameer Nelson is to the 2009 NBA playoffs as Andrew Bynum was to the 2008 playoffs.

Finally, before we begin an ongoing discussion of the Lakers-Magic matchup, we should take a moment to give credit to Mr. Courtney Lee. A rookie. Think about that, for a moment. All season, and throughout the playoffs, this young man has been exactly what Orlando has needed, and we just don't see that from a rookie.

Ok, so what is there to say about Lakers-Magic? We'll hopefully continue to talk about the matchups up until Game 1 on June 4th, and throughout what should be a fascinating series. In the meantime, here are some initial thoughts.

Rebounding: As is often the case with the Lakers, the rebounding battle should be an enlightening one. During the regular season, the Lakers were the 3rd best offensive rebounding team in the league, while the Magic were the 2nd best defensive rebounding team in the league. If the Magic are able to limit the Lakers' second-chance points, they have a chance of slowing down an incredibly impressive offense -- during the regular season the Magic were one of the best teams in the league at defending the two most efficient areas on the court -- the three point line and the area closest to the basket (the Magic's success in both of these areas is evidence backing up Dwight Howard's choice as Defensive Player of the Year: discuss). The Magic's ability to defend efficient shot attempts without compromising their team defensive positioning (they are able to defend most positions without having to collapse and leave open shooters, thanks to Dwight Howard's ownership of the paint) allows them to be in position to rebound to finish out defensive posessions. So, for instance, the Magic held the 76ers -- the second best offensive rebounding team in the league during the regular season, to retrieving just 21% of their own misses in the playoffs, far below average.

And individual matchups? A couple of quick thoughts: Lamar Odom and Trevor Ariza are as well-suited to guarding the Magic's nightmare forward lineup of Hedo Turkoglu and Rashard Lewis as anyone in the league. Those guys will present mismatches no matter what, but against the Lakers, that effect should be minimized. At the other end, while I admire what Courtney Lee and Mickael Pietrus have accomplished this year, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Kobe Bryant is uniquely suited to destroying the Magic defense.

The real story will be Dwight Howard on offense. During the playoffs, he has shown growth at that end, to the point where you can no longer count on being able to force him into turnovers with unexpected doubles (he's been making better and better passes), or being able to effectively single-cover him (Kendrick Perkins was able to do this, but there aren't any Lakers with Perkins' ability as a post-defender).

We'll have some more complete thoughts up here in the coming days, but I wanted to start the discussion right away. If you have any thoughts, leave them below.

Predictions? I'll go Lakers, in 5 or 6.

Before you crown Cleveland

2009-05-19T10:52:00.000-07:00

Let me tell you something. During the regular season, and so far in the playoffs, Cleveland has been a better team than Orlando. They've had a better record, a better efficiency differential, and any look at the stats currently available lead to only one reasonable conclusion -- that the Cavaliers are more likely to win the Eastern Conference than the Magic are. The Cavs are playing with a better starting hand.

Part of the reason I like to focus on matchups in playoff series is because I still believe they're important. But another reason is because there is actually a discussion to be had. I'm sorry, but claiming that the "better" (in terms of efficiency differential or won/loss record) team will win, and then if they don't, blaming it on luck? I'm not insisting it's wrong -- my day job as a statistician doesn't really allow me to go that far -- but I will say: that is boring.

So, let's talk about matchups. Among his many skills and talents, Lebron James has a remarkable ability to get into the low paint on offense, and finish once he's there. The stats at 82games bear it out, as does the Hotspot map:

Recall my own writings on offense and defense in the "low paint" from earlier posts. Lebron took nearly 40% of his shots from that area, and converted at a close to 70% rate. Cleveland's offense relies on that efficiency to generate points and create opportunities for the rest of the team. Any team hoping to slow them down needs a way to challenge him near the rim without collapsing and leaving wide open spot-up shooters. And it just so happens, the Magic have someone who can help with that.

Three games isn't enough to prove anything one way or the other, but what we've seen of Lebron vs. the Magic has been telling. The splits show that he has shot worse percentages (47% eFG%, vs. 53% for the season), but luckily I can dig even deeper. As it turns out, when Dwight Howard was on the court, Lebron took 63 shot attempts, but only 7 of those (11%) came in the low paint -- this is a far lower rate than what he was used to over the season (this speaks well not only for Dwight's help defense in the halfcourt, but the Magic's transition D also; it probably also has something to do with Lebron perhaps choosing to shoot 3's when he was hitting them). Lebron is actually a decently effective, if streaky, midrange shooter -- the thing is, at that range, he is human. You can beat a human in basketball. All told, Lebron hit 28 of his 63 shots when Dwight Howard was on the court, resulting in 61 points. 61 points on 63 shots comes out to an eFG% of 48%, which just isn't enough for Cleveland to win regularly. It's not just the points lost on his attempts (after all, if he shoots his season average, he scores 67 points on those shots -- 6 points over 3 games isn't a huge change), but the opportunites that don't open up for guys whose job it is to shoot wide open shots without having to put the ball on the floor.

Orlando struggled with Boston. Boston is a hell of a team, though, even though they were greatly diminished by injuries. Paul Pierce and Ray Allen can shoot mid-range shots off the dribble more efficiently than anyone on Cleveland's roster. These things matter.

The Lebron-Dwight matchup at the rim isn't the only story of this series. But I don't want to pretend it's completely unimportant. It will be important for Cleveland's offense for their bigs to move effectively without the ball and find open spots either at the basket or on the perimeter, while Dwight Howard is focused on helping on Lebron. If Ilgauskas (and Joe Smith) is hitting consistently from outside, or Varejao is finding open lanes to the rim, then the Cavs should be pretty efficient offensively. But those things are not guaranteed. The big takeaway for me: you give yourself a chance when Lebron produces like a human (still a star, but not an otherworldly one).

So let's give Orlando more of a chance than all of these people. Not because they're all wrong, but because I hope that the playoffs are about more than 7 flips of a weighted coin, weighted for the team with the better efficiency differential over the course of the season. There is something unsettling about the unanimity in favor of the Cavs. Like everyone is overlooking just how brilliant the Magic D is, or how dangerous the mismatches caused by Turkoglu and Lewis can be when the Magic are on offense. Forget all of the drivel about killer instincts and having a closer and this and that. The Magic have gotten this far against far tougher competition than Cleveland. Now is when they show us who they are, whether they have the instinct, whether they can get it done. We can't assume failure before they've even begun. Bollocks to conventional wisdom, Vitamin Water, ESPN, and even my beloved stats people. I'm picking the Magic in 6.

Nuggets-Mavericks Question of the day

2009-05-05T22:15:00.001-07:00

Why can't Gerald Green become J.R. Smith?

Quick Follow Up

2009-05-04T23:27:00.000-07:00

In the previous post (please read), I meant to write something about Rajon Rondo and walking the dog, in regards to the Magic-Celtics Game 1. As it turns out, though, Henry Abbot beat me to it, and wrote it much better than I would have:

Rafer Alston made, honestly, one of the most fascinating and exciting plays of the year with about 3:23 left in the game. After a Dwight Howard free throw, the Magic were up a dozen. Perhaps the game would soon be out of reach.
With a stopped clock, Rondo had the opportunity to save some precious seconds. The clock wouldn't start until he touched the ball. So he didn't, letting it bounce up the court.
This is sometimes called walking the dog.
Alston gave Rondo room ... to a point. But as Dwight Howard ran by, Alston hid behind him a bit and then ... POUNCED FOR THE KILL. Just launched his body fully horizontal, like a jaguar, diving cleanly between Rondo and that ball.
If Rondo walked the dog, and Alston was a dog assassin.
Just so ballsy and strategic. It was a risky play by Alston, and bizarre and creative. But justified, as it worked.
But then he was lying on the floor, more or less on the ball, while Mr. Big Active Hands Rajon Rondo began to work him over. Alston's teammates didn't know what was up, and didn't rush to make themselves targets for an Alston pass. Within a couple of seconds, Rondo not only had the ball back, but he then fired a strike to Brian Scalabrine, who was wide open for a game-changing 3.
The one thing that the Magic got out of it, however, was that they had at least made Rondo think twice about where he walks his dog. Right?
Wrong.
In the game's closing seconds, Rondo showed all of his indomitability, by making history for quite probably the longest dog walk ever in NBA play. He escorted the ball, untouched, three-quarters of the length of the court, before plucking it up at the 3-point line and firing. A hero for doing that. And a flawed one, for missing as badly as he did.

Real Talk

2009-05-04T22:42:00.001-07:00

(Title stolen from a friend of the site)

Real Talk

Yao Ming is a baller

I think Ron Artest is great, but come on -- Yao Ming needs some better PR. Fuck what you heard, he's the best center we have in the game right now. And he was healthy all season. And he's killing it in the playoffs.

Which reminds me: is this year the redemption of the foreign player? The regular season storyline was about the U.S. Olympic Team players playing out of their minds. But with the last couple of years, we've seen the storylines surrounding Dirk Nowitzki and Pau Gasol in the playoffs reflect a general attitude towards international players that has been a little concerning (see this, for instance). But now in the playoffs, between the way Yao Ming has been playing, and the way Dirk Nowitzki has been playing (also fantastic), it seems like maybe we might have a bit of a redemption year. Not to mention the play of Luis Scola, which has been superb.

And: Orlando has matchup advantages all over the floor against Boston. The fact that Boston came back tonight -- that's either a big concern, or a giant fluke. I'm not sure yet. During that fourth quarter run, Orlando seemed so caught up in trying to exploit mismatches that they started going into pure iso-play, which I don't see working against a defense like Boston's. Orlando won the game, though, so let's hope they learned their lesson. You heard it here first: Orlando WILL give Cleveland some trouble if they meet in the playoffs. Cleveland can win the series, but the way it's written about it's like it's a done deal. Don't sleep on the Magic.

Back to the Rockets: Did I mention Yao Ming led my "points saved in the low paint" stat? He's good, people. And he was healthy this year. That is important. We are lucky.

Thoughts while watching the playoffs in my hotel room in Charlotte

2009-04-30T20:06:00.000-07:00

- I support Josh Smith's mustard-filled dunk attempt, despite the unfortunate result. Anyone who's been watching the Hawks this year has seen how much his dunks mean to that crowd, and how much the crowd's support seems to feed the team. And: THEY WERE UP 20! Relax, TNT crew.

- That Denver team has been packed with talent for a while now. But these days, the difference is that the pieces make sense, together, despite the whole picture being rather fantastical. Chauncey Billups is a part of this, but there's more going on there. Nene and Kenyon Martin make more sense down low than Marcus Camby and Kenyon Martin. And Chris Andersen coming in off the bench (not to mention Balkman) is huge. And J.R. Smith is insane, but an absolute thrill. And Carmelo Anthony, despite his down scoring year, is still, I think, a completely different player this year and has been incredibly effective.

- The TV was all over two upcoming matchups in the Denver-Dallas series: Jason Kidd vs. Chauncey Billups, and Josh Howard vs. Carmelo Anthony. I agree that both of those (particularly the latter) will be great fun to watch. And Josh Howard has been great fun to watch lately. But my first two thoughts were: Kenyon Martin defending Dirk Nowitzki, and Jason Terry/J.R. Smith off the bench.

- MARCIN GORTAT!

- Oh my lord, the Bulls and Celtics. Jesus Jesus Ray Allen off the curl, over and over. And then Big Baby Davis hitting some big shots and huzzah John Salmons and great job Brad Miller. But I thought that Joakim Noah's steal/dunk was going to be the play of the game. When that happened, I jumped out of my hotel bed. Then, a couple minutes later, the Derrick Rose block on Rondo . . .. Just wow.

- Congratulations Rockets!! I still think the Lakers are a better team here, but the Rockets are a very very good team. I was shocked to see so many people picking Portland to win that series, even with homecourt. This should be a nice series. Matchup to watch? Obviously Battier/Artest on Kobe. But perhaps a bigger issue to watch for, is whether or not L.A. can take advantage of a height advantage when Yao Ming is out of the game. Without Dikembe Mutombo, Houston will be forced at times to defend Andrew Bynum or Pau Gasol with Luis Scola or Carl Landry. But those dudes can defend, even when at a disadvantage.

It's the journey

2009-04-24T22:55:00.000-07:00

Other people, besides myself, are doing a fantastic job covering the playoffs. I have had various minor ephiphanies: Boozer looking healthy in game 3, Sixers-Magic, Rose and Rondo, Josh Smith's Game 1, Chauncey Billups, Deron Williams, Portland's entire team denying Yao Ming and waiting for another Rocket to beat them, etc.. (Tony Allen death threats?)

Not to mention a memorable insight: "I always think it has to do with hangovers. Like, I really think like a huge percentage of teams having bad nights has to do with hangovers."

But the big thing for me has been how unexpected individual moments have been, yet how expected the results are. There aren't any series that, if you just look at the win-loss information, are in an unexpected spot right now (I'll admit I didn't think Philadelphia would win two games before Orlando, but based on how things have happened so far, I still think Orlando wins that series). But how it got to where it is? I'm still trying to process. Thoughts?

I love the playoffs!

Weekend Thoughts (Playoffs!)

2009-04-19T21:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the weird frequency around here. In and out of town, and a generally odd weekend.

Speaking of which, some comments on the playoffs so far, including some stuff I wanted to include in the previews before they got cut short:

- I was pretty convinced that Atlanta would win the Hawks-Heat series, and that it wouldn't be as close as people were predicting. But an almost-30 point blowout? That is not representative of what this series will look like (is it?). For one, as we've stated here before, the Hawks are a different team on the road from what they are at home, particularly defensively. One result that's not a mirage, though, is Josh Smith's playing well. I alluded to this earlier, but he looked better and better, more and more assertive, near the end of the season. Here's an example -- his propensity to end up with dunks or layups over time, since his return from injury in December (click to enlarge):

- The Lakers defend well -- the really do. But they defend strategically, also. While teams like Cleveland and Boston have visibly strong defenses, denying everything without question, the Lakers seem to encourage their opponents to send the ball into certain spots. Anyways, one way to be able to beat their defense is to be able to knock down three-pointers. Unfortunately for Utah, the Jazz are the second least three-point-shooting team in the league, shooting 3's on just 16% of their shots (only Oklahoma City shot fewer 3's during the regular season, at 14%). Without Okur, their offense is going to clog up really easily against L.A.. If Okur comes back, though, he'll help pull the Laker shotblockers out of the paint, and create some space down low for all of those cuts.

- Speaking of the Lakers -- one quiet concern for them is how Kobe Bryant is holding up at this point in the season. Numerous little tweaks and bumps, the trip to the Finals last year, the Summer Olympics, and a fantastic full regular season . . .. Is he wearing down at all? How can we tell? I looked at his dunk-to-layup ratio from month to month (the dunk-to-layup ratio was first published, as far as I know, in this wonderful book):

Other than a little bump immediately after the All-Star break (late February, early March), Kobe's dunk-to-layup ratio has been in decline all season. Is he wearing down? Or just saving himself for the post-season? I guess we'll find out soon (he looked fantastic in the first game against the Jazz).

- From the All-Star break through the end of the season, J.R. Smith shot 58% eFG%, continuing to score 18 points per game in just 29 minutes. He had some ridiculous games near the end of the year, but he's been hot for a while. His hot streaks still seem to envelop him, though -- like, he and the crowd all get so caught up in trying to figure out just what he can do, and it ends, invariably, in a three-point attempt from 5 feet behind the line with 18 seconds left on the shot clock. You take the good with the bad.

- Speaking of the Nuggets: they are much more talented than the Hornets, and probably should win their series with them. But I wonder if the series might come down to Chris Anderson and J.R. Smith -- New Orleans has so little depth, that that handful of minutes off the Nuggets' bench might be the difference.

- The only result that I really never saw coming was Philadelphia squeaking by Orlando in Game 1. That said, I still think Orlando has a good chance of making it all the way to the finals.

- Kelly Dwyer wrote, much more eloquently than I have, about the sort of rim-protection that I've been going on about here lately. However, according to the "points saved" number I came up with (looking at Totals, and not rate-statistics like per-minute or per-shot attempt), the top low-paint protectors were, in order: Yao Ming, Dwight Howard, Tim Duncan, Kurt Thomas, Kevin Garnett. While Yao Ming is an outstanding player, his numbers are probably inflated since he has so much perimeter help from Shane Battier and Ron Artest, so I'm cool with the vote for Dwight Howard for Defensive Player of the Year. However, doesn't Kurt Thomas seem out of place on that list? I dug into the numbers, and as it turns out Kurt Thomas has had quite a defensive year by a number of measures. And, though the sample sizes are small, the Spurs performed better on defense when they held the rest of the lineup constant and replaced Tim Duncan with Kurt Thomas.

- I am slowly becoming a huge Houston fan. They looked great against Portland in game 1. I fully expect them to make it to the second round, and a series between them and the Lakers would be far, far more interesting and competitive than, I think, most pundits would predict.

- Speaking of the Portland-Houston series, a couple of things to watch: (1) The battle of the boards. Portland was the best offensive rebounding team in the league during the regular season, and Houston was 4th in the league in defensive rebounding. Something has to give. In Game 1, Portland was able to do a good job grabbing their own misses, with Joel Pryzbilla and Greg Oden combining for 6 offensive rebounds in under 39 combined minutes. Houston won anyways, though, partly because they were able to hold Portland to an uncharacteristic 1-11 from the three-point line. That brings us to (2) Houston allowed the third fewest three-point attempts as a percentage of shot attempts of any defense during the regular season, while Portland often worked inside-out to get open 3's for Steve Blake, Rudy Fernandez, Nicolas Batum, and Travis Outlaw.

Playoff Preview, Round I (Part I)

2009-04-16T13:49:00.000-07:00

We at fruithoopz would like to wish Mr. Kevin Garnett a speedy recovery. He will be missed this postseason. And a get well soon to Mr. Danny Ainge, also.

Ok, Let's get to it! I should note that Ball Don't Lie is doing a great job previewing all of the matchups, so check over there for more.

I'll be travelling for the next couple of days for work, and back on Sunday, so there won't be much here during that time. But I'll try to have regular updates once I'm back on the playoff goings-on.

1 Cavs vs. 8 Pistons
Obviously, the Pistons have been a disappointment this season. That said, Joe Dumars again has them in a great position for the future, with both Allen Iverson and Rasheed Wallace coming off the books this summer, and a lot of young talent on the roster. And it's been a great run -- as PhDribble put it eloquently: "maybe only Atlanta Braves fans can truly understand how lucky we are to be Detroit Pistons fans."

But enough about the past and the future -- let's look at the right now. We know the Cavs are huge favorites, so the question is, what does Detroit have to do to have a chance here?

While the Pistons' defense has been nowhere near the level it's been in past years, they've continued to do a solid job of defending the 3-point line, trailing only San Antonio, Orlando, and Houston in the percentage of shots they allow from the 3-point line. They are mostly able to stay at home on shooters, when they play well. As you've probably noticed, a huge part of the Cavaliers' offense is shooting open 3's generated by the attention that Lebron James draws. So, if the Pistons can continue to take away the three-point line without allowing Lebron to go crazy, they might be able to slow down Cleveland's attack. On the other end, the Pistons live on mid-range shots, but Cleveland might be the best team in the league at defending that part of the court. So where can Detroit get its offense? I honestly have no idea. I re-ran those rim-protection numbers for this season, and added an additional layer -- I used the percentages and the shot totals to calculate the "points saved" by a defender either discouraging or altering shots in the low paint. Of the Cavs' interior defenders, Ben Wallace was by far the best, "saving" 43.5 points over the course of the season, or 2.2 points per 100 shot attempts. Wallace, though, is out with an injury. Unfortunately for the Pistons, I don't think they really have any inside scorers who can take advantage of this, unless Rasheed Wallace is able to perform consistently at a level that he hasn't really been able to reach during this year.

And let's end this with a note about Rasheed Wallace: this season for the Pistons has been disappointing for a number of reasons, but I feel like the Allen Iverson drama has detracted attention from how disappointing other Pistons' individual season have been, with Wallace chief among them. Rasheed Wallace has had one of the worst years of his career, and watching him play this year he just didn't seem to bring his A game more than once every several games. With him being 34 years old, I'm not necessarily willing to brush this off on attitude -- maybe he's just getting old? There has been the issue of a calf injury and other ongoing issues, so we shouldn't write him off completely. Still, it's something to keep an eye on, as he'll be a free agent this summer.

Matchup to watch: Tayshaun Prince guarding Lebron James.

2 Bulls vs 7 Celtics

Even without Kevin Garnett, it's hard to see how the Celtics can lose to this talented but flawed Bulls team. There are a couple of things to watch for, though. First off, the Celtics' biggest weakness, all season, has been their tendency to turn the ball over. The Bulls need to cause turnovers (which they haven't exactly done well during the season) to have a chance.

The other thing to watch for? Kevin Garnett was more vital to the Celtics' ability to protect the low paint ("saving" 3.9 points per 100 shots) than center Kendrick Perkins (just 2.4). The Bulls could, theoretically, try to exploit his absence by forcing the ball into the low paint. None of their bigs can create for themselves, though, and John Salmons -- one of their better slashers -- has been hobbled by a groin injury lately. So, all of a sudden, rookie Derrick Rose becomes the key. He's probably one of the quickest players in the league with the ball, and can usually get to where he wants to go. Kendrick Perkins is a good defender but the paint looks a lot more welcoming without KG there. The only obstacle to getting there regularly is Rajon Rondo, one of the better defenders in the league from the point guard position.

Which brings us to THE matchup of this series and the whole reason to watch: the Derrick Rose-Rajon Rondo matchup. These two are a treat to watch, and should be matching up for years to come.

3 Magic vs 6 76ers

This is a really tough matchup for the 76ers. The Magic stumbled a bit to end the season, but the Sixers looked even worse, and the Magic are just a better team all around. The Magic are an elite defense, and the Sixers are basically an average offense, and even worse when you force them to work in the halfcourt. Look how precipitously their effective field goal percentage drops after the first 10 seconds of a possession (from 82games):

Unfortunately for the Sixers, the Magic (besides Dwight Howard) aren't a particularly turnover prone bunch, so it's going to be difficult for them to get into transition. Their only real hope in the halfcourt is to rely on Andre Miller posting up the smaller Rafer Alston. Probably not important, but interesting: Philly is the worst 3-point shooting team in the league, and Orlando is the second best in the league in terms of opponent 3-point percentage (they defend the line well, which I guess won't really be necessary in this series). I still believe, however, that Donyell Marshall will play an important role in at least one or two of these games.

At the other end: Philly is an average defense who does one thing well (cause turnovers) and everything else pretty poorly. That does not bode well.

A fun matchup to watch might be the battle of the young backup bigs - Marcin Gortat for the Magic and Marreese Speights for the 76ers. Speights has had a really strong rookie campaign individually. And while Gortat isn't quite as prolific a shot-blocker as Dwight Howard, he does rate highly in terms of his overall ability to defend the low paint, rating in my numbers behind only Yao Ming, Kevin Garnett, and Kurt Thomas.

Unfortunately, I can't finish this preview today because of my travel schedule. But stay tuned! Feel free to leave any other notes in the comments, and remember to check out more detailed previews from the team blogs linked on the right, and from Ball Don't Lie.

Happy Playoffs!

We interrupt this silence . . .

2009-04-13T09:22:00.000-07:00

I'm still crunching numbers for a hopefully epic playoff preview, once the seeds are determined . . .. Don't forget, the playoffs start this weekend! In the meantime, though, I wanted to draw your attention to a couple of little observations from the weekend:

First of all, take a look at the boxscore below (click to enlarge). Try to guess whose game blew me away on Sunday, and all season. (Hint: it's Chris Paul).

Were that someone else, we might see the line as a reflection on Jason Kidd and the Dallas defense. Paul, however, has been doing this all season.

Also: Josh Smith's ankle is fully healthy. He has 52 dunks in his last 22 games (since the beginning of March), compared to just 51 dunks in the first 45 games of the season. In the last 10 games, he's shooting 53% eFG%, with 19 points, 8 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 blocks per game. Just in time for the playoffs. Hooray!

On Ginobili's Injury and Candace Parker's League

2009-04-07T14:18:00.000-07:00

First off, some unrelated links that I think are important reads:

Kevin Martin is a hell of a scorer.
A freedarko Instant Classic.
A more intuitive notion of pace. This actually makes a lot of sense, to me.
Seven reasons to fear the Orlando Magic

48 Minutes of Hell has been doing a fantastic job of providing some reflection and analysis on the Manu Ginobili injury, and ended up saying a lot of what I was thinking. These two posts in particular are excellent, one looking towards the long-term future, the other looking towards this year's postseason where the Spurs will be true underdogs for the first time in forever. Timothy Varner points out something that I think has been easily ignored or forgotten all season, but is absolutely true -- that the Spurs this year, a down year, are still one of the top five teams in the league:

Take this year: there hasn’t been a single stretch when the Spurs were firing on all cylinders, but I’d still pick them, sans Manu Ginobili, in a 7 game series against every team in the league, save the Cavs, Lakers, Celtics and Magic. That’s an incredible statement, I know. But it’s true. Let it sink in.

Expectation is crazy, huh?

As a basketball fan, the biggest takeaway from this unfortunate news is not the lessened competitiveness of the Western Conference playoffs, but missing out on seeing one of the more exciting players in the league. Even this year, in and out of the lineup, with his effectiveness coming and going from game to game, Manu Ginobili has been a fantastic watch. He accomplishes all of the things you want from a 2-guard, but the style with which he does them is completely unique -- the long strides and giant step-backs, the herky jerky direction changes in the paint and occasional run-ins with giant elbows, the oddly angled and even more oddly timed but perfectly placed passes to wide open teammates, to say nothing of the precise work off the ball and the unexpectedly effective team defense and charge-taking. Anyways, get well soon Manu! In addition, though, the new narrative for the Spurs' season is wide open. We know the Spurs won't give up, so it should be interesting to see how they do for the rest of the year.

And finally, Rethinking Basketball has a thorough and thoughtful discussion about the framing of women's sports, with the background of the recent ESPN The Magazine cover story on Candace Parker (as well as the editorially questionable decision in the first paragraph to focus on Parker's breast size, among other things). You should really take a look at the entire post at Rethinking Basketball, but I'll draw attention here to the things that stood out to me:

Q addresses and deconstructs the rather flimsy argument that is often directed against professional women's basketball -- that people want to see the "best" and most "spectacular" athletes and basketball players and will therefore always choose to follow the men. My gut reaction whenever I hear that is to point to the popularity of men's NCAA basketball, which is neither the best nor particularly spectacular in terms of athletic plays. Instead, as far as I can tell, the widespread appreciation of NCAA ball is based on arriving at the sport on its own terms, understanding that is an entirely different brand of basketball, not to be compared with the NBA. And that pretty much describes my feelings about the WNBA as well. Q goes deeper and looks at the historical validity of the claim that people follow the NBA because it is spectacular:

There was a time when the idea of professional basketball being marketable was laughable. There was a time when the idea of black professional basketball players was laughable. It's not like people watch sports purely because they are spectacular. By most accounts, the ABA definitely had the NBA beat in the "spectacular" category. In the end, it comes down to people buying into the narrative a sport presents.

It wasn't generic high leapers and quick movers who made the NBA what it is today, it was the Magic-Bird rivalry, the Michael Jordan myth-building, and so forth. The challenge for women's basketball in a sexist society, though:

It just so happens that the stories that work best are those that resonate with people's existing sensibilities...not ones that challenge their pre-existing ways of thinking about the world. That's quite a hurdle for women's basketball to overcome...

The underlying tension in anything written about Candace Parker is the fact that the WNBA has been placed on her shoulders, more or less. Will she, not only as a basketball player, but also as a pitchwoman, be able to sell the WNBA? And to whom? A big part of the question of the viability of professional women's basketball, I think, is the question of who the audience is. It seems sometimes that the WNBA has tried to market itself to existing consumers of the men's game, which, given the above discussion, isn't the only option.

Anyways, the discussion of at Rethinking Basketball is an important one. Q makes the important point that accepting female athletes involves expanding our defintion of womanhood:

The challenge then is not to sell women as athletes separate from their gender but to learn how to include "female athlete" within our entrenched understandings of femininity. That is going to take time and conscious effort on the part of those who write about and frame news about female athletes.

One starting point, of course, is to stop comparing female athletes to their male counterparts. But beyond that? How do women as athletes, as basketball players, become a part of popular culture?

I did, by the way, eventually get interested enough to read the ESPN piece itself. It's a good enough read, but it expresses doubt both about the ability to sell women athletes in team sports (I'm not totally clear about why it's easier to sell women athletes in individual sports, but the success of Serena Williams, Maria Sharapova, Danica Patrick, et al seems to indicate that that is the case) and about being able to make Parker an icon when she plays a sport that few people watch. My response to the latter point is: Lance Armstrong. How many Americans actually watch cycling? Yet we all know exactly who he is when he's pitching some random product on the television. I'm not saying I'm in favor of people not watching basketball, but it does seem like Parker could become an icon without a huge increase in the WNBA's following (I'm assuming that the rest of the WNBA would hope that she brings the WNBA with her).

On a completely unrelated note: did you see the Magic-Rockets game tonight? I think Marcin Gortat played Yao Ming better than Dwight Howard did.

Random Awards

2009-03-31T21:57:00.000-07:00

The regular season is coming to an end rather quickly. I'm preparing some pretty in-depth (boring?) playoff previews, and that's taking a lot of my analytical time. So in the meantime, I decided to just start handing out end of season awards. These are just my opinion and for the most part I won't be offering much to back them up, but thought it might be fun. If you disagree or think of another award that needs giving, go ahead and leave it in the comments.

MVP
1) Lebron James
2) Chris Paul
3) Dwyane Wade

Everyone will be arguing for the next couple of weeks about how to define MVP. For me, I'm not picking the best player, or the guy who if you took him off the team they would suffer the most. Instead, I'm just looking at who did the most. That's it. Lebron James did the most. If we take search trends to be a proxy for popularity, then it appears that fans have caught up to that fact, as Lebron James has really pulled away in the last week:

(Why aren't we making a bigger deal about Dwyane Wade?)

Rookie of the year
Winner: Brook Lopez
Runners-up: Kevin Love, Derrick Rose

It took me a long to come around on Lopez, but better late than never, right?

6th Man
Winner: Jason Terry
Runner-Up: Nate Robinson

Most Improved Player
Devin Harris seems to have this award wrapped up already, and deservedly so. I'm pretty sure Danny Granger will get a few votes, as well. So instead, I'm making up this award:

Player who should get more Most Improved Player Award votes than he actually will
Winner: Tony Parker

Parker has played out of his mind all season. His footwork and finishing ability in the paint is as strong as ever, his mid-range shooting has been acceptable, and he's taken on way more of the Spurs offense than ever before in his career, partly due to injuries. Despite taking on more of the offense, his shooting percentages remain quite high.

Reason you should pay for League Pass
Winner: Gerald Wallace
Runner up: Kevin Durant

Wallace is unique and quietly had a strong year in Charlotte. He's a total possession monster, what a hustle player would be if hustle players had superstar length and athleticism. And it's not just that he is constantly creating extra possessions for his team, but that he's restless and always coiled and ready to get out in transition. In football, announcer sometimes talk about "hidden yards" like special teams yardage and penalty yardage. Gerald Wallace is all about hidden points -- creating a fast break or two off of a defensive rebound, blocking a shot and keeping the ball in play for his team, stealing a routine entry pass, sneaking in behind the defense for an easy dunk . . ..

Guy we'll be talking about a lot more than we have this year
Winner: Anthony Randolph

What a treat to watch. Hopefully things will go well, he'll get more minutes next year, and he'll win the Gerald Wallace award.

Best basketball writers
Britt Robson ("On The Ball" column about the Timberwolves for Secrets of the City)
Kevin Arnovitz (ClipperBlog)
Ryan Parker (Basketball Geek)

Best second rounder (or best unexpected performance)
Winner: Luc Richard Mbah a Moute
Runner up: Mario Chalmers

7th man of the year
An award for bench guys whose minutes are more limited than those of 6th men, but who provide a lot.

Co-Winners: Chris Anderson, Carl Landry

Biggest storyline that didn't receive enough attention
1) Yao Ming's health
2) Lebron's 2010 shoe company free agency

Assuming he plays out the last 7 games of the season, Yao Ming will have played 78 games this year, which is 20 more games than he's played in any one of the last three seasons. This is after he appeared in the Olympics over the summer. People seem shocked at how well the Rockets have done despite the loss of Tracy McGrady this year, but Yao Ming playing almost every single game is a huge part of that -- I doubt anyone would have predicted he'd be healthy all year before the season began.

Meanwhile, with all the attention being paid to Lebron James' impending free agency in 2010, somehow the fact that his contract with Nike expires in the summer of 2010, also. His last contract was worth $90 million over 7 years. What will he make this time around? And how much will the 2010 deadline be on his mind this year and the next as he tries to win a championship before all these decisions get made?

Best off the ball offensive player
Kobe Bryant

There are lots of great shooters in the league who play great off the ball, and Ray Allen is probably near the top of that list. But Kobe's non-stop working and his ability to be a threat from so many different places on the floor makes it impossible to deny him the ball and really tough to force him into a bad spot. Since Andrew Bynum went down, he's been even more insistent than before on taking smaller defenders down into the post and it has paid off handsomely, as he's having one of his best years ever in terms of mid-range shooting percentage.

Best bounce pass
Deron Williams

Best high post offensive player
Dirk Nowitzki

Best pull-up jumper
I think this was Jameer Nelson before the injury. Now? I don't know. Deron Williams might be in the running.

Best hesitation dribble
Brandon Roy

Best step-back jumper
Even though he missed a lot of games, and wasn't his usual self for several more, Manu Ginobili still (to me) has the most dangerous step-back jumper, in terms of efficiency and range, in the league. Don't sleep, though, on Deron Williams at the top of the key, particularly in the fourth quarter.

Best/Most unexpected direction changes
I'll give this one to Dwyane Wade for this year, although the award itself should be named after Manu Ginobili.

Best example of the boxscore not telling the full story
According to the boxscores, Carmelo Anthony has been having a down year. But anyone who's been watching the games can tell you that he's actually having his best all-around year, having improved particularly on the defensive end. (Runner up: Lamar Odom, for the same reasons).

Protect Ya Rim

2009-03-29T23:21:00.000-07:00

Say you're watching a game, the Lakers and the Rockets. You see Kobe Bryant with the ball at the wing, with Shane Battier in front of him. Bryant makes a jab step, gets Battier off-balance, and then quickly begins a drive towards the baseline before Battier can recover. Bryant lowers his shoulder as he turns the corner and has his body in front of Battier's. It looks like he has his man beat, and is about to throw down a highlight dunk. And then, for no apparent reason, instead of attacking the rim, Bryant pulls up from about 12 feet out for a jumper, with Battier behind him.

What happened? Why didn't he dunk? You decide to rewind the tape and watch the play again. This time, though, instead of ball-watching, you pay attention to the battle of the bigs down low. You notice that as soon as Bryant has a step on Battier, Yao Ming slides over in the paint and places his body between Bryant and the basket. The television announcers often talk about the importance of having a center who can block shots, or even "alter" shots, but in this case Yao isn't altering a shot, he's discouraging the shot attempt.

Some of the most important moments in halfcourt defense are significant not because of what does happen (like a block) but because of what doesn't happen (a shot attempt from close to the basket). I was reminded of this recently when reading the stuff published over at basketballgeek. First, there was the study of the relationship between shot location, shooting percentages, and efficiency which, in addition to other things, showed that good defenses not only decrease their opponents' field goal percentage from inside, but also minimize their opponents' shot opportunities from inside. With that in mind, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at how centers around the league do in protecting the painted area.

The method I chose to go through this data is based on the way Football Outsiders looks at cornerbacks. Instead of just counting interceptions, as is traditionally done, they count the number of times a corner was targeted (ie, the number of times the quarterback threw to the receiver a corner was covering), and how successful those throws were when they happened -- accounting for incompletes and short completions as well as interceptions. That gives you an idea of how effective a corner is, filtering out corners who are taking a lot of risks to make big plays and rewarding those who are blanketing receivers so completely that they never even have a chance at an interception.

Assuming that the center is supposed to be the last line of defense at the rim, I've looked at the 2007-2008 regular season and counted the number of times opponents took shots at the rim while a center was on the court, how often those shots went in, and how often they were blocked. This all comes from the very useful play-by-play data made available at basketballgeek. The definition I'm using of "low paint" is the same as what Ryan used at that site, which is shots in the paint within 6 feet of the basket. Hence, some of these numbers will be slightly different from what 82games reports as "close" shots. Here's the spreadsheet:

You can also take this link to see the same spreadsheet:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pnj1rgBpEtJHTONHNBixWOA

You'll notice a couple of columns at the far right that might need a little extra explanation. Opponent quality matters -- it's a different proposition to stop Lebron James from scoring in the paint than it is to stop Tyronn Lue -- so I calculated how much above or below average each center held each of his opponents. For instance, individual opponents on average shot 6.8% below their season averages in the paint when Dikembe Mutumbo was in the game. Similarly, "% of Opponent shots in low paint compared to average" compares how many of an opponent's shots were taken in the low paint against each center versus that opponent's proportion of shots taken down there for the whole season.

(As a matter of curiousity, I calculated how each center in the league performed against Lebron James. For what it's worth, last year, Joel Pryzbilla had the most success against Lebron in the paint, holding him to 4-12 shooting. Shaquille O'Neal was at the other end of the spectrum, allowing Lebron to go off for 11-12. For reference, Lebron averaged 66% from the low paint on the season. Tim Duncan, Marcus Camby, and Jeff Foster had the most success at keeping Lebron out of the paint altogether, as the only centers holding him to taking less than 30% of his attempts in the paint).

Notice in the numbers that centers who defend the paint well don't always register a lot of blocked shots (see: Jason Collins), while some centers get a lot of blocks but seem to do a better job of blocking and altering shots than they do of "discouraging" them (see, for instance, DJ Mbenga or Samuel Dalembert).

These numbers aren't meant to be an end-all to measuring low-paint defense, but (I hope) they do tell a story, and I hope you'll find them useful. Keep in mind that the number of shots a center allows in the low paint will be related to the talent of his perimter defenders, coaching, and other factors. For a more complete story of how players affect opponent shot distribution and FG%, please see this post, which uses adjusted plus/minus methodology to measure these things. My goal here was to present some easily countable and understandable numbers that can be used in conjunction with other numbers to tell a complete story.

This Beautiful Game

2009-03-26T23:06:00.000-07:00

I don't know if he was trying to end the game early since it was the first of a back-to-back, or if he's getting himself into playoff mode, or if he was just in a mood, but Kobe Bryant was in complete, maniacal, murder mode for tonight's game against the Pistons. He played under the sort of tensed and flexed control -- with a dash of rage -- reminiscent of mugshots that you see on the evening news with voice-over neighbors saying "he always kept to himself, but he seemed nice enough." It was as though he had an aneurysm, like he was trying to conceal some intense pain but you could just see his head ready to explode all over The Palace at any moment.

Bryant always plays with intensity -- he's the surest ticket in the NBA, but this was the playoff version, there was a different mask, a different persona. This guy, who played this game, had focus to spare. No complaining to refs, no shortcuts, no settling for low-percentage shot attempts, no taking plays off on defense.

Bryant's controlled fury is apparent, though not fully captured, in his boxscore: 30 points (on 10-18 shooting from the field), 8 rebounds, 7 assists, and just 1 turnover. The efficient 30 points were the result of the whole bag of tricks -- the pull-up, the crossover, the drop-step, the fadeaway, the three-pointer, the baseline reverse, the irresistible shot fake, you name it. That doesn't do full justice to the work he did, though. You can study the boxscore for more hints: his lockdown, ball-denial defense reflected in Rodney Stuckey's line for the night: 5 points, 3 assists, 4 turnovers (this is a guy who was averaging 16 and 6 in the 10 games leading up to this one, and is the heir apparent to Chauncey Billups). Or you can see the way he single-handedly zoned off the weakside when he wasn't denying the guard to guard entry pass, the effort reflected in his two steals on the night. You can see how, as a team, the Lakers held the Pistons to 39.5% shooting, including just 2-13 from 3, resulting in just 87.5 points per 100 posessions (currently Boston has the best D in the league, and they allow 101.5).

If you don't trust all of that, then you should look at the game flow. With Kobe in the first quarter, the Lakers went on an 18-6 run en route to a 13 point lead. As he sat for the first three and a half minutes of the second, the Lakers gave up a 12-0 run. Then, with Kobe again in for the third, the Lakers went on a 20-0 run to effectively put the game away.

But there was more to it than all of that. Bryant was all over the floor, making deflections, tipping out rebounds, moving the ball, making the plays that MVP voters will never see, since they may read the boxscore and the game recap but probably won't watch the game broadcast. Through it all, Bryant's expression didn't change a single time. Not when he was working feverishly off the ball to establish post position against a smaller defender, not when he was limping after a hard hit that appeared to injure his knee, not when he was sitting on the bench watching the game.

There is a four second indication of how badly Kobe wants to win this game at the end of the third quarter. Kobe goes to the bench with 1:14 left in the third for his usual rest, expected to come back with around 8 minutes left in the fourth if needed. But when the Lakers get the ball with 4 seconds left, Kobe throws off his warmups and returns to the court, just to run the last play. It results in a missed three pointer, but his being on the floor at all spoke volumes.

This wasn't a game where Kobe took over offensively and took a lot of shots, or dominated the ball and racked up assists, or yelled and screamed and beat his chest. Still, the leadership element was apparent. If I was able to sense the tension and focus watching on television, surely his teammates picked up on the energy. Lamar Odom played his usual active defense and ended up with 3 steals and 12 rebounds, to go with 7 assists and a block. Luke Walton's statline doesn't show it, but he took a couple of pretty serious spills that might normally have seen him at least take a few moments to gather himself, if not be taken out of the game entirely. But tonight, he just bounced back up as though nothing had happened (who knows how he'll be walking tomorrow?). Even Sasha Vujacic, who had an otherwise forgettable game, abstained from pleading with the refs when his flops drew no attention. He just redoubled his efforts on defense and worked to pester the Piston backcourt.

So nevermind that the Pistons were playing without Allen Iverson, Rip Hamilton, or Rasheed Wallace, and that the Lakers were expected to win this game easily. Nevermind that Jordan Farmar and Derek Fisher were completely incapable of staying in front of 6 foot D-League alum Will Bynum (9-14 shooting, 25 points, 11 assists). And nevermind that the rest of the Lakers had a pretty subpar offensive game. Because if Kobe Bryant is playing the way he played tonight, they won't be beat.

Count on one hand

2009-03-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

If you have the chance, I would highly recommend watching tonight's Utah-Houston matchup. Unfortunately, Carl Landry is still recovering from a gunshot wound, so we won't be treated to the Paul Milsap - Carl Landry showdown, but both of these teams have been playing so well recently that this game should be a must-watch.

What to watch for: These teams know each other pretty well by now, so they should be pretty prepared for this game. Utah once again has one of the more efficient offenses in the league, and Houston, as usual, has one of the better defenses. The battle of the boards might be telling -- Utah is the fifth best offensive rebounding team in the league, grabbing close to 29% of their misses, while Houston is the fifth best defensive rebounding team in the league, only allowing their opponents to retrieve 25% of their own misses. So, something has to give (in 3 games so far this season, Houston has done an acceptable job of keeping Utah off the offensive glass). The battle should be particularly pronounced at the power forward spot, where Paul Milsap and Carlos Boozer of the Jazz are two of the better offensive rebounders around, while Luis Scola and Chuck Hayes of the Rockets are two of the better defensive rebounders around. At the other end of the court, the Rockets have been mostly average on offense while Utah has improved their defense this year and are top 10 in the league right now. However, Utah continues to be pretty foul-happy, which is a problem since the Rockets as a team are the fourth best free throw shooting team in the league, at 80.6%. The Jazz need to avoid giving up free points to the Rockets. Also, Ron Artest has really improved his offensive game over the last few games, playing within himself and making good decisions. If he continues to do that, and Kyle Lowry continues to give them some fast break opportunities off the bench, then Houston's offense should be fine.

Other: I've been noticing more and more how pronounced the internal narrative of each game I watch is. The story is easier to pick up in some games than it is in others, but I suspect that this Houston-Utah matchup should give us a pretty good storyline, without having to build anything into it from the outside.

Links
I linked to it elsewhere, but this piece about Lamar Odom is worth reading.

I agree with a lot of what Bill Simmons says in this ESPN the Magazine column, in fact he echoes a lot of what I've been saying here (he has a few details wrong -- for instance, what he calls "mega-assists" are already available at 82games.com and Queen City Hoops (as super-assists), and 82games also answers the Dwyane Wade question for us -- his effective field goal percentage is a full 1% higher if you exclue the 10% of shots he takes with 3 or fewer seconds left on the shot clock). I like this line: "You could be feeding us gourmet cheeseburgers, except you're more interested in cloning cows. Let's clear up the small picture before we get to the big one." He's definitely right to say that teams have access to a lot of game-charting information that would be great for us as fans to see, but that they keep a secret. What he's saying about wanting more contextual stats reflects, I think, what is so interesting about what this guy's been doing recently, but it's more than a rejection of boxscore-based value metrics like PER and Wins Produced -- it's philosophically a repudiation of things like adjusted plus-minus, which in its current form assumes that a player's effect on the court is fixed regardless of the context changing around him. His example of the Spurs needing Bruce Bowen more than they would have needed Carmelo Anthony makes sense even though it's problematic -- Bruce Bowen throughout the last several years has consistently performed better in +/- type stats than Carmelo Anthony. The argument Simmons is making, though, isn't that he's a better player, but that he's a better fit (although might have been even more powerful if he used Tayshaun Prince and Anthony, seeing as how the Pistons had the opportunity to draft Anthony and passed). The argument could conceivably be extended to other more extreme cases, and particularly cases where even the adjusted +/- tells us that player B is better but we know player A is a better fit -- although I'd warn that the most recent Olympics showed us that the superstars in the league are much more capable of expertly filling specific and limited roles on talented teams than most of us probably would have imagined.

And, speaking of 82games, there's a good interview of Roland Beech (the guy behind the site) up at Slam Online. Mr. Beech also gives a pretty persuasive argument in favor of more context and less all-encompassing player metrics. He and Simmons together in the same day seem to be good cheerleaders for tracking more basic information in boxscore-like formats as opposed to trying to guage an overall value: "Oddly while I have published a lot of regression based ‘adjusted +/-’ articles on 82games, I am not actually a fan of that approach. I think again, with more data on hand you can really understand a player’s strengths, weaknesses and traits very clearly without having to resort to mathematical techniques to try and extract info that you think is ‘missing.’" I also loved that he ended with this: "It’s ultimately entertainment. I take issue with the notion that teams should be all about a championship or they need to blow things up. It was sad to see the Suns dismantled prematurely to my mind when they were such a great team to watch, and had certainly some significant success with still the hope of finally breaking through."

And finally: The Lakers website has an article up about Luke Walton and Jordan Farmar that maybe sheds a little light on my previously hypothesized "BFF Theory."

College, Pro, and the Age Limit (And CHUBBY COX)

2009-03-20T14:22:00.000-07:00

Shoals had a nice column up at the Sporting News yesterday that I wanted to draw your attention to, asking "has the age minimum really created a bridge between the college and pro ranks? Or is the NCAA just wasting the time of eventual All-Stars?" The column isn't an opinion piece about the age limit. Instead, Shoals asserts, "college ball is quite simply a different form of basketball than the pros." It's a reasonable assertion, one I've made myself many times. The column uses that assertion to start a discussion specifically about NBA all-star type talents, so ignore for now the narrative of the NCAA star who becomes an effective role player in the NBA, for instance.

We are also leaving aside, here, the Carmelo Anthony-type stories of players who dominate the NCAA and go on to become stars in the NBA. Instead, we're looking at players who didn't stand out in college play, or seemed like role-players at the college level, but went on to become stars at the NBA level.

On the other hand, college ball has the uncanny ability to stifle future stars, or camouflage them altogether. We’re not talking about the all-too-familiar economy of sleepers and busts that makes the NBA draft an all-consuming passion for some (including even a few scouts). Looking at this year’s rookie class, I’m left wondering how O.J. Mayo -- once the Next LeBron, now the future of the Memphis Grizzlies -- could have been so prosaic at USC, to the point where his going third in the draft was considered a comeback of sorts.

Or why did the Thunder’s Russell Westbrook, one of the most dynamic and versatile young guards in the league, spend two years at UCLA known only as a defensive stopper and raw dunker? To paint an even more extreme picture, how is it that Dwyane Wade and Brandon Roy, both of whom served extended tours of duty at their alma maters, were merely very, very good at what’s supposedly an inferior level of play?

I don't really follow the NCAA enough to have a ton to add to the discussion, but wanted to point it out to you. I would submit, in terms of specific and material differences, that what separates most superstar perimeter scorers from just decent scorers in the NBA is the ability to create and convert pull-up midrange jump-shots (since most NBA defenses have a good shotblocker near the rim, unless your name is Lebron James you're not always going to have an opening to finish at the rim when you beat your man off the dribble). The NCAA, with its closer 3-point line, shrinks a lot of the floor and doesn't really have space for that midrange pull-up game to flourish. Just a thought.

The real March Madness: The race to crown the best ever NBA name
I had thought that Ruben Boumtje Boumtje had this award locked up forever, until today. I randomly stumbled across the career statistics of the great Chubby Cox. Cox was drafted in 1978 but never played a pro game until 4 and a half years later when he signed a couple of 10-day contracts with the Washington Bullets. And if you were looking for proof that the NBA is the greatest thing ever: It turns out that Chubby Cox is Kobe Bryant's uncle on his mom's side. So what do you think? Did Chubby Cox beat out Ruben Boumtje Boumtje? Or is there another candidate that I'm missing completely?

UPDATE: I guess I should do a little more research next time. After posting this, I did a quick Google and realized that basketbawful had already written about Chubby Cox and his awesome name and Kobe connection, 2 years ago. Credit where it's due.

A Pale View

2009-03-18T21:35:00.000-07:00

Jason Terry is probably the favorite at this point for the 6th man of the year award, and deservedly so -- he's having a great year, scoring an efficient 20 points per game off the bench. But why haven't we heard more about Nate Robinson's candidacy for the award? Robinson's averaging 18.2 points, 4.1 assists, 4.1 rebounds, and 1.4 steals per game, while shooting solid percentages from the field and the free throw line. I'm assuming we'll start hearing more and more about him as a possible 6th man award winner because of how he's performed recently -- since the all-star break, he's putting up 25.8 points, 5.2 assists, and 4.5 rebounds while shooting 47% from the field, 39% from the 3-point line, and 87% -- all off the bench (33.5 minutes per game). That's a remarkable run.

Meanwhile, it's starting to seem like it wouldn't be that much of a stretch to see Donyell Marshall have a huge impact on at least one or two playoff games this spring. He's only appeared in 16 games for the 76ers so far this year, and in very limited minutes, but he's shooting close to 54% from the 3-point line in those games, which is exactly what Philadelphia needs. So far, the team is 5.3 points per 100 possessions better on offense when Marshall is on the floor.

In the Western Conference: with Thabo Sefalosha playing, the Thunder have stretches when they look like a respectable defensive team, which is a big improvement from where they were without him. Not to mention, he's averaging 2.4 steals per game on a team that loves to get out and run. Step by step, this team is making its way towards being competitive. They've been right around .500 since their abysmal start, and they are definitely going to be worth following closely next year.

And finally: I don't watch NCAA ball and I've never filled out a tournament bracket (though if I did, it would be this very attractive one). So for no particular reason, here are my completely uninformed picks for which teams will make the elite eight: Pittsburgh, UCLA, Gonzaga, Syracuse, Louisville, West Virginia, Connecticut, and Memphis. Let's see how I do!

Looking ahead with the Hawks

2009-03-16T15:21:00.000-07:00

Unrelated asides: If you're into art or re-imagining office spaces, check out a side-project I'm involved with called mauve?. Speaking of side-projects, I'm also involved with this [not entirely safe for work] site.

I might be the Hawks' good luck charm this year -- it seems as though every time I watch them, even on tape-delay, they not only win but play fantastically. A lot of that has to do, I think, with my having watched more of their home games than their road games. Still, even with the postseason still a ways away, it's hard not to begin imagining this team (assuming a healthy return for Marvin Williams) advancing to the second round of the playoffs this spring.

Yesterday morning's game might not have been the perfect example -- they were playing at home to Portland at 10 a.m. West Coast time. But I'll use it anyways. Joe Johnson is the main story for the Atlanta offense, both in this game and throughout the season, but for now I'd like to focus on the defense. When they are at their best, the Hawks do a great job of switching and closing out on shooters and generally making things difficult for the opposing offense. Unfortunately, they're not always at their best -- below is a chart of Atlanta's defensive efficiency over the course of the season. The blue line is their defense from game to game, and the pink line represents their overall defensive performance during the prior 10 games -- a moving average (recall that for defense, lower numbers are better). Click the image to make it bigger.

As you can see, they crapped out a bit around late December and early January, but have recently been picking it up again (for context, a defensive rating of 108 would be about average this year). More striking is the home-road split: the Hawks allow just 104.8 points per 100 possessions at home (that would be sixth in the league, right behind San Antonio), but 110.5 points per 100 on the road (which would be 24th in the league, behind the Knicks). Fortunately for them, they're on track to end up with the fourth seed in the playoffs, which would give them homecourt for the first round, probably against either Miami or Philadelphia.

On Sunday, the Hawks held the Blazers, the best offensive rebounding team in the league, to just retrieving 28.6% of their offensive rebounding chances (Portland averages over 32%), and it was mostly due to the bigs' boxing out and allowing the guards to get a number of rebounds (Joe Johnson and Mike Bibby combined for 11 defensive rebounds).

When they're at their best, the Hawks continue to be one of the more fun teams to watch in the league, despite numerous flaws. And, despite all of those flaws, if the team plays the sort of defense that they've shown themselves to be capable of so far in March, they'll still be around for the second round of the playoffs, for the first time in a decade.

Neither here nor there
Since getting called up from the D-League, Pops Mensah-Bonsu has played in a handful of games (8 total). Somehow, he's averaging close to a point and a rebound every other minute -- that is, close to 7 and 7 in just 14 minutes.

Also: I was flipping around on the TV the other day and saw this odd sight:

And finally: the Warriors aren't exactly going anywhere and the whole franchise seems to be in disarray, but since coming back from resting his stiff ankle, Monta Ellis has looked like Monta Ellis again. That is a good thing.

The Clippers, in 7 seconds

2009-03-11T12:06:00.000-07:00

No game is won or lost in the last few seconds. I understand that. But last night, I saw one of the more frustrating late game decisions I can remember, and wanted to share. See, last night I got home from seeing the movie Gomorra (worth watching!), and turned on the tube to find the Clippers ahead of the Cavs with just a few minutes left to play. Thinking I'd see a possible upset or at least some Baron/Lebron heroics, I settled in.

The Cavs, obviously, were in the process of a comeback. Almost immediately after I tuned into the game the Cavs had tied it up. There were some big shots by Mo Williams and Boobie Gibson, as well as Al Thornton. But then, with 7 seconds left, the Clippers get the ball and are down by 2. I'll let Kevin Arnovitz of Clipperblog explain what happened next:

[4th, 0:06.6] This game ends for the Clippers the way it begins — with a Zach Randolph airball from 27 feet. What do the Clippers want, down two points with a hair over six seconds remaining? According to Mike Dunleavy, “We ran a side out-of-bounds play to try to get the ball into Baron.” That appears to be the intent: Baron starts along the baseline, with Randolph, Novak, and Thornton in a sort of line set across the stripe. Al, who’s farthest from the inbounder [Gordon], runs to the front side around Randolph/Varejao and Novak/Pavlovic. Meanwhile, Baron sprints up from down low, trying to shake loose of LeBron around the Randolph/Noak stack. Baron tries to split them, but the whole ordeal is clumsy — LeBron actually beats Baron around the screens, making any attempted inbounds pass to Baron impossible. Eric is stuck. He could go to Thornton on the near side wing, but Williams — who’s guarding him — has cut off that angle. Finally, Randolph steps toward the sideline to receive the ball from Gordon. When he does, Eric steps onto the court and asks for it back, only Randolph never looks at him. Never looks at anyone. With the court spread, there’s an nanosecond when you believe Zach might just want to take Varejao off the dribble, but that notion dissolves pretty quickly. Instead, Randolph takes a couple of dribbles, then elevates to launch the shot with exactly 5.0 seconds left. His teammates are perplexed. Al Thornton drops his arms, then after the whistle is blown, looks back as if to confirm he saw what he thinks he saw, then turns around in disgust. Baron looks angry and Eric bemused. 1.6 seconds remain. When Cleveland inbounds the ball, Mo Williams is fouled with 0.00.6, and sinks both FTs, which ices the game.

The Clippers are a caricature of themselves.

Around the League

2009-03-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

Some quick notes that I thought were important enough to pass along. Apologies for the bullety form, work is starting to settle down, and hopefully I'll be able to go home and do this at more reasonable hours starting soon.

- I don't want to comment on the game itself, but do want to address briefly the Trevor Ariza foul that led to Rudy Fernandez's injury. I think Matt Moore's point that the foul wasn't dirty so much as reckless was pretty accurate. I would point out, though, a couple of things. One, players probably need to be judicious in how they approach a situation where they're behind the play on a fastbreak and want to challenge the shot (from behind). However, I can see how Ariza might have thought he had a shot, he made a similar play in the first game of the season against Jerryd Bayless, and it resulted in a clean block. Further, Ariza, and others like Josh Smith or Andrei Kirilenko, use blocks from behind as an important part of their games, as a way of capitalizing on their length and athleticism. But there's a difference between blocking a player from behind in the halfcourt and coming across his body from behind when he's at full speed on a fast break. The problem wasn't, as the announcers tried to argue, that it was a 30-point game and Ariza should have just let him go -- that is stupid. The problem was that the probability of causing an injury there was much higher than the probability of defending the shot. Anyway, the main reason I'm bringing the episode up is that I happened to be watching a Portland feed of the game. Now, I've never met Rudy Fernandez myself, but as soon as the play went down, I was horrified and all of my thoughts were along the lines of "I hope he's ok" and "I hope that wasn't as bad as it looked." So why was Portland's color commentator, who I assume actually knows Rudy personally, obsessed only with how the referees would hand out techincal fouls for the resulting skirmish or whether Lamar Odom would be suspended for briefly leaving the bench, even as Fernandez was laying motionless on the ground? You can mention those things, of course, but can't you at least pretend to be concerned for the player who might have just been seriously injured and is being taken out on a stretcher? The color guy, whose name I can't recall right now, didn't say anything about Fernandez. That's disgusting.

- I am really glad to hear that Fernandez will be ok. After watching replays, I was relieved to see that a head, neck, or spine injury seemed very unlikely. I sort of thought that it might be one or more broken ribs. As it turns out, it is "soft tissue damage." I have no idea what that means, but the reports make it sound not as serious as the other possibilites.

- I only caught the first half of the Rockets-Nuggets game last night, but wow, the Rockets' defense is fantastic. Right now in the standings, the Rockets are third in the West. That would match them up with the Hornets in the first round, and I don't think the Hornets make it out. Watching Ron Artest and then Shane Battier at times guard Carmelo Anthony was obviously big, but I was more taken by how Yao played both in team defense overall and specifically against Nene.

- Speaking of the Rockets, Bill Simmons had Houston GM Daryl Morey on as a guest on his podcast, and it is worth listening to if you get the chance. Some roundabout dithering on statistics: the podcast includes a few pretty clear digs at Dave Berri and the Wages of Wins, and I hear that Mark Cuban also referred to the WOW as dumb. As the volcano said to the riverbed, "I share your sediment." Although I have some theoretical disagreements with Berri et al's approach to basketball statistics, the real issue I have is with the style and tone that the blog has taken. This idea that repeatedly debunking "conventional wisdom" while being dismissive of any other work done in the field and treating the audience like it is stupid is . . . well, it makes analsysis in general look bad. And it serves as some sort of confirmation to those who are resistant to any quantificational analysis that there is nothing of value there. What I found interesting about the Morey-Simmons conversation was that Simmons is one of those resistant types, and he goes into what he thinks is important, discussing, basically, context. And that's interesting to me because I think that's what a lot of people who care actually are trying to uncover using numbers. As I've said here before, as a fan, I have no interest in using statistics to show "who's better" or "who's the best player in the league?" or whatever. I want to know things like "what would Philadelphia look like if they had a better outside spot-up shooter who didn't disrupt their defensive style?" or "would this team benefit more from a center who always comes out of the paint to defend the pick and roll (Kendrick Perkins?) or someone who sits back in the paint but is a great shot-blocker (Marcus Camby)?" I guess what I'm saying is that Simmons is right, there, but his point isn't a strike against statistical analysis, it's a strike against stupidity and oversimplification. (This is a subtle recommendation to read the recent work at basketball geek, for instance). Anyways, as fans we don't have a ton of access to data outside of what's in play-by-plays, like how a player shoots off the dribble as opposed to spotting up, how efficient he is going right or going left, or how well a player defends under different strategies of defending the pick and roll. But that's data that I'm pretty sure is available to a lot of teams.

- I didn't see yesterday's Heat-Bulls game, unfortunately. I know I just rambled about the uselessness of the boxscore and whatnot, but look what Dwyane Wade did: 48 points (shooting 15-21), 12 assists, six rebounds, four steals, and three blocks. Good lord. I realize that the NBA is a league of outliers. When we talk about 450 of, probably, the 1,000 best basketball players in the world, that's more than one or two standard deviations from the mean -- we're talking about really exceptional players, the top .0001% or something. So the fact that, even among this group, there are a handful of players who are just that much stronger, faster, smarter, than their peers, is remarkable. I'm looking at you, Lebron James, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade. Kind of the athletic successors to the younger Kevin Garnett and Orlando Tracy McGrady.

Again, apologies for the lack of structure. There are well-formed essays swimming around my head, I'll do my best ot get them up in time for when the NCAA takes over all the attention.

A special Birthday post

2009-03-07T19:27:00.000-08:00

This is a special post celebrating the birthday of a dear friend, who may or may not be reading this. In honor of this friend, some pictures of a sampling of the hottest players in the NBA. Let me know if I've missed anyone. In no particular order. (HAPPY BIRTHDAY, FRIEND!)

This list could go on and on, but I started to feel weird about it. And now, birthday songs!

Hey Fantasty Folks

2009-03-05T15:22:00.001-08:00

In case you hadn't noticed yet, this might be important at some point:

This season, per 36 minutes, Anthony Randolph is averaging 16.5 points, 11.9 rebounds, 2.8 blocks, and 1.2 steals.

True, he doesn't get consistent minutes, and he turns the ball over a lot, and he only shoots 45% from the field. But he's 19 years old. We can build on this.

March Boringness

2009-03-01T17:43:00.000-08:00

Apologies for the sporadicness of recent posting. My day job has been particularly demanding recently, and I haven't had much spare time. I've still been following the League, but watching games without taking notes doesn't often lead to many great insights. Anyways, there's a couple of things I wanted to discuss in this post. This is kind of a mind-cleaning for me, some thoughts that have been kicking around in my head. March seems like the time to get them out for some discussion, what with all this focus on the NCAA now.

First off: some stat-ish links:

- I've focused a bit in the past on metrics measuring how well teams get into the break off of defensive rebounds. So it was nice to see a real coach expounding the virtues of that. And advocating tracking the time from rebound to score (like I did!).

- For a while now Ryan at basketball geek has been doing really fantastic work examining what makes a good defensive lineup. He started out looking at each of the four factors' contributions to defensive efficiency, then began an investigation of shooting efficiency. First, he looked at which areas of the court have the most importance to overall efficiency (good defensive lineups guard the basket and the three-point line, as expected. Also of note -- the most efficient areas on the court to begin with (low-paint area and the corner 3's) are also the places where a defense can make the most difference by defending. It would be interesting to see to what extent a defense can affect the shot selection -- Eli at counthebasket had a pretty intelligent approach to this question about a year or so ago, with some results here, and if I were smarter I'd look into how they relate to Ryan's findings. In the latest installment, Ryan's applied the adjusted +/- methodology to look at the effect of individual players on low-paint shooting percentages, since low-paint FG% was such an important part of overall efficiency. While results were only statistically significant for some players, the idea and methods outlined here are really smart and thoughtful. Ryan points out in the first post that he's doing some defensive game-charting of games, and "I want to ensure I’m getting data that helps create a clearer picture of defense. To do this, I need to know what information would be most helpful to have." A reasonable extension, though: these results could inform how to create more informative box-scores that can tell us something about players' defense. Bruce Bowen, born too late!

- Kevin Pelton had two nice pieces about the correlation between team age and success in the NBA. Pelton himself notes that the correlation he finds could be caused by a bit of self-selection, mentioning that better teams always look for older players to fill out the rotation while rebuilding teams give more minutes to youngsters. There's also another factor at play, probably -- that lousy young players don't really last in the league, and so the only ones still playing at the later ages are the ones who were good to begin with. It seems like Portland, with so many good young players playing a lot of minutes, is an exception that doesn't really have a precedent (and the Lakers, who have so many very good players who are in their primes). In any case, the findings are interesting, and worth checking out. While I'm at it, Pelton also has an article up about the Spurs that's worth reading.

Other Notes

- For all the talk about Mo Williams in Cleveland, and the talk seemed to reach a high point during the "debate" about whether he should be on the all-star team, everyone who's been watching the games knows that Delonte West is probably an even bigger part of the story in Cleveland. He's a great fit for that team, and he's been playing out of his mind all season. So my question is: are the pundits watching? Why no Delonte mentions?

- Speaking of Cleveland, that Joe Smith acquisition should be big for them. As well as Hickson can play the minutes opened up by Ben Wallace's absence, Joe Smith will still do an infinitely better job playing whatever's left than anyone else would, and he'll also take some minutes from Hickson, Varejao, and Z. Good for everyone. I know Boston didn't want to take any chances, but I have to think they'd have been happier with Smith than with Mikki Moore . . .

- I like Kyle Lowry on the Rockets.

- Before the playoffs start, please make a date to watch a couple of Oklahoma City Thunder games. You won't regret it. Preferably wait until Durant and Green are healthy.

- The Bobcats have the 8th best defense in the league. Hats off to Larry Brown.

- My coach of the year choices so far this season. They are all rather obvious. In no particular order: Jerry Sloan, Mike Brown, Stan Van Gundy, Scott Skiles (ugh), Gregg Popovich.

More thoughts later . . ..

As of right now

2009-02-23T19:38:00.000-08:00

Just an observation, through 56 and 54 games respectively, these are this season's stats per 36 minutes for Ramon Sessions and Andre Miller:

Sessions: Age 22, 16.6 pts (on 12.5 shots), 6.6 assists, 4.2 rebounds, 2.5 turnovers

Miller: Age 32, 16.2 pts (on 12.6 shots), 6.3 assists, 4.4 rebounds, 2.4 turnovers

"Get buckets and puntang!"

2009-02-22T23:19:00.000-08:00

I'm assuming this is a Wiki falsehood that will be edited out sooner or later. (Click the image to enlarge).

If I'm wrong, and it's real, then huzzah. (The part about the failed between the legs dunk is real -- I was watching that game. The Lakers were not particularly interested in getting back on D on that particular play).

On some sidenotes: The Thunder are really exciting -- the difference between their run this year and the Trailblazers last year is that Portland had an established fanbase with beat writers and blog writers to draw attention to what they were doing. Hence, Brandon Roy was a (deserved) all-star last year, but Kevin Durant was not this year. How provincial are the Thunder? During their local broadcast of the game against the Warriors this weekend (must-watch TV, by the way), they had a fluff piece on the new mascot, Bison. One of the lines was "Bison even got national attention" and pointed out that he was on ESPN Sportscenter. You're in the NBA now! Come on people! Also, the Lakers are a really smart team.

"EURO" is the new "BLACK" All-Star Edition

2009-02-21T22:54:00.001-08:00

I'm super late to the party, but these two posts on Rudy Fernandez's dunk contest performance seem thematically relevant to my "'Euro' is the new 'Black'" hypothesis.

For what it's worth, I didn't think Fernandez had a chance, but was surprised at how fantastic his dunks were. Really, really, fantastic.

A semi-related topic: perhaps the term "Euro" has more or less aged out of usefulness at this point? Peripheral observers and xenophobes might still lean on it as a crutch, but there's enough non-American players in the league at this point that most NBA observers can probably connect each country represented in the league to a particular style of play. This isn't a brand new thought, freedarko was all over this long ago, but it seems worth pointing out in view of the facts that (a) Spanish style has emerged over the last several years (the Summer Olympics were like the official coming out party for those who don't follow the league as closely) as the most stylish of the Euro hoops styles, and (b) Rudy Fernandez turned his dunk contest invite into a celebration of all things Spain.

Regarding (b) -- Kenny Smith and Reggie Miller seemed confused at Rudy's involving Pau Gasol in his dunk, instead of taking the more traditional approach of using a temmate, but when coupled with the invocation of Fernando Martin in the first dunk, Rudy's moves seemed almost a pre-emptive counter to the (expected) xenophobia that his presence in the competition would provoke. He was throwing up signs -- they just happened to be for Spain.

Taco Break!

2009-02-21T21:23:00.000-08:00

Athletes, bodies, women's bodies

2009-02-20T23:21:00.000-08:00

This might be semi-coherent -- it's late and I'm intoxicated.

For obvious reasons, the bodies of famous athletes are public in ways that no one else's are. If Olympic coverage was any indication, we apparently care what Michael Phelps eats for breakfast. When our favorite football player strains his groin, we watch the news hour to hour hoping to see some signs of progress, becoming medical experts and talking about ligaments and tendons and muscles and rehab regimens. The recent Alex Rodriguez media-gasm was an unhappy reminder of how much we allegedly care about exactly what it is that athletes put into their bodies, also -- and given that the whole affair was instigated by the illegal release of supposedly private information, it was a reminder of how entitled we feel we are to complete information about athletes' bodies.

This is only notable because as a culture we've put bodies under the umbrella of privacy. We have rules like HIPAA and Doctor-Patient confidentiality, we have laws against peeping toms, we have these expectations of our rights. Seemingly, only athletes have forsaken these rights, since their bodies are so instrumental to what makes them public figures, I guess. When Darrell Arthur's draft position fell last year amid rumors of an "undisclosed" kidney ailment, it was his kidney that was the story, and not the problematic leak of his personal medical information.

All of this is some background in order to finally address some of the issues raised after the announcement of Candace Parker's pregnancy, which I linked to at the tumblr site a month ago (sidenote: the father of the child will be Parker's husband Shelden Williams, who just got traded to Minnesota and will hopefully help to shore up the frontline in Al Jefferson's absence). The official reaction from the Sparks and the WNBA has been positive, but I've recently run across some fan opinions lamenting Parker's decision, and that had me a little uncomfortable.

As noted above, as a sports fan, I should have been used to the public-ness of Parker's body, since she is an athlete. But there was something more to it. Even women in the United States who aren't athletes theoretically have some experience with having their bodies made public -- the ongoing Roe v. Wade "debate" has turned not only the female body, conceptually, but also the bodies of individual females into a canvas for public debates about morality and religion as well as a potential outlet for state power. For all the talk of the government not entering into one's home, women live with the threat of the government jumping right inside them.

I guess what I'm trying to get at, is that this sense that we have any right to debate Parker's decision to have a child seems to fit right in to a culture where we put A-Rod's drug habits up for public discussion. That's why the first analogy that popped into my head was that of Shaquille O'Neal, in 2002, choosing to delay a surgery, saying "I got hurt on company time, so I'll heal on company time." Fans felt betrayed by this decision that O'Neal was making about his own body, and it made perfect sense.

But that analogy doesn't capture the discomfort I feel in hearing about Parker's pregnancy. It's like being an athlete has only helped to amplify the fact that, as a woman, her body was fair game for public debate to begin with.

I realize I'm oversimplifying. I also realize that the only reasonable response as a fan, is to congratulate the mother-to-be and move on, ignoring the haters.

The thing is, at this point, we can not really discuss the WNBA as a whole without having a discussion about sexism. I'm not starting that discussion here, I'm just acknowledging the fact. So a better analogy might be to race in the NBA in the Iverson era (post-Jordan, pre-Lebron) -- a time in the NBA when we couldn't honestly talk about the league generally without at least acknowledging race in our nation of cowards. So instead of comparing the current story to the Shaq story, here is, I believe, a better analogy: imagine if, in the summer of 2002, right after his MVP year, Allen Iverson had converted to Islam. And further, that the next year Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, happened to occur during the regular season, and Iverson missed 5 games in order to participate in the pilgrimage.

I can already hear the sports-talk radio phones burning up with complaints and soliloquies. The comparisons to Sandy Koufax would have been impossible or shot down as irrelevant, because really the outrage would be not so much about practicing religious freedom (in the face of one's responsibilities to a secular whole), but about the fact that Iverson was touching all of America's most exposed nerves. Some fans might be legimately concerned about the 76ers fortunes without Iverson, but that next level of outrage is one about race, and not about basketball.

So back to Parker. Yes, she's an athlete, and yes, fans of the Sparks (including me!) might be watching when and how her temporary absence will affect the Sparks' upcoming season, not to mention the WNBA as a whole. She's also a woman, making a personal, private choice with her body in a country that continues to fear women controlling their own bodies. It makes me wish that sports fans could step back, this once, and just be better.

That we could have been better in understanding the Darnellia Russell situation, also.

And this is all not to mention, of course, that she (and Williams) is a decent human being who is excited to start a family.

Not that they're reading this, but Candace and Shelden: congratulations.

Life after All-Star

2009-02-18T16:27:00.000-08:00

Hope everyone is well and had a nice All-Star weekend. As it turns out, a lot happened while I was gone. The main stories, as far as I can tell: (1) The Heat traded Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks to the Raptors for Jermaine O'neal and Jamario Moon, (2) The Suns fired Terry Porter, (3) The Hornets traded Tyson Chandler to the Thunder for Chris Wilcox, Joe Smith, and the rights to Devon Hardin, (4) Tracy McGrady is getting microfracture surgery and is out for the season (at least), (5) the New York Times Magazine published a basketball statistics story on Shane Battier. Also in the air is more and more talk about the economy and how it will affect various NBA teams over the next year or two. I don't have access to each team's financial statements so I can't reliably comment on who is desparately trying to cut payroll or which teams are most likely to relocate (it seems almost a given at this point that one current NBA city won't be on the NBA map next year), but I recommend this article on the possibility of the salary cap and the luxury tax level decreasing next year.

Heat-Raptors trade

This seems pretty straightforward, and it has been rumored for a while so it didn't come as a surprise. The Raptors save a bunch of money, and in the short term they potentially get the sort of athletic swingman they've wanted in Shawn Marion as well as make room for Andrea Bargnani, who has begun to live up to expectations recently, while the Heat fill a big hole at center. I say potentially because Kevin Pelton demonstrated that Marion is much better as a power forward, where the Raptors are already set with Chris Bosh, but in any case, Marion's contract comes off the books this summer. At that point, the Raptors will have a head start on rebuilding the team around Bosh before he becomes a free agent in 2010.

Terry Porter

Farewell. What a rough year for coaches. Also -- the Suns are a mess. I realize I'm saying this about a team with three all-stars and is 6 games over .500. Still, they are a mess, and it's not a mess that started when Kerr arrived as GM. Years of thinning out the roster through free agency (Joe Johnson) and sold draft picks were upsetting, but following them with a complete financial reversal of course with the Shaq trade just revealed the franchise to be one with lots of talent but no organizational direction. Kerr's hiring Porter and emphasizing defense seemed like a joke given the personnel, and that's exactly what it's been, as Phoenix is worse defensively than they ever were under D'antoni. And I haven't even mentioned the Jason Richardson trade. This is by no means all Kerr's fault, but it really seems like the various levels of this organization (ownership, GM, coach, players) need to get on the same page about what they're trying to accomplish. I wish Alvin Gentry good luck going forward, but nothing about this team feels good right now.

Tyson Chandler

This is so huge for the Thunder. They have in place now the groundwork for a phenomenal team, with lots of young talent already on the roster and plenty of draft picks coming up in the next couple of years. This is really a team on the rise. And in terms of having a direction -- Phoenix should maybe learn something from this team. From New Orleans' point of view, this is pure cost-cutting, which is disappointing since they are supposed to be title contenders this year. But, as I mentioned earlier, we don't know how dire the financial situation is for various teams this year, and it's easy to imagine that the Hornets are in a particularly bad situation given the state of New Orleans. Get well soon, New Orleans.

As I'm writing this, there's a story out that the trade is being held up because Chandler didn't pass the physical. More on this later . . ..

T-Mac

How depressing. Hopefully this procedure will help relieve some of his ongoing pain issues, but really this feels a bit like the official beginning of the end of his career. I really hope I'm wrong about that. It's too soon to have a eulogy, I guess, but I would like to remind you that not too long ago, earlier this decade, McGrady was easily the best perimeter player in the league, inspiring one of the better pieces ever published at ESPN. Here's hoping to a full recovery, and not a career story that includes the words "just like Penny Hardaway." As for the Rockets for this year: I have no idea what this means.

Stats story in the NY Times Magazine

There shouldn't be anything new in that article for readers here, but it's nice to see some of the concepts of plus/minus and efficiency getting some attention. Most of this stuff was written about over a year ago in the Houston Press, and the Houston Chronicle has been running Morey stories all year, but I guess the New York Times magazine will be more widely seen, and it is well-written, so check it out. One worry is that with Morey's propaganda machine (I'm assuming) creating so many of these stories about the Rockets and Battier, that (a) advanced basketball statistics will become so closely tied to the Rockets that the perceived value of them will depend entirely on the Rockets' success, and (b) Shane Battier takes the trek from underrated to overrated while similar players on other teams continue to be ignored.

And Finally: STARBURY!

This is random, but some dude ran into Stephon Marbury on the street and asked if he would co-star in some short skits. Marbury agreed. Here is the first of the resulting videos, via slamonline:

All Star Break!

2009-02-11T21:10:00.000-08:00

Some site news: I'll be travelling until next Wednesday, so there probably won't be any posting around here. If you are still planning to enter the contest, please do so by then -- I'll be picking the winner next week when I get back. You can post your short story in the comments section of the contest post, or in any other accessible location (Google Docs, a separate blog) with a link in the comments section of the contest post.

This is pretty silly.

All-Star Thoughts: I am pretty intrigued by the H-O-R-S-E contest, and I kind of enjoy that it's called G-E-I-C-O. There have been some complaints about the contestants (O.J. Mayo, Kevin Durant, and Joe Johnson), since they're not established superstars, but I like the fact that they all are great shooters who are also creative scorers who happen to have unlimited range on their jumpshots. These seem like the basic skills for HORSE success, don't they? I'd add that, strategically, it seems like the key to winning this contest will be the ability to make other people's trick shots. I guess that's another way of saying "Defense wins HORSE championships!" Also, I am thrilled at the last-minute addition of J.R. Smith to the dunk competition. He's my pick to win it all, in an upset over Dwight Howard.

The Lionel Hollins Era in Memphis: Just some brief thoughts on the Grizzlies under Hollins. He's been the coach officially now for 9 games. It's a small sample, but there have been some noticeable changes. The most glaring difference in the new Grizzlies is their effort to get out in transition. They are by no means, even now, a "run and gun" type of team, but they have shown more of a committment to run off of missed shots and turnovers, and it has resulted in a few extra easy buckets per game, which is nice for this team that struggles sometimes to score in the halfcourt. Of particular value to this strategy is Mike Conley, who seems to be back in the Grizzlies good graces, starting and playing 35 plus minutes. One of his underrated skills is an ability to defensive rebound -- he's currently got the fourth-highest defensive rebound rate in the league among point guards, behind only Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, and Rajon Rondo. We've explored before how valuable a rebounding point guard is to the transition game, so, as Conley becomes more and more comfortable directing the team and pushing the ball, his defensive rebounding ability should become more and more valuable to the team. O.J. Mayo, while still not a great rebounder, has been a little more active in that department lately, as well -- running to the glass after shots whenever he's not closing out and releasing. He still doesn't always box out his own man, so he gives up some offensive rebounds at times -- I'm sure he'll fix this though.

Random Musing: I understand the disappointment with Amar'e Stoudemire's lack of improvement on the defensive end, but given how far his reputation has fallen, doesn't it seem like a good time to acquire him? Deep down, he must at least be as good as he was last year, even if his numbers are down a bit. Why not take a chance, when the price is lowest?

Anyways, have a great Friday the 13th, Valentine's Day, and All-Star weekend.

Who's hot now

2009-02-09T15:21:00.000-08:00

You're reading this, so you were aware when, during various stretches early in the season, the Grizzlies, Bucks, and Timberwolves had mini-bursts of strong play. In each case, also, in addition to the usual contributors (Mayo, Gay, Bogut, Redd, Al Jefferson), we saw less heralded names step up to fill in the gap between losing by 5 points and winning by 3. For Memphis, Hakim Warrick started getting more minutes and Darko Milicic really started contributing at the defensive end. In Milwaukee, Luc Richard Mbah A Moute surprised as a rookie. And in Minnesota, Randy Foye took well to a full-time position as the shooting guard while Kevin Love inserted himself into the Rookie of the Year conversation with strong rebounding work and improving offensive skills.

As a sidenote: I second all of these sentiments about Al Jefferson and how disappointing it is that he's out for the season. Get well soon, Big Al.

So, 5/8 of the way into the season, who's hot now?

I'll spare you any Lakers-content here -- they are on top of the world right now but you can read about them in 500 different places. In a similar vein, I'll leave off praising the ever-brilliant Spurs since their victory on Sunday has reminded the national media that they are in fact still good (this is me patting myself on the back for predicting they would win the Southwest Division before the season started).

I'm still waiting for the Pacers to heat up as expected, but between unforgivable defense and recent injuries/re-injuries to Danny Granger and Mike Dunleavy, Jr., I'm starting to wonder if that will happen at all. And I should have written more about the Bobcats before Gerald Wallace went down. They are still playing their best basketball all year, but without Wallace they don't have the talent to win any games. Still, they're worth paying attention to for the rest of the season.

So, beyond the obvious, what teams are worth commending for their recent strong play? I'm going with the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Philadelphia 76ers. The Thunder are 5-5 in their last 10, but more impressively, they're 10-9 in their last 19. The obvious story is the steady improvement in Kevin Durant's numbers, as he really seems to have figured out where to find his scoring. In 2009 (a total of 18 games to date) he's averaging 29.1 points, 8.1 rebounds, and 3.7 assists, along with 1.1 steals and 3.3 turnovers. And the scoring is efficient -- he's shooting a scorching 54.9% eFG% and, because he's getting to the line 8.1 times per game, his true shooting percentage is a remarkable 61.9%. It's impossible to overstate just how great those numbers are -- he's grown in my mind from a poor man's Carmelo Anthony at the beginning of the year to a more efficient Carmelo Anthony with more upside.

Beyond Durant, though, there are huge reasons for optimism as the other two members of the young star core of the Thunder, Russel Westbrook and Jeff Green, have also been playing great. They both have been playing great all-around games, but if we say that Durant's superpower is scoring, then likewise we could say that Westbrook's superpower is rebounding and defending from the guard position, and Green's superpower is shooting the 3 (41% on the season, and he's playing against power forwards).

As for the 76ers, they've won three in a row without Elton Brand (out for the season) and look a lot like they did in the second half of last year, forcing lots of turnovers and getting out and running. I mentioned before the season that they still lacked a consistent outside shooter, and expressed some doubt about whether they'd be able to make up for that with running once Brand was aboard. But I had no idea that they would look so dramatically stuck with Brand, and I still feel like they'll figure out a way to get the pieces to fit when Brand comes back next year. But for now, it's worth enjoying their frantic style and all those points in the paint. Samuel Dalembert has come alive during the winning streak, gathering a total of 41 rebounds in relatively limited minutes over the three games. But mostly I'd like to draw attention to the outstanding defensive play of Andre Iguodala, who continues to be one of the better perimeter defenders in the league -- comparable to Tayshaun Prince or vintage Bruce Bowen but with better rebounding numbers. He doesn't seem to get that much credit for his D, though. I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he scores close to 20 points per game, or because the 76ers don't get much attention as a whole? One thing to keep an eye on: Like Thaddeus Young last year, Marreese Speights has emerged as an outstanding rookie big man for the Sixers, and with Brand down, it's possible he sees more minutes going forward.

Fruithoopz Contest!

2009-02-05T15:44:00.000-08:00

(Picture via Ball Don't Lie)

This is the sort of image that usually ends up noted on our other location, but it feels like this picture needs some fictional elaboration. So, I'm announcing a fruithoopz contest! Please contribute a fictional story that explains how Baron Davis and Jon Lovitz ended up here together with the as-yet unnamed ladyfriends. I'm not asking for witty one-liners, put-downs, or jokes -- there are various other locations on the web for those contests. I want a well-told story that explains where they are and why they're there, who the unnamed people are, (perhaps) who is taking the picture, what happened afterwards, etc.

Pre-emptive: I realize that the "real" story is probably just that Jon Lovitz and Baron Davis happened to be at the same party, and someone asked if they could take a picture with them, and voila. That is why I asked for a fictional story.

The Dream is Over

2009-02-05T15:42:00.000-08:00

Over

Get well soon!

On the Super Bowl and the NBA's Obama Era

2009-01-30T11:10:00.000-08:00

I hope you don't mind some semi-football related talk here on the eve of the Super Bowl.

In retrospect, given what we know about the national political scene, maybe we should have seen the downfall of the Patriots coming. Looking back, the New England Patriots were the team of the Bush Administration. The parallels go a little deeper than the simultaneous reigns -- Bush came to power dubiously, on a techincality, bypassing the conventional electoral process and getting chosen to govern by the Supreme Court despite evidence that the voters had not in fact elected him; meanwhile, the Patriots rise to championship level was aided by the questionable application of a little-known rule known as the tuck rule, which gave the Patriots the ball even though it was clear to those watching that they shouldn't have had possession. Once in power, the Bush Administration became known for an obsessive, paranoid insistence on secrecy and control, while Bill Belichick's team similarly was known for tight-lipped press conferences and injury report antics. The two regimes then turned to a series of abuses to consolidate their power, with the Bush regime resorting to warrantless wiretapping and spying on the civilian population and the Belichick regime resorting to surreptitiously videotaping opponents' hand signals.

The Patriots, as much as any sports team, were representative of the general mood and specific abuses of America immediately after September 11, 2001, so it's no surprise that their first Super Bowl victory was so closely tied to the mourning and outpouring of patriotism that was prevalent in those days.

With the tide turning as it is, I think it's time to close the book on the Patriots. Mr. Brady might be back and healthy, but that team was for another time, a time that's passed. As a nation, we turn our eyes to the NBA, which is experiencing the rise of the draft class of 2003 as well as other youngsters such as Chris Paul, Dwight Howard, Brandon Roy, and Kevin Durant. These newcomers are bringing with them a new era -- the Obama Era. These players evoke a sense of optimism among their fans, and the promise of some type of change in both the substance and form of the league -- finding actual success on the court along with an undeniable marketability for their own brands as well as the NBA. Some examples (first, an AI commercial from the old era, and then a Lebron commercial from the new era):

There is, I think, a lot to be said about the similarities and differences in these two commercials.

And that brings me to this and this. I highly recommend both reads, and to me they are related. "The new NBA is at peace . . .." I have a lot more thoughts about those two links, I just can't seem to put everything together right now -- just do take the time to read them.

Why am I so disappointed about Michael Redd's knee injury?

2009-01-26T11:46:00.000-08:00

I have never been particularly enamored of Michael Redd's game. On the one hand, he's a multi-faceted scorer who's capable of efficiently putting 25 or so points on the board, but on the other he's never been as pure of a shooter as he gets credit for and he doesn't appear to offer a whole lot -- aside from the efficient scoring -- to validate the attention he gets as a star player. Also, I wasn't too into all the Jesus stuff.

That's not meant to be an expression of hate. I wish him success, and I enjoy watching him play. But he'd never make one of my "favorite players to watch" type of lists.

So why do I find myself so heartbroken at his season-ending knee injury? Well, aside from the fact that it's always tough to see anyone have their season cut short by injury, it's that I saw (and still continue to see) this year's Bucks team as a promising "make-the-playoffs-interesting" team in the East, able to break up the monotonous inevitability of the Celtics/Cavs/Magic ascent in the postseason. Given the right breaks, they might have shocked one of those teams in the playoffs, or at least put up a good fight before bowing out. And I'm nothing if not a sucker for the unexpected storyline. Seeing predictable results in the postseason just encourages the sort of caste-style reporting we see on mainstream sites. A fan new to the NBA, trying to learn about the league by reading ESPN, would not be in a position to even know that there are teams in Sacramento, Oklahoma City, Indiana, Memphis, Minnesota, or Milwaukee, despite the fact that there are numerous incredibly intriguing stories to tell about each of those teams at this moment. The Bucks "coming out of nowhere" to impress on a national stage in the spring? That would have been a great way to introduce these talented and hard-working players to the rest of the country.

And I'm still optimistic that it can happen. When Andrew Bogut is healthy, Milwaukee sports one of the best defenses in the league. And while Redd made a huge difference at the offensive end, one possible "bright side" to the injury could be more minutes for Ramon Sessions, who's been playing well enough that he should be known to more of an audience than fantasy players and potential-fetishists. Given coach Scott Skiles's preference for the more consistent and predictable, if lower-ceilinged, Luke Ridnour, Sessions had lately been squeezed into third guard minutes, averaging 16 and a half minutes per game since the beginning of December. However, we saw early in the season when Redd was out with a different injury that Skiles was willing to play a Ridnour-Sessions backcourt, a backcourt that had some success, and I expect we'll see more of that -- recall that Sessions averaged over 33 minutes per game through November.

The team also has the inspiring story aspect: Sessions was drafted at the very end of the 2nd round and is a D-League callup who didn't get the fanfare reserved for lottery picks, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute was a 2nd round draft pick and overshadowed before the draft by his college teammate Kevin Love, and Charlie Bell went undrafted and had to prove himself in Europe before signing on with the Bucks. Seeing these three contribute significantly to a successful team -- isn't that exactly the sort of hard work and pulling on bootsraps Horatio Alger story that every journalist is dying to write?

The Bucks' season just got a lot harder without Redd, but there is still a foundation for success there, and they are still a playoff-caliber team. And that's the thing. I was wrong, really wrong, about everything to do with this team before the season started. I was wrong in thinking that Scott Skiles wouldn't have much of a positive effect on the defensive end. I was wrong about Andrew Bogut -- he's a far better player than I gave him credit for before this year. I was wrong in thinking this team wouldn't be that much fun to watch this year. And it's reassuring to be wrong like that, to be reminded that it's worth following the league because you just really never know. This team deserves national attention, and they're not likely to make it onto many TNT, ESPN, or NBA TV games this year, so the only way they'll be seen is if and when they make a strong post-season showing. That won't be easy without Redd, but hopefully they can build off the success they had early in the season when Redd was out. They deserve gushing stories by writers better than myself.

The Youth Movement

2009-01-25T00:12:00.000-08:00

I was at a cafe staring out a window on Saturday morning and decided to flip through the sports page, and saw on the third page a couple of paragraphs on Friday's Thunder-Clippers matchup. The game involved huge performances from Eric Gordon, Kevin Durant, and Al Thornton. That seemed like enough of a reason to call up that game on League Pass and give it a watch, so I did, with a notebook. I took notes on Kevin Durant and Eric Gordon only (I feel like Thornton's game is more or less known at this point). Here are some of my observations. Before I begin, I would just like to point out that Nenad Krstic is able to touch his tongue to his nose:

Anyways, Eric Gordon scored 41 points on a remarkable 12-19 shooting, along with 4 assists. He played both with the ball (mostly in pick and roll situations) and off the ball, as he and Ricky Davis (!!) shared primary ballhandling duties when the Clips' 5th (?) string point guard, Mardy Collins, went down with a strained calf. I've written before about Gordon's relentlessness when he drives to the basket, and his ability to absorb contact there, and he did a lot of that in this game too, taking 14 free throws for the game. He also had a particularly pretty drive in transition in the first quarter, using a hesitation crossover dribble to get past Kyle Weaver to the basket and finish with a layup. But in addition to his outstanding work with the ball (and the superb decision-making that went into that), his work off the ball was really strong -- especially in the third quarter. Throughout that quarter, Gordon worked off baseline screens and curled up to the wings for 2 point jump shots, 3-pointers, and drives to the basket. As with his ability to score in the paint, Gordon used his body really well to create space for his jumper, and showed off an ability to quickly catch-and-shoot that should serve as a nice complement to his ability to score off the dribble. Gordon looks even less like a rookie than O.J. Mayo does.

In all, Gordon had an extremely efficient second half in terms of scoring -- he shot 8-12 for 25 points in the half.

As a sidenote: Ricky Davis played a solid game while filling in as point guard. He's only 29 years old, which is pretty grown up in basketball-years but is still young in real-life years. Looking at his career thus far, it's easy to point at unfulfilled potential as a result of a lack of maturity. Recently, though, he's been looking a lot more mature as a basketball player. Considering how old 29 really is (or isn't) in real life, it shouldn't really be surprising to see him growing, and yet, because sports is so skewed, it does seem surprising. I don't want to delve too far into this at the moment, but consider every 20-something you know. Doesn't it seem impressive how early in their lives most NBA players are able to figure things out -- enough so that Ricky Davis, who took until his late-20's, seems like an anomaly?

Kevin Durant scored in a variety of ways, but the running theme of his performance was a refusal to settle. He missed his first couple of jumpers, and after that seemed determined to get to the rim, or at least to his most efficient shooting locations, for the rest of the night. I've seen him in other games settle for wherever the defense is pushing him out to, unable or unwilling to establish position, and he's a good enough shooter to make that work, since he really can hit from anywhere on the court. But in this game, he was constantly attacking and not settling, and he was rewarded with 26 free throw attempts (he made 24).

The most awe-inspiring moments Durant had were in transition. He is so much faster with the ball than anyone should reasonably expect, and on this night he used that ability often, particularly in the early going. He fought for rebounds at the defensive end more than usual, and ended up with 13 defensive rebounds (15 total). A number of these rebounds turned into fast-break points as Durant flew 94 feet down the court without any Clipper able to get in front of him before he got to the rim. In the first quarter alone, Durant got 4 defensive rebounds and every single one of them resulted in a one-man fast-break, producing 8 easy points on 2-2 from the field and 4-4 from the free throw line, all of the points coming in 6 seconds or less after the rebound. It would be nice to see Durant get a lot of rebounds consistently, to help him get out in transition.

Watching these two players provided a sort of interesting contrast, too. Eric Gordon seems to work extremely hard for every shot he gets, while, at least from my vantage point, there is an ease to Durant's scoring. This isn't a judgment one way or the other, just an observation. I enjoyed watching Gordon get those shots -- he worked hard but the hard work always paid off in extremely high percentage looks.

Welcome Back, Monta

2009-01-24T11:07:00.000-08:00

I was fortunate enough to catch yesterday's Warriors-Cavaliers game, the return of Monta Ellis. The game itself was entertaining, but for this post I want to consider the case of Monta Ellis. Monta looked a lot better than I thought he would given the long layoff -- he isn't yet able to hit those 15-18 foot jumpers from the elbows that he shot so efficiently last year (I'm sure it will take a few games before that shot comes back to him), but he was still very creative and effective around the rim and in transition. It is definitely a promising beginning.

In the offseason, before the unfotunate moped nonsense, I wrote about Monta's expected increase in usage rate, and what that might mean for him and the team. At that time, I chose to ignore the effect of a proposed move to the point guard position, but it's probably time to return to that topic.

Since Jamal Crawford was out with an injured hamstring for last night's game, it is hard to draw too many conclusions about what the lineup will look like when everyone is healthy, but it was interesting to see Monta play the entire game at the point guard position. As we've seen in the case of Randy Foye, who has continued to succeed at the 2-guard spot since the Minnesota coaching change, not every guard with a handle is equipped to make the move to the 1. In my offseason post I mentioned that Monta has not had much success as a point guard so far in his career (I was looking at pre-06-07 numbers), but I took another look at the numbers from last year, and noticed that he actually played solidly in the very few minutes he had at point guard. His effective field goal percentage wasn't affected, and he was able to get to the free throw line more, while turning the ball over a little bit more (his assists were up slightly).

So on to last night's game. Monta played the point for 34 minutes, and the Warriors as a team posted a somewhat respectable 108.2 points per hundred possessions against the second best defense in the league. That offense was partly the doing of the second unit, who outplayed Cleveland's bench, but Monta played exceptionally well. He finished the game with only one turnover, and as a team the Warriors only turned it over 13 times in a high possession game. Further, the offense seemed to run smoothly while Monta was in the game, with the Warriors getting into their sets quickly and Monta making decisive passes. Also, Monta's quickness and ability to track down long rebounds led to a fast-break or two for the Warriors. Looking long-term, Monta's ability to rebound -- which is so-so for a 2 but decent for a 1 -- might be a boon to the Warriors (Monta is a better rebounder, for instance, than either C.J. Watson or Jamal Crawford).

It was only one game. But I was impressed enough that I'd be interested to see more Monta at the point.

Details about the game:

Link to the popcornmachine gameflow

NBA Graph breakdown

Four factors:

Offensive efficiency: Warriors - 108.2, Cavs - 109.3

eFG%: Warriors - 47.5%, Cavs - 48.2%

FT/FG: Warriors - 36.3, Cavs - 28.2

OReb%: Warriors - 20%, Cavs - 26.1%

TOrate: Warriors - 13.4%, Cavs - 10.3%

Worldwide Farm

2009-01-20T15:28:00.000-08:00

Ambrose's post from earlier today has had me seriously thinking about where non-NBA development happens.

Think about Anthony Parker's story. He was good enough, skilled enough, big enough, athletic enough, to be drafted in the first round, but his early career was derailed a bit, as many careers are, by the wrong circumstances. He struggled with injuries and couldn't find a good fit, and was out of the league within two years. To his credit, he worked hard, eventually got a gig in Israel, and proved he could ball at the highest levels by winning back-to-back EuroLeague MVPs and EuroLeague Championships. With similar early struggles, Chauncey Billups bounced around the NBA for a number of years before blossoming into an NBA Champion, All-Star, and MVP-candidate in Detroit. These days, players faced with these sorts of issues early in their careers also have the option of competing in the D-League and proving themselves that way, while getting a chance to work on their games. Clearly, there are a number of (extremely tough, but still possible) routes available to players who either aren't drafted or are drafted but don't make a splash during their first go in the league.

But what I find interesting about Parker is the skillset he brings to the table. As Ambrose points out, he really is a complete perimeter player. He won't post-up like Joe Johnson or Kobe Bryant, but otherwise he has a strong mid-range game while also shooting a superb percentage from beyond the three-point line, he can catch-and-shoot as well as shoot extremely well off the dribble, he is incredibly smart and understands spacing and moves flawlessly off the ball, he makes good decisions with the ball and is a good passer, he has solid (but fading, somewhat, at the age of 33) athleticism as well as size and is an acceptable defender . . .. From the description, it really sounds like I'm discussing a star, because of the well-roundedness of his skillset. But Parker is not a high-usage type of guy, he only shoots when he's open (hence the high shooting percentages), and was never a 20 point per game type of scorer in the NBA (though he was definitely that kind of star in the EuroLeague). He's basically a solid fill-in-the-gaps type of guy, a guy you can count on to score 10-12 points without making any mistakes, but who won't get headlines or national attention. Every good NBA roster is filled with these sorts of players, we call them role players. But most role players are specialists. We have Steve Kerr-style shooters who are in the game to shoot a high percentage from three, and not much else; we have undersized defense-and-rebounding bigs who can hit the occasional mid-range shot but don't have a well-developed post game and aren't relied upon for points, like Josh Powell or Ronny Turiaf; and so on, and so forth.

While specialists are a dependable resource for a coach to look for off the bench, I'd venture that the way domestic player-development is handled also leads to the Fordist divisions we see. After all, if a player doesn't have instant success in the league, the domestic path will often look like: find the skill(s) you have to offer, and work with trainers to refine those particular skills until they are undeniably NBA-level, play in the summer league and possibly spend time in the D-League proving yourself, and hopefully get called up. And the D-League, while a wonderful development tool, is still seen as a stepping stone to the NBA, and so games will inevitably be somewhat shaded by individual agendas. I don't mean that in a negative way -- this is a solid enviornment in which to refine individual skills. But this sort of development puts a premium on specializing -- find what you have to offer at an NBA level, and focus on that.

But the EuroLeague, on the other hand, isn't really a means to an end. The EuroLeague is, like the NBA, a high-level competitive professional league. While I'm sure Parker continued to harbor dreams of the NBA during his time in Israel, he also developed the skills necessary to contribute to his team in a variety of ways, independently of any NBA dreams. It's possible that if he were toiling in the D-League during that time instead, he would have focused on just one or two specific skills and made his bones in the NBA as, say, a lethal spot-up shooter.

As it is, if I'm a GM, I'd spend some time thinking about what my team needs and look to these different avenues for these needs. If the team needs a great rebounder, or a knock-down shooter, chances are I can find that in the D-League. But if I need a contributor off the bench who will do a little bit of everything, without doing anything great? I'd have to consider the EuroLeagues, right? I can see Josh Childress developing the sort of all-around game that Parker boasts during his time in Greece. And I can already see a similar sort of ability to contribute from Rudy Fernandez, although Fernandez's ceiling is higher given his young age.

And who's the next potential Anthony Parker? Looking at DraftExpress's international free agent listings (and we should trust them -- they were all over Parker for two years before he came over to the NBA), the top international free agent is Ramunas Siskauskas. Like Parker was before he came to the NBA, Siskauskas is being called the most complete player outside the NBA, and he is "a phenomenal shooter, ball-handler, passer and defender, as well as one of the smartest guys you’ll find around." But in terms of American players who were unable to make a name for themselves in the league early in their careers, which is what this post is concerned with, we might want to pay attention to Marcus Haislip. Haislip, like Parker, was an NBA first round draft pick who didn't develop early on. And, like Parker, he has used his time in Europe to develop into an all-around player. While he still has some holes in his game that the linked profile covers, the sentence that caught my eye was: "his skill set is radically different than it was when he left Indianapolis for Istanbul."

And that's the bigger picture that I'm wondering about. My hypothesis is that a player like Haislip could very well have developed some NBA-worthy skills in the D-League, but we probably wouldn't see his skillset as "radically different" from what it was when he was drafted -- just more refined. Is it possible that the NBA has somewhat outsourced the very different tasks of developing "utility" role players and "specialist" role players to two completely different leagues (EuroLeague and D-League)? It seems that way to me, and I think it's great. In terms of role players, the league needs Amir Johnsons and Ben Wallaces and Steve Novaks as well as Charlie Bells and Jorge Garbajosas (well, not literally Garbajosa, but that type of all-around player). There's no reason to think these completely disparate strands of development can or should happen in the same leagues, so maybe what we're seeing, as far as American players (I am excluding non-American players for this discussion of development), is different schools for different types of players.

What's so funny about peace, love, and Anthony Parker?

2009-01-20T11:51:00.000-08:00

One can only make approximations to my level of surprise this weekend when I turned on the tubes to see Mr. Anthony Parker playing the point guard for the Toronto Raptors. I found this situation to be unusual because of how strong his play has been without the ball; consequently, it is odd to see him with the ball in his hands.

But after my beginning surprise, it appeared to me after another reflection that Parker is a precisely tested Basketball Player -- not "lead guard" or "off guard" -- unweighted by the restrictions of "position." Because of his incubation period in the Euroleague, he developed all the capacities necessary, to exploit everywhere the facets of the perimeter. None of the requisites -- shooting middle range or longer range, passing, cutting, defending, dribbling -- are foreign for him.

So I present to you the following question: what is a better role player? A specialist, or a Basketball Player like Parker?

Some Kudos for Mike D'Antoni

2009-01-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

"Mike D'antoni doesn't coach defense."

Some formulation of that statement has been repeated so frequently that it's become accepted as true. And why not? The Suns always played high scoring games, the Knicks do too, all in all his teams always give up tons of points. Steve Kerr also has hinted at believing the no-D meme, as has Amar'e Stoudemire, who claimed the Suns never practiced defense under D'Antoni (Stoudemire's play backed up that claim, which is why it was so easy to believe).

Not to mention this bit of backwards and faulty logic: Defense wins championships (actually, it turns out that to win a championship, you have to win four games in the finals. And to win a game, you need to score more points than the other team. You can use any combination of scoring points and denying your opponents points to accomplish the goal. As it turns out, you usually need both a good offense and a good defense). D'Antoni never won a championship. His teams must not have been playing defense!

Well. This isn't indisputable proof of anything in particular, but I would like to point out something that seems to get ignored:

Phoenix Suns Defensive Efficiency under D'Antoni (starting with his first year there): 105.5 (24th in the league), 107.1 (17th), 105.8 (16th), 106.4 (13th), 108.1 (16th).

Phoenix Suns Defensive Efficiency so far this year: 109.4 (24th in the league).

So D'Antoni, outside of his first year, had the Suns right around the middle of the pack every year in terms of defense (to go along with an elite offense year in and year out). And with him gone, replaced by supposedly a defensive coach, they are back to being near the worst in the league at that end.

Now, the Knicks under Larry Brown first, then Isiah Thomas: 111.0 (26th), 108.8 (25th), 111.9 (29th).

And guess what? This year, under Mike D'Antoni, they have a defensive efficiency rating of 108.6, good for 19th in the league.

[It's better for these year-to-year comparisons to look at the relative ranking rather than the absolute number, because the latter partly reflects changes in the offensive efficiency of the league as a whole]

Nineteenth in the league is not elite by any means, but it is a huge improvement over 29th, and personnel matters here -- this team can only do so much on defense with those players. The point, here, is that there just isn't any evidence to back the oft-made claim that D'Antoni is a poor defensive coach. In fact, from the evidence available we could, if we wanted, claim the opposite: that the same groups of players seem to perform better on defense under D'Antoni than they have under other coaches.

I bring this up now since the most recent webisode breakdown from seven seconds or mess (the weekly youtube videos from there are really good in general, check them out) takes a look at the Knicks' defensive strategy in a recent victory over the Hornets. The video notes the Knicks' decision to switch on every screen in that game, and how that worked. When you think about it, it's a smart, if risky, strategy. It addresses the weaknesses of the lineup on the floor (lack of size in the front court) and the strengths (the length and anticipation of Jared Jeffries and Wilson Chandler), and utilizes the strengths while minimizing the consequences of the weaknesses. What more do we really want from defense?

Watch out for these Pacers

2009-01-13T16:54:00.000-08:00

[ed note -- fruithoopz has hired a new contributing writer, Ambrose Beerback. In this, his first of what we hope will be many posts, Ambrose discusses the current incarnation of the Indiana Pacers, which he sees as an up-and-coming team in the East. Welcome to the team, Ambrose!]

Allow me to introduce the Indiana Pacers.

Considering from each and every angle, pondering from the various heights for various periods of time, I've come to the summary which I declare here: The 2008-2009 Indiana Pacers are the Utah Jazz for the Twitter generation. I propose a discussion of this team today as they willmake a ruckus come playoff time. Be prepared!

Coach Paulie Walnutz has the team in states of motion uninterrupted, always on the go. They shoot well, but they keep going, everywhere you turn, there they are, putbacks, tip-ins, backdoor cuts. Walnutz calls the team "Hannibal" because they cut you to death. But just when you thought you could zone them up, they pop you with fast breaks and the pick and the pop. They get those points by hook or by thief, one by one, two by two, three by three, they get those points, they flip them, then they stack them to the ceiling.

On Danny Granger
They the more intelligent men obviously explained, with elegance themselves: "Danny G ain't nuthin' to fuck with." It is true. Don't let the large ears fool you, they are for the preservation of balance in the course of pull-up jumpers and curls off of screens. He has hits from everywhere, 80's, 90's, and today. He gets buckets on top of the other buckets, with or without the bounce. Like Kool Keith would say, "he's an all-star."

T.J. Ford
Take the offense, and press the fast forward button. Zoom! He loves to be near the hoop, and it is difficult to keep him away from his love.

Troy Murphy
I suspect he possibly spends his recreational time listening to the Pogues and drinking stout. However, on the court, he can play the baseline like Charlie Mingus. Do not turn your head, or he will embarrass you with that tip-in. If not the baseline, he likes to hang around up top. Perhaps he will disappear in the transition, only to reappear behind the pack to attack from the downtown area!

Mike Dunleavy, Jr.
aka "Junior" aka "Lil' Dun" aka "Dunny" aka "Chris Mullin hate me"
He is the son of a coaching man, so you know he can shoot. And fill the open spaces. Perhaps the rumor noise that I just invented -- that Dunny practices with Mike Miller during his time of rest -- cannot be proven to contain any truth.

Roy Hibbert
He looks quite large, but Hibs can move it move it! In spite of the being of such a young man, he holds himself to the game of an old man at the park with the kneepads and the safety goggles, keeping the ball high, surprising team members with passes from the elbow. His capacities make him perfectly corresponded to this particular type of offense.

Jarret Jack
They are tears of joy, from splashing the three-pointer.

Rasho Nesterovic
Like the Hibs, he can find the cutters, but he also is more at ease shooting the pop after a pick. Do not let him roam free outside the key as he will demand compensation.

A little upset with the Blazers

2009-01-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

I've written bits and pieces here about the unique situation involving Darius Miles and the Portland Trailblazers, but here's a quick recap: Miles was under contract with the Portland Trailblazers, and contracts in the NBA are guaranteed, so despite the fact that Miles has not played with the Trailblazers for a while, he is still guaranteed $9 million this season and $9 million next season. All teams will insure themselves when they sign big contracts, so the fact that Miles has been out injured for 2 years hasn't necessarily hurt the Trailblazers financially, since the insurance company pays his salary. However, Miles's salary still counts against the salary cap, and therefore as long as his contract lasts, the Trailblazers have to consider his salary when determining how much they can offer to potential free agents. However, last season, the Trailblazers asked the NBA to provide an independent doctor to examine Miles and see if he could ever play again, and the doctor determined Miles to be medically unfit to play again. Miles still gets paid what he's owed from his contract by the team's insurance policy, but what changed after the medical exam was that the Blazers were able to take Miles' salary out of their salary cap calculations. That's because league rules allow for exceptions to the salary cap when a player has a career-ending injury. That cap space, and the ability it allows the team to go after free agents, is huge for an up-and-coming team like the Blazers. To make sure that teams don't take advantage of such rules, the league specifies that if a player, after having been deemed medically unfit to play, comes back and is able to play in at least 10 games, then his salary goes back on the team's books.

All well and good. And the Trailblazers are, rightfully, a feel-good story of the NBA, having completely rebuilt and turned around a team that was struggling through smart moves in the draft and smart trades. GM Kevin Pritchard deserves tons of credit for the amazing job he's done.

However, there's one little problem: it turns out that Miles may still be able to play. How do we know? Because he actually has played, in 2 games this season as well as 6 games in the preseason. And if Miles is healthy enough, and teams think he's good enough, to cut it in the league, then he has every right to pursue employment without regard for Portland's cap space and plans for future team-building. That stuff is not his responsibility.

So I'm a little annoyed at how many stories there are insinuating that teams might sign Miles and play him for a few minutes just to hurt the Blazers.

Lots of teams that are down and out have contracts they'd love to be rid of. I'm sure no one in Sacramento likes the fact that Kenny Thomas's contract is stopping the Kings from making all the moves they might otherwise, and similarly in New York with Jerome James's contract. The league is littered with busts, bad signings, and so forth, and the NBA happens to be structured in such a way that it puts teams on the hook for their own mistakes. So Portland thought they'd wiggled through a loophole with regards to Darius Miles, and so sped up the rebuilding process.

I don't feel sorry for them now that it might turn out that that loophole has closed. And I really find this whole business of threatening to sue distasteful. As one of a huge number of players who are working hard to try to make it in the league, Miles should be insulted that his efforts have been reduced to some paper-shuffling conspiracy plot. It's like finding out the person you've been dating has just been seeing you to get back at his/her ex, except way worse.

And it's not just the current lawsuit threats. In the offseason, as well as the start of this season, there were reports that Blazers officials were trying to spread the word that Miles is a horrible character. As a fan of the league, I find that petty and insulting.

And I don't hate the Blazers. Not at all. I'm as impressed as anyone with the moves they've made and how quickly they've returned to relevance. But in basketball, like everywhere, great powers are often built on questionable moral choices, choices which come back and force the power to re-examine itself. It sounds ironic, but Darius Miles has become the conscience of the Trailblazers. Please, Trailblazers, I want to keep liking your team, so please do the right thing here. And the right thing here, is to get out of the way and let the man pursue his career.

Last 10 Game All-Stars

2009-01-07T11:27:00.000-08:00

I thought it would be fun to take a look at some players who have been putting up unusually high numbers (compared to their own averages) in the last 10 games. 10 games isn't a whole lot, so this is just for kicks, and to shine some light on some accomplishments that may be flying under the radar nationally.

Brandon Roy
Roy's obviously been having a great season overall, but he had some particularly huge games before missing the last three games and counting with a hamstring injury. In the seven games before the injury, he was averaging 28.6 points per game on just 13.2 field goal attempts (for a scorching 89.5% TS%) to go with 6.1 assists and only 1.6 turnovers, really working that pull-up mid-range game. That's really brilliant. This span of course includes his 52 point explosion against the Suns a little while back.

Kobe Bryant
It seems like every winter, Kobe goes through at least two insanely hot streaks between the months of January and March. I think we're in the middle of the first right now -- through the last 10 games he's averaging 32.2 points per game on just 22 field goal attempts. That's a remarkable level of efficiency, and it's possible because he's shooting 51.4% from the three point line and 54.1% overall. That shakes out to an effective field goal percentage of 58.4% and a true shooting percentage of 63.4% -- that TS% over the entire year would be first among all guards, just ahead of Jose Calderon and Ray Allen.

Kobe's also posting his usual 5.3 rebounds, 4.2 assists, and 1.4 steals to go with his hyper-efficient scoring over the last 10.

While it's true he's on a bit of a hot streak, if you watch the games there's something else that's apparent about Kobe Bryant's game -- he never takes a shot he hasn't practiced hundreds or thousands of times before. Every movement is rehearsed. I point this out because he may not continue to hit on such a high percentage of his shots throughout the season, but this is not the same kind of "streak" that we might see with, say, Jamal Crawford, and when he cools off, he'll still be efficient. Check out his shot chart for this year:

Those jumpers from the right elbow are like layups for him, and it's no shock that he's taking close to a quarter of his two-point jumpers from there.

That's something that irked me in the first quarter of the Christmas day game against Boston. Kobe hit several jumpers in a row from the right elbow over Ray Allen, as the Celtics avoided double-teaming him at the start. Jeff Van Gundy commented that Allen was playing great defense, and Kobe was just hitting contested jumpers. That was sort of correct, but not exactly accurate given Kobe's strengths -- once Kobe got to that right elbow, it didn't really matter if Ray Allen was trying to contest or not, he had already basically given Kobe one of his most efficient shots. Western Conferenc players who are more used to defending Bryant (and are good enough defenders to do it) such as Bruce Bowen will know ahead of time where they don't want Kobe to go. Rather than just staying in front of him and then contesting when he goes up, they'll beat him to his spot and force him to shoot from a few feet further back or further to the right, or body him into directions he doesn't want to go in (if the refs aren't too whistle-happy). Obviously, Kobe can still hit from anywhere, but the difference between playing good defense and not against Kobe is the difference between allowing him to shoot (contested or not) from places where he can hit over 50%, and forcing him to shoot from spots just a few feet away where he'll hit closer to 40% or less. The difference isn't necessarily apparent when you look for the normal signs of good defense -- harassing and irritating and being up in a players face or making highlight blocks -- beating a man to the spot he's trying to get to is completely forgettable as a spectator, but vital for the defense. This isn't meant to be a criticism of Ray Allen's defense -- I'm sure if the teams meet in the playoffs and both sides are preparing specifically for each other, he'll be more purposeful in his strategy, but it's something to watch for, because with a shooter like Kobe who isn't really bothered by hands in his face, it's hard to see the difference sometimes between someone who's doing a good job defensively and someone who isn't.

Anyways, recently Kobe's been doing more than just hitting shots from his preferred locations, he's been hitting from everywhere. While last night's third quarter explosion (20 points on 8-9 shooting in the quarter) was awe-inspiring, it didn't just pop up out of nowhere -- he's been pretty hot for a few weeks now. When he's hot like that, I don't think there's any defensive option other than bringing the second defender and trapping to get the ball out of his hands, which is what the Hornets eventually did.

Also, yesterday Kobe did this:

Marcus Camby
Marcus Camby has been averaging 18.3 rebounds per game over the last 10. That is absurd, even by Camby's lofty standards. A lot of that production has come from necessity, as Chris Kaman's been out with injury and Zach Randolph went down recently as well. The Clipper guards aren't particularly good rebounders, so Camby's been picking up the slack, accounting for close to half of the team's rebounding totals in recent games.

Eric Gordon
Camby's teammate Gordon hasn't necessarily been on a shooting streak recently, but he's been playing increased minutes due to team injuries and making the most of them by scoring more and maintaining a high level of efficiency. In the last 10 games, Gordon's averaging 19.6 points per game on 59.7% True Shooting. While Gordon is a pretty good shooter from the outside, the way he's been able to maintain such a high level of scoring efficiency is by relentlessly attacking the basket and getting to the free throw line. He's a strong guard, but it's surprising how effectively he's able to utilize his strength around the basket so early in his career. Over the last 10 games, he's averaging 6.2 free throw attempts per game in just over 42 minutes, which comes out to about 5.3 per 36 minutes (for the entire season, he's at 4.2 per 36). As a comparison, Dwyane Wade, a similarly sized guard who's made a career out of getting to the charity stripe, averaged 5.3 free throw attempts per 36 for his entire rookie season (he was up to 10 by his third year). Gordon is a much better shooter than Wade was as a rookie, so it's impressive to see him not settling for jumpshots as a lot of rookies probably would.

Randy Foye
I wrote about his move to the shooting guard position in the previous post. Maybe it's paying off? He's been shooting 59.7% TS% (including 43% from the 3-point line) and scoring 18.2 points per game, to go with 4.8 rebounds, over the last 10. It would appear that the Timberwolves have a solid starting 2-guard. Congrats!

Have you noticed any other players going through particularly productive stretches recently? Leave anyone I might have missed in the comments.

Position Matters

2009-01-06T15:39:00.000-08:00

In his most recent column, Britt Robson goes into some detail describing the cascading positives resulting from the Timberwolves' moving Randy Foye permanently to his natural position at the off-guard. It's a persuasive and enlightening read, and I highly suggest checking it out. Robson details how the correctly constructed lineups can help create a more beneficial pace for the game as well as allow for appropriate spacing in the halfcourt, among other things. And he throws in this observation from Saturday's game against the Bulls:

Even with the Saturday night injury to Kevin Ollie, there should be no turning back on the commitment to keep playing Foye off the ball. After Ollie suffered a dislocated elbow and left a tie game just 3:37 into the first quarter versus the Bulls, Bassy Telfair manned the point for 38:47 of the remaining 44:23, and racked up a plus +22. By contrast, the Wolves were minus -12 in the two brief stints (comprising 5:36) that Bassy sat and Foye went back to the point.

That made me curious, so I went and checked out the "by position" splits at 82games, and found that this trend has held all season -- the Wolves are actually close to a .500 team when Foye is in at the 2, but are abysmal when he's playing the 1 (he's played at least 500 minutes at each spot, so the sample sizes aren't horribly small). Looking in detail at the lineup data, it's clear that the best-performing lineups that he's a part of involve him playing alongside either Kevin Ollie or Sebastian Telfair in the backcourt, while the worst pair him with Rashad McCants or Mike Miller (there are lineups with both him and Miller in together that perform well, but all of them have Miller playing the 3 with Ollie or Telfair in as point).

The differences here are drastic, and lead to the question (at least for me): what difference does it make? Why should the team look so different when a player is at the 2 rather than the 1? In an earlier post about Kevin Durant's move to the small forward position and the resulting improvement in both his and the team's performance (a result which has continued throughout the season so far), I mentioned the possibility of having an extra shooter on the floor providing more space in the mid-range areas where Durant is effective. However, in the case of moving a player from the point to the off-guard, that doesn't really seem to apply.

It's a question that's caused some consternation in the past -- that blog post from last May by Tom Ziller looks at perceptions about "pure points" vs. "combo guards," which, I think, is related to my question -- just looking at assists doesn't really tell us if someone is a better lead or off-guard, so what are the skills that we look for from a point guard (I'm talking here about the non Paul/Nash universe)?

Robson gives some thoughts:

There are subtle but crucial differences between being a freelance playmaker (which fits Foye's m.o.) and a point guard. To command the point guard slot, you need expansive, strategic court vision and an utterly reliable handle; otherwise, you aren't going to be able to effectively execute your half-court sets against opponents who have scouted the plays and worked up defensive wrinkles to stop them. The point guard's anticipatory vision and second-nature dribbling according to the split-second dictates of his brain and his instincts are key tools in his ability to counter the defensive gambits while keeping the set play reasonably in sync.

Robson focuses on the move to off-guard allowing Foye to score freely without the various restrictions of a lead guard.

Besides the mentioned skills, in general there are some more obvious considerations as well. For instance, if a player's most valuable (to a particular team) skill is scoring/attacking, it makes sense to get him the ball in the triple threat on the wing, where he is most dangerous, rather than already committed to a dribble at the top of the arc. Further, point guard coverage has gotten so wrapped up in the outliers like Chris Paul or Steve Nash who create almost the entirety of their team's offensive opportunities, that we've lost sight of the basic requirements. We say a point guard (since he's got the ball coming across the halfcourt line) often "initiates" the offense -- whether through a post-entry pass, a pass to the wing, penetration off of a screen, or whatever (in addition to his ballhandling, if you're ever wondering why Sasha Vujaucic never became a full-time point guard for the Lakers, watch him attempt to throw entry passes into the post -- every now and then he'll pick a lousy angle for the pass, usually resulting in a turnover). And the point needs to know what's going on -- if a shooter is curling off of a screen the ball needs to arrive at the destination at the same time as the shooter, so the pass has to leave the passer's hands well before that. These are little things, and they're obvious things, but I want to make sure they're not lost, and that we don't forget that these are skills, every bit as much as a polished post-up game, or an ability to shoot.

I'm harping on this a bit since, besides plus/minus numbers, there aren't great statistics to measure all of those skills that point gaurds bring to an offense. This is probably partly what motivates commentators to take the unneccesarily extreme position of measuring a point guard's abilities by looking at his team's won-loss record (similar to how some evaluate quarterbacks in football). Both of the extremes (judging solely on team performance, and judging solely on individual box-score statistics) cause problems unique to the evaluation of point guards in addition to the general problems they cause for evaluating any player. Robson's column illustrates the nuance and holism that really should always be involved in a discussion of a guard's natural position.

What to do on a Monday night in Milwaukee

2009-01-05T22:34:00.000-08:00

The scene: a pub in Milwaukee. Two old guys sitting at a bar.

Old guy 1: So, what're you doing tonight?

Old guy 2: Ah, I got some tickets to the Bucks-Raptors game, gonna see if there's any MILF trim to check out.

Old guy 1: Cool, let me know how it goes.

Later.

Old man 1: Oooooh yeah. That was fun. Definitely worth it!

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

2009-01-04T20:28:00.001-08:00

A day of upsets throughout the league. Some observations from the pieces of games I saw:

Raptors over Magic

This might be a stretch, but I kind of think Roko Ukic looks like John Francis Daley:

Anyways, going into the season I was a little worried about the Raptors point guard depth, and have found that worry mostly well-founded throughout the season, so I was pleasantly surprised to see Roko Ukic and Will Solomon play so well filling in for an injured Jose Calderon in this one. They combined to score 23 points on 9-14 shooting, with 11 assists and just 4 turnovers between them. Solomon played a really strong first half while Ukic came on strong late (including the game-clinching shot at the end) and it'll be interesting to see if that was a one-game fluke or if Ukic is starting to get comfortable. Also, Anthony Parker is really good at moving without the ball. In this game, it led to 26 points on 13-16 shooting.

Pistons beat the Clippers, but barely

The Pistons needed a game-winner from Allen Iverson to beat an injury-depleted Clippers team, and even after that they almost lost on a shot by Eric Gordon that just missed. Not to sound cliche, but the Clippers played hard throughout this game that they had no business being in (Rasheed Wallace was out, but the Pistons still had a huge talent advantage), and they deserve a ton of credit. It is remarkable that the Clippers were down to their fifth-string point guard throughout this game (Mardy Collins, who played 42 minutes), and yet only committed 10 turnovers. They did have some trouble creating offense at times, as Eric Gordon and Al Thornton were the only guys who could create a shot in the halfcourt (Collins did somehow end up with 12 assists, though).

Mostly, I'm mentioning this game because of how well Eric Gordon played, and has played lately, particularly with Baron Davis out. I haven't written nearly enough about him, but he's quite accomplished as a scorer. It seems like he should be a better rebounder than he is, but as a scorer he is aggressive, skilled, and poised. In this particular game, he's the main reason the Clippers were able to stay in the game in the fourth quarter. I would write more about his game, but there is a writeup far more eloquent than anything I can do up at ClipperBlog, and I'd say that's a must-read. Like, feel free to just ignore the rest of this post, as long as you read that.

Grizzlies crush the Mavericks

I flipped over from the Clippers-Pistons game just in time to see the Grizzlies pull away in the fourth quarter. I didn't see enough to gather much of the story, but I did notice a couple of things worth mentioning.

First of all, Hakim Warrick is having a great season, and had another nice game in this one.

Second of all, the Grizzlies held Erick Dampier without an offensive rebound in 24 minutes. There have only been four other games this season when Dampier played at least 10 minutes and didn't register an offensive rebound. Oddly, one of those four was also against Memphis. So props to Marc Gasol, for helping hold one of the better offensive rebounders in the league without an offensive rebound for almost 48 full minutes through two games.

Secondly, Memphis put Hamed Haddadi and Darius Miles into the game for the last two minutes. This was my first time watching Haddadi this year (it's only the second time he's played). He didn't do anything notable, but he didn't look like a stiff either. He was tentative and seemed lost, at one point forgetting to get his hands up in the air for a rebound, but that's to be expected at this point. As for Miles, his playing in this game is notable because if he appears in 10 games this season, his previous salary amount goes back to counting against Portland's salary cap, somewhat restricting their ability to sign free-agents this offseason. His 2 minutes were completely inconsequential to the Grizzlies on this afternoon, but might have profound effects for the Trailblazers for years to come.

Lakers over Trailblazers

This was the only Sunday game not resulting in an upset or near-upset, and it might have been much closer had Steve Blake and Rudy Fernandez not missed a bunch of wide-open shots in the first half that they almost always make. They combined to shoot 10-29, but many of those attempts were without a Laker anywhere nearby -- the Lakers were extremely fortunate to have a one-point lead at halftime. The Lakers then went on to really tighten up their defense in the second half (as well as clean up their turnover problems, with just 3 in the second half after 10 in the first). The Lakers' final defensive performance of 101.2 points per 100 possessions and an effective field goal percentage allowed of 44.5% was reflective both of the strong D they played in the second half and their good luck in the first half when the Blazers' guards missed easy shots.

Stu Lantz spent some time criticizing Lamarcus Aldridge's game in the third quarter, which was odd since Aldridge played a solid game and ended up with 22 and 11 on 11-19 shooting, with 4 assists, 2 steals, and a block and just 2 turnovers, and he was the only Blazer besides Nicolas Batum who could hit a shot (both Lantz and Myers also spent a lot of time complimenting Aldridge, so go I'm nitpicking a little).

I was interested in the rebounding battle in this game -- Portland came into it as the best offensive rebounding team in the league, while the Lakers' only real weakness on defense is their average defensive rebounding rate. I thought the Lakers actually did an acceptable job on the boards in this game until one Portland possession in the fourth quarter where Portland worked their way to 5 shot attempts before finally nailing a 3. If it weren't for that possession, the Lakers would have held Portland to a solide 24% offensive rebound percentage. As it was, they allowed Portland to grab 30.6% of their misses, which is below Portland's average but still too high an amount for the Lakers to be allowing.

It was also fun to watch the battles in the post between Greg Oden and Andrew Bynum. At this point in his career, Oden only has one move when he receives the ball in the post -- a jump hook spinning into the paint that he can hit with either hand. Since he doesn't have any moves going towards the baseline, he can be pretty predictable to defend. The first couple of times he caught the ball against Bynum, Bynum allowed him to spin to the middle to get off his shot (he made one of two). Bynum was really quick to adjust, though, and throughout the rest of the game whenever Oden caught the ball in the block (which wasn't often, since Bynum did a great job through much of the game of fronting Oden), Bynum leaned on his inside shoulder. Instead of using a drop step or spinning baseline, Oden continued to shoot his jump hook in the paint, but the shots were all awkward, off-balance, fading away, and contested (Bynum even blocked one of them). I can see a more polished Oden in the future adjusting to Bynum's adjustment and spinning baseline and getting some easy dunks (which he did do against Gasol at one point . . . why couldn't he do that against Bynum? Not sure).

Lamar Odom played excellent defense, as he has all year. He allows the team to be really agressive with their traps because of his quickness and precision in his rotations, and he once again led the team in net plus/minus. For the whole season, he leads the team in net plus/minus, and the Lakers sport an elite defense when he's in the game. The Odom/Bynum pairing in the frontcourt is particularly strong defensively.

Finally, a couple of Laker injuries were announced just before the game. Sasha Vujacic played despite tonsilitis, and I assume he'll continue to do so until he gets surgery. Luke Walton, though, was out due to a toe injury that is "commonly associated with long-distance running or dancing." Maybe he hurt himself dancing at home to Tupac Shakur? Anyways, it was a little surprising to see Trevor Ariza get the start instead of Vladimir Radmanovic. Since being pulled from the starting lineup, Radmanovic has barely seen any playing time at all, averaging fewer than 8 minutes per game in the 10 games leading up to this one. He did eventually get into the game, though, and while he was in he played excellently at both ends of the floor, looking like someone who is doing everything to prove that he belongs in the rotation.

Converting off of Defensive Rebounds, Part II

2009-01-03T01:37:00.000-08:00

So, a little while back I put up a post looking at the success of teams after defensive rebounds. In the comments to that post, reader Marshmallow Lips gave the helpful suggestion to present the data by position. So, below, I've split out the data for the 2007-2008 season by position, by team, and by individual player (separated out on various tabs based on position).

The positional classifications here come from the player data at dougstats, while the rest of the data was derived from play by play data that I downloaded from basketballvalue. I realize that positions aren't always fixed (for instance, in this data Monta Ellis is considered a point guard and Tim Duncan, despite his protestations, is a center), but hopefully in general the classifications will make sense.

For the individual player tabs, I've added a color-coded column that looks at whether or not the individual's defensive rebounds resulted in the team's creating offense more or less quickly than what that team's average is. Green means faster (ie, a negative difference between the player's average and the team's average), and red means slower.

As a reminder, I've included only defensive rebounds that immediately resulted in a shot attempt, a foul, or a turnover. I've removed those defensive rebounds that were followed by a timeout, jump ball, end of quarter, kicked ball or deflected out of bounds, and so forth. Also, the "success rate" metric does not count missed shots that resulted in offensive rebounds as "successes" -- the idea is to look at the success rate of the play immediately after the defensive rebound. Note also that the success rate is not a measure of points produced -- all drawn fouls are treated equally regardless of whether they resulted in made free throws, and made three pointers aren't given any extra credit.

For what it's worth, the individual player breakdown is separated out by team, so players who were traded midseason will have multiple entries. It might be interesting to compare the numbers for one player with different teams . . ..

The positional breakdown, I think, highlights some of the added value of a point guard who can rebound -- notice not only the higher success rate but the faster turnaround time (the "average time" column measures number of seconds from the rebound to the offensive play). Also note that, even here, Jason Kidd, Kobe Bryant, Lebron James, Dirk Nowitzki, and Tim Duncan show up as extremely valuable. Let me know in the comments if you see any other interesting results or areas for further research.

(On a mostly unrelated note -- I am writing this while watching the Nuggets play the Thunder, and keep wondering about how to quanitfy the value of the sorts of offensive rebounds that Russell Westbrook retrieves. Nene and Carmelo Anthony have been prolific in terms of rebounding their own misses because the move that results in their shot attempt puts them in rebounding position, but Westbrook comes out of nowhere to extend Thunder possessions that, without his presence, ought to have been over, rebounding misses by centers when most point guards would have been retreating to prevent a fast break at the other end. It's like he's committing the opposite of a turnover. Hmmn . . .).

Expanding the Empire

2009-01-01T21:51:00.001-08:00

Hey all, in addition to this blog, I'll be posting semi-regular tidbits here. Don't be a stranger!

Bucks 100, Spurs 98

2008-12-31T00:21:00.001-08:00

I had a few thoughts about this game I wanted to jot down. There's also a solid recap of the game up at brewhoop:

For those who have trouble seeing why numbers people will look at point differential instead of won-loss record to assess a team's quality, notice that in this game: (1) Charlie Bell hit a couple of impossibly difficult jumpshots in non-crunch time -- shots that would miss 8 times out of 10 and shots that, if they had missed, could have tilted the game in San Antoni's favor, and (2) Tim Duncan missed an easy layup that would have sent the game into overtime. How often will these events happen in the same game? Milwaukee played great and absolutely earned this victory on the road, but realistically it's a game that could have gone either way.

The Spurs played a lot of the game with Tim Duncan as the only big in the lineup (as they have throughout the entire season as they wait for a number of injured bigs to recover) , and all of the Bucks took advantage by cutting to the basket whenever Duncan was drawn out of the paint. Andrew Bogut was the biggest beneficiary, scoring on a number of dunks over Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili. Duncan was drawn out of the paint more and more in the second half because of Luke Ridnour, who heated up and scored 11 points in the third on 5-8 shooting. The Spurs responded by trapping Ridnour aggressively to end the third and throughout the fourth, and the Bucks made them pay with smart off-ball movement.

That isn't to say, necessarily, that the Spurs made the wrong choice by going to the smaller lineups (not that it is much of a choice, given the health situation). Combined, Tony Parker, Roger Mason Jr., Michael Finley, and Manu Ginobili shot 25-41, including 9-12 from the three point line. More often than not, if the Spurs get that kind of perimeter production, they'll win.

The Bucks outrebounded the Spurs 43-29. It helped that Michael Redd (averaging 3.3 rebounds per game for the year) grabbed 10 rebounds himself.

It doesn't show up in the numbers, as far as I can tell, but Luc Richard Mbah a Moute (who also happened to play a mostly solid offensive game) did a lot of really nice things defensively in the third quarter. He made the right rotations at the right times, and generally was always in the right place, and fought to get there. It's not surprising to see that for the season, he has the best defensive net plus/minus rating on the team. Considering that he's taking minutes that last year went to Yi Jianlian and Charlie Villanueva, it's understandable how much better the team is defensively this year.

I generally forget to mention when I think a local broadcast team does a good job, but I thought the Spurs broadcasters were very watchable and informative. There are a number of broadcast teams around the league who do excellent work, and I'll try to remember to give them some credit whenever possible (New Year's resolution!).

Example #408,344 that Tim Duncan is really good: check out this sequence from about halfway through the second quarter. Duncan, at that point, was a bit frustrated for a variety of reasons. Anyways:

- Duncan rebounds an Andrew Bogut miss and immediately turns around and leads a fast break, dribbling the length of the court and setting up Roger Mason for a wide open three point look in the right corner (Mason misses, but it's a brilliant set up from Duncan).

- After Mason's miss, Duncan gets back on defense, and sees Andrew Bogut about to pass to a cutter in the paint before Bogut actually makes the pass. Duncan hops back into the passing lane and intercepts the pass, and immediately looks up and throws a perfect outlet to Tony Parker, who is streaking down the court. Parker misses the resulting layup, but again a great setup from Duncan.

- As the rest of the players work to get back up the court after Parker's layup attempt, Richard Jefferson finds himself with the ball at the three point line with only Tim Duncan in front of him (no one else has even crossed the halfcourt line yet). Duncan obviously knows the scouting report on Jefferson, so he sinks back towards the hoop and holds his ground, drawing the inevitable charge from Jefferson as he comes crashing into the paint.

- On the Spurs' ensuing offensive possession, Tim Duncan makes a tough, leaning 8-footer in the paint over Andrew Bogut and draws the foul on Bogut in the process. Duncan completes the three-point play by hitting the free throw.

- After a Michael Redd made jumper, Duncan gets the ball on the left side about 15 feet out, and makes the bank shot over Bogut.

All told, in about one minute and 15 seconds of game time, Duncan leads a 5-2 mini-run for the Spurs, making every play on both ends of the court. In addition to scoring the 5 points during this time, he creates two turnovers on defense (one of which comes off of a fast-break situation), grabs a rebound that leads to a fast break because of his ball-handling ability, and draws two fouls. It's difficult to think of another player who could have done all of that in 75 seconds. Perhaps Kevin Garnett, maybe Rasheed Wallace? In any case, it's a brilliant little sequence in the midst of a very exciting game.

Possible New Year Turnaround Stories

2008-12-29T11:44:00.000-08:00

Happy holidays, all.

The calendar is flipping into a new year, but the NBA season is just starting to heat up a little. Given that less than half the season has been played so far, it's easy to draw mistaken conclusions about what's going on in the league. I, for one, have no idea what will happen for the rest of the season -- it looks as though the best teams in the league right now are the Cavaliers, Celtics, and Lakers, but I imagine that Houston, San Antonio, Utah, and Orlando will have something to say about that eventually. In any case, I thought it would be fun to take a look at both the numbers and what I've seen from teams and try to project some of the "surprises" that we might see in the 2009 part of the 2008-2009 season (both good and bad).

By The Numbers: Almost The Entire Central Division
There are a ton of stories here right now. The Cavaliers are definitely one of the top teams in the league no matter how you want to measure it, but after them the rest of the teams have records that don't really indicate all that's going on beneath the surface.

The Pacers are 10-20 right now, but have played much better than what their record would indicate. They've lost more than their share of close games, and have played, in terms of winning percentage, the toughest schedule in the league so far. They do have the tendency to play to the level of their competition, following up wins against playoff teams with losses against cellar dwellers, but I think they'll get this figured out. The schedule doesn't get any easier in January, but if they're within shouting distance of .500 by the time February rolls around, they'll have a nice soft schedule that they can use to make a big playoff push. I can see them having a similar story to last year's Philadelphia 76ers team who surged into the playoffs and had some success against Detroit before bowing out. I can also see them finishing ahead of the Miami Heat in the standings. What's impressive about Indiana's strong play so far is that they're doing it all without one of their better players, Mike Dunleavy Jr. The injury to Dunleavy has forced coach Jim O'Brien into playing rookie Brandon Rush for big minutes, and Rush has definitely been the weak link in that rotation. If they can get Dunleavy back healthy for the second half of the season (a big IF, to be sure -- Dunleavy has been suffering from knee problems and has no scheduled return date, and has barely begun practicing), this might be a team to avoid in the playoffs. Danny Granger deserves a lot of credit for holding things together -- he's dramatically increased his usage this year (from 23.2% last year to 29.7% this year) without losing any efficiency, which is a pretty rare accomplishment.

While we're on the topic of teams that have refused to fall apart in the face of a tough schedule -- the Bulls have played the second hardest schedule of the year and are currently sitting on a 13-17 record. However, while I see the Pacers finishing the season strong, I can't really see the Bulls doing the same. That's completely a hunch, though.

The Pistons have been treading water, at best, since they traded Billups away, and despite their 17-11 record they really need to improve in order to have any relevance in the spring. Coach Michael Curry has tinkered a bit trying to find enough playing time for Rodney Stuckey, Richard Hamilton, and Allen Iverson, and somehow the odd man out has been Amir Johnson (Curry decided to go small and start all three of the guards), who went from being a starter in November to barely playing by December. Johnson was forced back into the starting lineup in the Pistons' most recent game due to an injury to Hamilton, and the Pistons had a strong defensive and overall effort in beating a good Bucks team with Johnson playing 35 minutes. We can't draw conclusions from just one game, but hopefully experiences like this will help to convince Curry to keep Johnson in the rotation even when Hamilton comes back. He's the best rebounder on the team, and rebounding at both ends has been a major weakness for them so far this year.

Finally, the Bucks have really impressed this year, despite playing 20 of their first 33 games on the road against some very stiff competition, and despite playing half of their games without leading scorer Michael Redd. Rookie Luc Richard Mbah a Moute should be getting a lot more attention as one of the better rookies this year, and Scott Skiles deserves a lot of credit for getting a team without any notable defenders to play elite-level defense (their defensive efficiency is right around even with San Antonio and Houston so far), after finishing dead last in the league in defense last year. It's early, but it isn't unrealistic for Bucks fans to be shooting for a top-five seed in the playoffs and the chance to avoid Cleveland, Boston, and Orlando in the first round.

Conditional on Health: Jazz and Warriors
While my optimism regarding the Bucks and Pacers is based on analysis of the numbers to date, I'm also optimistic about the Jazz and Warriors for reasons that aren't necessarily based on the numbers.

The Jazz have played above-.500 ball this year despite both Deron Williams and Carlos Boozer missing a lot of games. Williams is back though he was slowed when he first came back and his defense has suffered, while Boozer is still out indefinitely. Paul Millsap did an amazing job stepping into the starting lineup and filling in for Boozer, playing efficiently on offense and much better than Boozer on defense. Now Millsap is out for a week or so with a strained PCL, and it really seems like the Jazz will never get everyone back at the same time. For the time being, the bench will suffer the most as Andrei Kirilenko moves into the starting lineup to fill the void at power forward. Despite the injury issues, I don't think there's a lot of doubt among analysts about the Jazz making the playoffs, but they make my "optimistic" list because if they can get healthy by the all-star break they can be one of the top 3 teams in the West, instead of just making the playoffs. Of note with the Jazz is that they are fouling a lot less than they did last year, which has really improved their defense since they aren't giving up easy points at the free throw line.

There really aren't any numbers to back up my optimism regarding the Warriors. Not only are they sitting on a 9-23 record, but there is apparently all sorts of turmoil throughout the organization. There is a power struggle among the coach, GM, and owner, the owner is going behind the back of the GM to sign older players to long-term contracts, the coach is trying to get a promising young rookie traded, and everyone from fans to front office people seem to be unhappy with the performance of big-time free agent signee Corey Maggette, among other things. Still, if you look closely, there are reasons for optimism. The Warriors are the youngest team in the league, and have had the most road-heavy schedule in the league (20 of their first 32 games have been on the road so far) including numerous back-to-back games and already two stretches of four games in five nights. So many road games so early would be difficult for any team, but it's particularly difficult for such a young team that needs, more than anything, time to practice together -- time they just haven't had. Furthermore, they've played the entire season without their best scorer, Monta Ellis. Ellis has been spotted at shootaround before games recently, and is hopefully close to a return to the rotation. By the time he gets back, the Warriors should be looking at a decent stretch of home games in front of the best and most supportive fans in the league. There are too many good teams in the West, and the Warriors are too far behind, for Golden State to have legitimate playoff hopes, but they are definitely better than their 9-23 record would indicate.

Game Recaps from December 23, 2008

2008-12-24T12:50:00.001-08:00

It's been a little while since I've done any game recaps, and I happened to watch another three games last night and take some notes, so here we go.

Houston 90, Cleveland 99
The most exciting game of the night, for me. Cleveland won this game but I thought Houston played particularly well given that it was their fourth game in five nights. Houston stayed close until the end of the third, and then even had a run in the fourth to make it interesting. Zydrunas Ilgauskas did an admirable job powering Yao Ming out of low post position in the fourth quarter (when the Cavs often chose not to double-team him as they had earlier, giving up open threes), but couldn't keep himself from fouling out and helping to send Yao to the free throw line 12 times in the quarter. Anyways, I've been so busy watching the Bucks, Grizzlies, and Hawks this year that I've only had a chance to see each of these teams play about 3 or 4 times before last night. I was impressed by both. Aaron Brooks was all over the place for the Rockets in the first half, and as a team they impressed with their ability to score against an excellent Cleveland defense; meanwhile Mo Williams made some huge plays for the Cavs at the beginning of the fourth quarter with Lebron on the bench, and that was something that was missing last year (so far this year, the Cavs are playing about even with their opponents while James is on the bench, and that's a huge advantage for them). I thought the Rockets did a good job defending Lebron James, but I looked at the box score at the end of the game and James had 27 points, 9 rebounds, and 5 assists (although he was forced into 7 turnovers). So, I guess what I'm saying is that James is quite good.

Houston shot 8-16 from the three point line in the first three quarters, but only 2 for 8 in the fourth when Cleveland stopped sending regular doubles towards Yao Ming.

Chicago 98, Detroit 104
For several years now, Detroit has combined the talent to be the best team in the league with the attitude to do just enough to win. It felt like that happened again here, when the team played excellent ball in the first quarter, got a big lead, and then just kind of coasted to the win while riding the coattails of an impressive performance by Rodney Stuckey (40 points on 24 shots with just 3 turnovers). In the first quarter, Detroit went inside to Rasheed Wallace repeatedly and with great success and also succeeded in getting Derrick Rose into foul trouble (which threw off his game for the entire night), all while committing just one turnover in the entire quarter. During the first 9 minutes, Allen Iverson looked brilliant on offense, gathering 5 quick assists on all sorts of passes, hitting cutters and curlers as well as breaking the defense down off the dribble. Iverson ended up leaving the game in the third quarter with a strained groin, and Wallace shot 1-9 in the second half with 2 rebounds, after going 4-5 with 2 boards in just the first quarter, but Stuckey played well throughout and Arron Afflalo had a nice third quarter. Detroit only had 9 turnovers all game, which is impressive.

Lakers 100, Hornets 87
The Lakers played Trevor Ariza on Chris Paul for stretches, and it worked swimmingly. With Jordan Farmar getting surgery and probably set to miss several weeks of the season, I wonder if we'll see a lot more of this for the Lakers, who've had a lot of issues containing point guards so far this season.

Something I've noticed about the starting unit -- they defend well in the half court but often get beat in transition more easily than it seems like they should, given their athleticism and the pace they like to play at. Part of the reason they play so well against New Orleans is that New Orleans really doesn't like to run, but against other teams there's really no reason the Lakers shouldn't be able to get back in transition defense.

A late highlight of the game for me was a sky-high defensive rebound by Kobe Bryant with 1:30 left to play. The reason it was a highlight was the context. Rewind to about 4 minutes to go in the game, the Lakers have a 13 point lead. Here is how the ensuing three possessions go for the Hornets:

Possession 1: Chris Paul misses a shot and gets his own rebound. Then Mo Peterson misses a three-point attempt, but Paul gets another rebound. Finally, Rasual Butler makes a shot on the Hornets' third shot attempt of the possession.

Possession 2: Chris Paul hits Mo Peterson for a jumper.

Possession 3: David West misses a shot, but Rasual Butler corralls the rebound. Butler misses a three-pointer, but Tyson Chandler gets the rebound. Finally, Chris Paul hits the three-pointer, again on the Hornets' third shot attempt.

The Hornets got 7 shot attempts in three possessions, and it felt like they would have had an offensive rebound on the second possession if Peterson had missed. The Lakers' defensive lapses recently have included, among other things, an inabity to hold opponents to one shot attempt during important possessions -- for the season, defensive rebounding is the most glaring weakness for the Lakers defense, which shouldn't be the case with Lamar Odom, Andrew Bynum, and Pau Gasol aboard (the Lakers are currently 15th in the league in defensive rebounding percentage, but are top-8 in every other defensive factor).

In any case, the Lakers still have a 10-point lead after Paul's three pointer (the Hornets are completely unable to slow Kobe down at the other end), but at this rate even if they hold on, the victory will feel hollow given the mini-collapse. The Lakers need to have a solid defensive stand on the next possession, both to ensure the win and also to stop sliding down the defensive hill they've been on. So on the ensuing possession, Paul misses a three-pointer, and the rest of the Hornets gather under the rim for what feels like the inevitable second-chance opportunity. But somehow in the middle of all those Hornets, Kobe leaps over Tyson Chandler and company and secures a very tough defensive rebound. Game over. Kobe once again hit huge shots down the stretch, but it was that rebound that I'll remember as being the most clutch moment.

Smarter Visualizations, Exploiting the Play by Play

2008-12-22T12:14:00.000-08:00

Often here when I do a game recap I'll link to the pocornmachine visualization of the game in question, as a point of reference for the claims I might make about how the game was affected by particular lineup changes. I've always found the gameflow presentations there to be insightful and useful, and overally just a smart and effective way of communicating as much relevant information as possible from the play-by-play logs that are available to us. If you haven't looked at the gameflow data there yet, I highly recommend taking a look at a few games' worth to get a feel for how the information is presented and how to read it, as it's a valuable source of insight into a game.

A little while back, I stumbled upon a similarly ingenious visualization of play-by-play data, currently being presented here. It takes a while to get used to, but the use of color allows you to see at a glance which players were involved with various runs throughout a game, and at what point the decisive run might have happened. I don't have much to say about it right now, except to direct your attention towards that site, as it is a unique and interesting way to look at the data.

On the topic of intriguing visualizations, I always found the work of The Arbitrarian particularly smart. I especially enjoyed the network diagrams of player similarities, like this one. Sadly, that blog has been inactive for a while, ever since the author was hired away by an NBA team. Similarly, at countthebasket, Eli's use of shot location data to come up with detailed shot charts was really nice, and something I'm hoping to copy for upcoming team-by-team looks. Eli also got hired away.

Anyways, not much else to report here, just wanted to draw your attention to those new visualizations at the NBA Graphs website. Also, while I'm going over some nice references, I might as well mention the "Statistical Scouting Reports" up for each team at the basketball geek website. I found it interesting enough to add a link up in the reference section here, but do check it out. Try researching the opponent of your favorite team before a game, and see if there's anything to pick up and watch for during the game.

Canadian Dog Whistles

2008-12-20T10:54:00.000-08:00

I don't want to cherry-pick articles and make it look like the NBA is under attack, and I don't want to unnecessarily draw attention to poorly thought-out columns by people who probably haven't seen an NBA game in 20 years, if ever. Really, I'd rather write about what an amazing game last night's Jazz-Pistons matchup was, or how brilliant Rasheed Wallace was in the first half or how much of a difference Deron Williams made in the second quarter. But I somehow ended up reading this article by Mark Hasiuk (which I arrived at through this post) and it seemed worth digging into, since most of the responses to it caught the obvious racist tropes but missed the old-school Jew-Bashing aspect.

So, let's dig in:

Title: "NBA: a ghetto gutter run by money grubbers" - Dogs everywhere just went deaf. A question, though -- is the title anti-Black, anti-Jew, or both?

The NBA is America at its worst - Really? See, I would have gone with something more obvious, like indefinite detentions and waterboarding at Guantanamo. But you know, maybe it's the NBA. Yeah.

Players like Allen Iverson--perhaps the greatest basketball talent of his generation--spend more energy producing sneaker commercials than winning basketball games. - I honestly haven't seen an A.I. shoe commercial in a very long time.

NBA players wear saggy shorts, roll in posses and cuss on camera. - Hey hey old friends! Why didn't you bring the rest of the gang, you know, tatoos, cornrows, and jewelry? (A few paragraphs down, there is in fact a reference to "flamboyant chauvinism, jailhouse lingo [and] black ink tattoos").

Television ratings have dropped steadily since 1996. - Apparently no one filled him in on the news.

Basketball icons such as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and the late Red Auerbach have denounced today's players, calling them 'thugs' and 'bums.' - There isn't any reference here, so it's hard to respond. I would find it odd if Kareem had denounced today's players that he still works as a coach for the Lakers. Similarly, Auerbach was involved with the Celtics right up until the end. He also probably called everyone a bum, that's what you call people when you're from Boston.

Now comes the anti-Semitism alert. See if you can spot the dog whistle words and phrases in the below passage. I'll bold them, just in case.

Hip hop, a cultural movement spawned in 1970s New York, has been dead for years.

It sold its soul to corporate sleaze merchants, who repackage black music for a white suburban consumer base.

Nope, the remnants of hip hop--flamboyant chauvinism, jailhouse lingo, black ink tattoos--didn't kill the NBA. It was New York lawyers like Stern, who cashed in on the athletic ability of young black men while ignoring the social realities of basketball in America.

. . .

Ironically, the greed of Stern and his gang of crafty owners (ubiquitous Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban currently faces insider trading charges) may ultimately rescue the NBA from the gutter.

Look, Mark Cuban isn't Jewish, but anyone who's ever paid attention knows what "greedy" and "crafty" and "New York lawyers" mean. And "sleaze merchants" takes it old school, to the days of Shakespeare.

Stern can keep his basketball franchise. His NBA cabal doesn't belong around here. - Again, "cabal" has expanded its meaning and can be used in non-denoninational ways, but taken in context, it's hard to believe that the use of a word that's derived from Hebrew wasn't purposeful.

Oh Mark Hasiuk, who are you? Ah, it turns out that when you're not busy trying criticize a sports league about which you know nothing, you're writing about the threat to the future of a pure Canada posed by immigration from the third world. Well, I for one am thrilled that I won't be seeing you at the next game I go to. You can keep your pure Canada and your Pat Buchanon and your "European culture" that "spawned the now-universal tenets of democratic rule, personal freedom and Christian-based virtue—not to mention many of civilization's greatest scientific and technological achievements" -- but I'm keeping my NBA, my mongrel heritage, and the number zero.

Mining Shaq's Rejuvenation

2008-12-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

Chances are you've noticed by now that Shaquille O'Neal is having a bit of a bounceback year this year, particularly in terms of scoring efficiency, as he's currently on pace to set a career high in True Shooting Percentage at 61.4%. This isn't merely a case of being in better shape or trying harder, either -- from the games I've seen, the starters in Phoenix have gotten more accustomed to getting him the ball in the places where he's most effective. I noticed several occasions last season when Shaq would establish low post position but the guards wouldn't get him the ball quickly enough to take advantage, and that sort of hesitation seems to be gone this year.

The sort of success Shaq's having, though, raises some questions about the trade that brought him to Phoenix. The story we were sold when the trade was made was that O'Neal provided much-needed interior defense and rebounding. Most basketball fans probably noted at the time that Shaq is no longer a defensive/rebounding force, so obviously we were skeptical. Looking at Phoenix so far this season, they are once again one of the most efficient offensive teams in the league (4th overall), but they are the 26th ranked team in terms of defensive efficiency -- they're worse than they were in the D'antoni years. Specifically, their defensive rebounding rate is 22nd in the league (not any better than they were in 2006-2007, before Shaq's arrival). Individually, O'Neal's defensive rebounding numbers are pretty much in line with his career numbers, but digging a little deeper, the Suns only rebound 72.2% of opponent misses while Shaq is on the floor, which would put the Suns right around the level of the Knicks as a team, and opposing centers are averaging 13.8 rebounds per 48 minutes (for comparison, Erick Dampier, who plays on a similarly paced team, allows opposing centers to get 12.6 rebounds per 48). I don't mean to say that Shaq has hurt the team or anything like that -- in all he's having a positive effect and defensively he's a tremendously better option at center than Amar'e Stoudemire, but it does seem like a stretch to say that Shaq has improved the defense enough to justify the trade.

In a very close game last night against the Portland (who, granted, are the best offensive rebounding team in the league), the Suns gave up 15 offensive rebounds -- if Phoenix can corral two or three of those the outcome of the game is completely different. Most of the second chance opportunities allowed weren't Shaq's fault, but it does seem a concern that Phoenix can continue to get beat in this way after trading for him.

On the other hand, while Phoenix's offense isn't quite as efficient as it was in its most free-wheeling D'Antoni days, it is still very efficient and Shaq brings a lot to the table here. We've already gone over how efficient he's been at scoring, but there have also been other little changes that might help Phoenix in the long term. The most important, I think, is shot-creation. For the last several years, people have criticized the lack of an adequate backup to Steve Nash. Since there are so few players who can consistently create their own shots on this team, they were looking for someone to be able to create when Nash was off the court (this was part of the reason they were excited to bring Grant Hill aboard, for instance). But now, with Shaq, they have the option of running their offense through him, since he's such a skilled passer. Seven Seconds or Mess did a nice job breaking down some of Shaq's plays against the Knicks recently, and notice how many of them are passes leading to easy shots for teammates:

I'm wondering if, instead of helping the defense, Shaq's main benefit on this Suns team this year will be to create easy offensive opportunities when Nash isn't on the floor (obviously Shaq plays most of his minutes with Nash and the starting unit, but that unit doesn't seem any more efficient than it was before the trade, so I'm looking at those few minutes with the reserves). For instance, while Shaq is averaging 2.3 assists per 40 minutes on the floor with Nash, he's averaging 4.5 assists per 40 when he's on the floor with Goran Dragic. It seems like a really obscure reason to pay someone $20 million and trade away Shawn Marion, but is it possible that those few minutes of increased offensive efficiency when Nash isn't on the floor could mean the difference in close games in April, May, and June (recall, for instance, in game 1 of the playoff series against the Spurs two years ago, before all the controversy of the suspensions, there was the Nash bloody-nose game that the Suns lost after Nash had to sit out a couple of key posessions at the end of the game getting his nose bandaged and re-bandaged)? I'm not really sure, but it seems like an interesting tidbit to keep an eye on.

Around the League -- Early Fruity Storylines

2008-12-15T16:30:00.000-08:00

As we approach the 1/3 mark of the season, I thought it would be nice to take a look around the leauge and see early surprises and storylines. In the process, I'll compare actual storylines of the season to what I talked about in the season previews for each team during the preseason.

Fired Coaches
So far this season, as of this writing, 6 of the 30 teams have made coaching changes. None of the firings were huge surprises on their own, but as a group to see 20% of teams change coaches within the first 20 or so games of the season is a bit of a shocker. I get the feeling that we'll see all of these guys, except for P.J. Carlesimo and Randy Wittman, in other NBA head coaching positions in the near future. Carlesimo, though -- I thought his head coaching career was over before the Sonics hired him last year, so who knows.

Fantastic Rookie Guards
The rookie class as a whole has been very impressive, with an assortment of strong centers (beginning with Oden and Marc Gasol, but also Brook Lopez), forwards (particularly Jason Thompson, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute, and Marreese Speights, but also Kevin Love recently), and athletically intriguing question marks (Javale McGee and Anthony Randolph!), but the sheer number of strong rookie guard performances has been impressive.

Point Guards: Derrick Rose was supposed to be good as the first overall pick, but I'm not sure anyone expected him to be this good this quickly. He's averaging an efficient 18 points (54.2% True Shooting Percentage) and 6 assists along with some pretty decent defense for a rookie at a very tough position. At 4 rebounds per game, he's not quite Jason Kidd but overall I can see why the comparisons were drawn. Meanwhile, there have been a number of solid point guards behind Rose. Mario Chalmers has started every game for the Heat and has made a name for himself as a solid defender, averaging 2 steals per game in just 30 minutes. George Hill of the Spurs has provided some much needed scoring and shot-creation early on as Manu Ginobili and Tony Parker worked back to full health, and is a big part (along with Roger Mason, Jr.) of why the Spurs didn't fall apart when their star guards were injured. His ability to get to the rim regularly without turning the ball over often helped what otherwise might have become a stagnant Spurs offense. D.J. Augustin, meanwhile, has been coming on strong of late, and is shooting 43.8% from the three point line while scoring 13.5 points and 4.4 assists in just 29.5 minutes per game. Russell Westbrook has played well since becoming a starter, and has excelled defensively, keeping opposing point guards out of the paint while being among the league leaders in steals per game and having an overall positive effect on the defensive end. He also leads all point guards in offensive rebounds per game despite playing just 28 minutes per game, and that sort of athleticism leads me to believe that he might be able to improve his ability to finish at the rim, so if he can improve his jump shot, he will be a solid contributor for the Thunder for years (maybe those Rajon Rondo comparisons were apt).

Shooting Guards: Both O.J. Mayo and Rudy Fernandez should be in the running with Derrick Rose for rookie of the year, and behind them Eric Gordon has had some good games. Meanwhile, undrafted rookie Bobby Brown has been consistently productive in providing offense off the bench, while fellow undrafted rookie Anthony Morrow has been quite the scorer when he has had the chance to play.

Rajon Rondo

In the preseason, I mentioned Rajon Rondo and Tony Allen as players to pay attention to. Allen is having a decent year, averaging career highs in steals and blocks per 36 minutes, but Rondo has improved yet again over his performance last year, to the point that he can legimately be considered for all-star status this year. His shooting percentage is up to 51.4% and he's averaging over 7 assists in just 31 minutes per game, while currently placing 3rd in the league in steals per game.

Devin Harris

Devin Harris is, so far, the best point guard in the Eastern Conference. Did anyone expect that?

Cleveland Cavaliers Offense

In the preseason, I singled out Cleveland's offense and begged for Lebron James to be offered opportunities to work more off the ball. Well, that's exactly what they did and now, surprisingly, Cleveland has the best offense in the league. This is largely due to the ever-brilliant James having the best season of a remarkable career, but give credit also to the supporting cast, who have really picked up the slack in terms of efficiency, beginning with Zydrunas Ilgauskas, but also notably including Mo Williams, Delonte West, and Anderson Varejao.

Mike Bibby's Rejuvenation
The Hawks have played, I think, a bit better than expected so far this year. Joe Johnson has been very good, as expected, and Josh Smith has been strong defensively as usual. But Mike Bibby is having perhaps his best year of his career, as a 30-year old. He's shooting a career high 43.7% from three-point range, and overall a career high 55.4% effective field goal percentage. It'll be interesting to see if he can keep this pace up for the whole year.

Joel Anthony
In the preseason, I mentioned that the question marks for Miami would be at point guard and center. As mentioned above, Mario Chalmers has done an admirable job filling the point guard spot. Meanwhile, Joel Anthony has taken over Alonzo Mourning's role as shot-blocker extraordinaire, coming in third in the league so far in percentage of oppoenent's shots blocked.

J.J. Barea, Jason Terry, and Jason Kidd
I suggested in the preseason that Jason Terry would have a very good year. He has so far, but in unexpected ways. He's averaging a career high in points per game, as well as in field goal attempts as he has really taken to the sixth man role and is in the early running for sixth man of the year. J.J. Barea's ascent was unexpected, though. He's been a fan favorite and played well on offense, particularly since Josh Howard went down. And Jason Kidd, out of nowhere, has turned into a knockdown shooter, shooting 42% on his 3-point attempts (he's a career 34% shooter) and he's currently on pace to set a career high in effective field goal percentage. Also of note with the Mavericks has been Gerald Green's apparently finding a home, finally.

The Bucks' D
I expressed doubt in the preseason about whether Scott Skiles would be able to improve this defense, despite his reputation as a defensive coach. However, the Bucks have been, so far, the 13th best defense in the league this year, which is a HUGE improvement from their last place finish a year ago. Skiles deserves some credit here, but I doubt he'll get any consideration for Coach of the Year type honors even if the Bucks keep up this pace.

Mike Miller's disappearance
Mike Miller was a big part of the trade that sent O.J. Mayo to Memphis and brought Kevin Love to Minnesota, and it seemed at first like he'd provide a solid fit as an outside threat alongside Al Jefferson's inside game. At 28 years old, though, Miller is having his worst season of his career so far. His shooting percentages are down, but even more of a concern is that he's taking less shots -- his usage rate is down to 15%. In the games I've seen him play, he looks somewhat hesitant to create shots, but I wonder if a bigger part of the dropoff has to do with the fact that Al Jefferson isn't nearly as good of a passer out of the post as Pau Gasol.

Aaron Brooks
Last year the Rockets seemed to fall apart a bit without Rafer Alston in the lineup. Adding Ron Artest should have helped the offense some, but it hasn't. What has really helped is the emergence of Aaron Brooks as a legimitate backup point guard and sometimes starter.

Darius Miles
In a story that might only be interesting to me (and Portland Trailblazer fans), D-Miles has signed a 10-day contract with the Memphis Grizzlies.

Early Awards, etc.
It's too early to really say anything meaningful, but as recognition of those who have performed admirably in the early part of the season:

MVP: Lebron James (although Dwyane Wade should lead the "those who should receive more votes than they actually will" category -- his season is similar offensively to Kobe Bryant's 2005-2006 season).

Most Improved Player: Devin Harris (if it were still called "comeback player" then Nene would win this one in a landslide -- as it is I'm not sure he'd be eligible to win Most Improved).

Sixth Man: Jason Terry (a healthy Manu Ginobili will surely overtake him, but so far it's been Terry)

Most Defensively Improved Player: I realize this isn't a real award, but it was the only place I could squeeze in some acknowledgment of how much better Carmelo Anthony has looked on that side of the ball, both in terms of man-defense and rebounding.

Best Temporary Injury Replacement: Another fake award, but shouldn't it be real? To recognize the efforts of a bench player who is forced into starting due to injury -- this is quite different from being a sixth man. I'd vote here for Paul Millsap, who has been fantastic in taking over for Carlos Boozer early in the season.

Best Defensive Player: Ron Artest. Seriously -- watch a Rockets game, check out the numbers. The team is 14.6 points better per 100 possessions when he is on the court compared to off of it, and he's holding opposing small forwards to 39.3% effective field goal percentage and a 9.8 PER. Those number are a bit inexact, since he's not always guarding small forwards. But in any case, I think he's done a solid job -- hopefully the Rockets can hold things together while he and McGrady recover from injuries. I'd like to throw some consideration in for Andrew Bynum, though, who has done a remarkable job as an all-around defender, both positionally and in help situations. I don't think he'll get a ton of attention for this award, since he has impressive but not gaudy blocks per game numbers (1.9, but he's playing just 29 minutes per game), and the Lakers aren't known as a great defensive team despite being third in the league in defensive efficiency. But it's hard to find a consistently better defensive center.

New NBA Commercials

2008-12-14T23:38:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Alana G, here are some outtakes from the new NBA commercials. Lebron James + Cyndi Lauper. I think that should be enough to intrigue you . . .. There's more information about the commercials here, but in any case I'm pretty excited to see them. They'll be unveiled during the Christmas Day games.

Converting off of Defensive Rebounds

2008-12-09T23:30:00.000-08:00

This is completely random, but I was curious so I played around a little bit calculating team offensive success immediately following a defensive rebound. Is a team aided significantly by rebounders who lead a fast break, like Jason Kidd or Lamar Odom? Are there any bigs who are underrated due to their effective outlet passing?

I took a look at the play-by-play data from 2005-2008, and every single defensive rebound recorded during those three seasons. I then removed those that were immediately followed by a timeout or by the end of a quarter, and ended up with a record of defensive rebounds that were followed by either a shot (made or missed), a drawn foul, or a turnover. For this study, we'll consider "made shot" or "drawn foul" to be successes, and we'll take a look at the success rates after defensive rebounds for different players. I'll look team-by-team so as not to have to worry about the quality of a team's offense skewing the success rates. In addition to success, I'll take a look at the average time between the defensive rebound and the next play, to see whose rebounds lead to more fastbreaks and early offense.

For the purposes of this project, I've included only players with 250 or more defensive rebounds in a given season.

Here's some notes from teams that have interesting stories (I'll skip the teams where there wasn't much of interest to take away):

Atlanta
Josh Smith's defensive rebounds consistently lead to much faster action than thos of anyone on his team. For instance, in 2006-2007, Smith's rebounds turned into an offensive play within an average of 9.6 seconds, whereas the rebounds of his teammate Marvin Williams turned aruond in 11.7 seconds. Last year, it was 9.2 seconds for Smith and 10.8 for Williams. The change over the years for Smith, though, has been his success rate. It has climbed each year, from 47% in 05-06 (which was second-lowest on the team) to 53% in 07-08 (highest on the team, and much higher than second place Al Horford, who had a success rate of 49%). So what happened? Well, the big improvements came in FG% after rebounds, which went from 42.3% in 05-06, to 50% two seasons ago, all the way up to 53.9% last season. This ascent mirrors Smith's own FG% on inside shots over the years, from 58.5% in 05-06, to 61% in 06-07, to 61.8% last year. Maybe he just got better at finishing what he started?

Charlotte
Last year Gerald Wallace's rebounds led to much more effective offense than those of any of his teammates, with his success rate at 55% compared to his team's average of 48%. The effectiveness wasn't a result of his necessarily starting fast-breaks, though, as his rebounds didn't cause any faster action than those of his teammates. So what's the story? I have no idea -- if you have any, leave them in the comments.

Chicago
Andres Nocioni's rebounds result in turnovers more often than those of any of his teammates.

Cleveland
Obviously, when Lebron James gets a rebound, good things happen, and they happen quickly. Lebron has high success rates every year, and his rebounds turn into plays close to two seconds faster, on average, than those of his teammates.

Denver
We know they've been a fast-paced team for a few years. What's intriguing here is that center Marcus Camby doesn't slow down the offense at all -- his rebounds turn into offense just as quickly as those of Carmelo Anthony. On a team that likes to get out and run, I could see Marcus Camby being hugely valuable since he is a very good defensive rebounder who is also good at starting the fast break. Without Camby this year, Denver is playing at a much slower pace than they did last year. Meanwhile, the Clippers are struggling, and, by the way, they are playing at close to the same pace as they did last year, despite adding prolific fast-breakers Camby and Baron Davis (discussed below). Maybe they'd be better using their talents if they got out and ran more?

Golden State
We've all seen Baron Davis and Monta Ellis single-handedly start fast-breaks, so it shouldn't be a surprise to see that last season their defensive rebounds turned into offense a lot more quickly than anyone those of anyone else on the team (an average of 7.2 seconds for Davis, and 7.7 seconds for Ellis -- compared to 9.2, 8.2, and 9.7 for Andris Biedrins, Al Harrington, and Stephen Jackson). I did find it odd to see Stephen Jackson's rebounds being not only the slowest on the team last year, but also the least successful, with just a 47% success rate. He is helped a little when you look at points produced, as he likes to shoot those pull up three pointers in transition. So even though his success rate is lower, his rebounds produce points at about the same rate as those of his teammates.

Houston
Tracy McGrady is easily the fastest Rocket around, turning his boards into offense in an average of 10.4-10.7 seconds each year (Rafer Alston is also pretty quick, but doesn't grab enough rebounds to qualify). Unfortunately for McGrady, his success rate has dropped each year, from 52% (which led his team and was much higher than the team average of 45%) to 47% to 46% last year.

LA Lakers
I expected to see Lamar Odom's name more prominently here, but in fact Kobe Bryant has been the Laker who converts his rebounds into offense most quickly and most effeciently for the last three years. Of interest to this year's Lakers' squad is the case of Pau Gasol in Memphis -- Gasol is one of the few bigs in the league who led his team in creating early offense off of defensive rebounds, turning his rebounds into offense faster than even the gaurds on his team. This year, it appears that he has continued that tradition, constantly looking for the outlet once he's secured a rebound -- but I'll wait to see the numbers before drawing firm conclusions.

James Posey
Posey gets his own entry here because he showed similar results while playing for different teams. For two years in Miami and one year in Boston, Posey's defensive rebounds were the slowest on the team to turn into offense, and had the lowest success rate.

New Jersey
Jason Kidd definitely likes to get out and run, creating offense off of his rebounds within 8 to 8.5 seconds each year (around 1 to 2 seconds faster than his teammates). But it's Vince Carter who has the highest success rate over that period. Kidd, a great passer in the open-court, might have just needed some more teammates who could finish on the break (Carter can finish and draw fouls on his own in the open court, so was less held back by the lack of quality teammates).

Hornets
Like Kidd, Chris Paul gets out off of rebounds much faster than any of his teammates, although Paul has a much higher success rate than his teammates, also. Peja Stojakovic, meanwhile, turns his boards into offense a whopping 2.5 seconds more slowly than Paul.

Orlando
Hedo Turkoglu wins the speed and efficiency contests here, and it makes sense from watching games -- a lot of times after he grabs a rebound he turns into the de facto point guard, bringing the ball up the court and initiating the offense. The numbers show that this helps the Magic, which would partly explain why the Magic offense was so much more efficient when he was on the court last year.

Portland
Good things happen when Brandon Roy gets rebounds!

San Antonio
Like Gasol, Tim Duncan is another of the rare bigs who generates fast and efficient offense off of his defensive rebounds. So, add that to the list of good things you can say about Duncan's game.

Conclusions
Well, that was fun! Hopefully this will be the beginning of being able to look at offense and defense together. Most of the statistics available deliniate a very clear boundary between the analysis of offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency. Sometimes on television broadcasts we get to see statistics like "points off of turnovers," but I think that in some cases looking at points off of defensive rebounds might be valuable. The above exercise shed some additional light, I think, on a couple of areas:

- Point guards who can rebound are additionally valuable since they can so effectively generate offense off of those rebounds -- for instance, Jason Kidd, Chris Paul, and Baron Davis above (similarly effective but not mentioned: Gilbert Arenas and Steve Nash, who tend to have lower rebound totals, so can't make this feature as much a part of their game).
- Marcus Camby, Tim Duncan, and Pau Gasol are special in their ability to quickly turn rebounds into offense through ball security and effective outlet passing. We should be able to take a look after this year to see if Kevin Love, he of the world-famous outlet pass, measures up.
- Maybe there is some value after all to athletic 3/4 tweener/hybrid types. Josh Smith, Gerald Wallace, and Hedo Turkoglu all proved to be very effective at both rebounding the ball on the defensive end and immediately turning those rebounds around into points on the offensive end.

Doing Homework, and Calling BS

2008-12-04T18:27:00.000-08:00

There's something fishy about this:

Five games, five Golden State losses and a more than 2:1 turnover-to-assist ratio. Maggette's selfish play hasn't gone unnoticed by other players. According to sources, after the final buzzer against Boston, Celtics forward Kevin Garnett turned to Maggette and shouted, "Way to get your numbers."

"He just puts his head down and goes to the basket," an Eastern Conference scout said. "He doesn't even look to pass."

Word from team sources is that the Warriors are already regretting signing Maggette to a five-year, $50 million deal last offseason. When Monta Ellis returns to the lineup early next year, Golden State will have to figure out how to spread the wealth among three players (Ellis, Jamal Crawford and Maggette) who aren't very good at spreading it.

Was the quote from the scout recent, or something laying around the office? Had the anonymous Eastern Conference scout (and honestly, is there any justification for the anonymity here? This isn't national security, people) ever seen Corey Maggette play? This is his 10th NBA season, and this is the way he's played for the previous 9 years. Who are these "team sources" who say the Warriors are regretting the Maggette signing, and did they sign Maggette without ever having seen him play? Does anyone do their homework before paying someone $50 million?

Here's the thing: Corey Maggette has been a scorer whose style consists of putting his head down and going to the basket for his entire career. Maybe if it were earlier in his career you could try to criticize him for not expanding his skillset, but at this point, if you thought you were getting anything other than exactly what he's been for 9 years, that is stupid. No one has ever praised him for his great passing or his all-around game. He is a so-so shooter who scores efficiently because he can get to the rim and get to the foul line. That's what he's always been.

Ok, let's be generous. Let's say that Mr. Mannix, who wrote the article, and the "team sources" (if they exist at all) who are quoted, knew exactly what Maggette's game was throughout his carreer, but they are complaining that he passes even LESS than he did before. Let's see if the numbers back that up:

Compared to last year, Corey Maggette is taking slightly more 3-pointers per game than he did last year -- but this is on a team whose offensive identity revolves around jacking up threes. Further, Maggette is going to the line a little less often, but that seems like the flip side of shooting more threes. His usage rate is actually down, from 27.6% to 23.9%, which would seem to suggest the opposite of "selfish play." As for assists, his assists are slightly down, but he never got many assists to begin with. Further, his turnovers are down as well, and the assists and turnovers together might be a reflection of scheme as much as anything else -- Golden State prefers to shoot quick shots rather than risk turnovers. For instance, this year the Warriors assist on 52% of their made baskets, and that is fourth lowest in the league.

All told, Maggette is more or less the same player he's always been. So why should I believe that his playing style is somehow surprising someone involved in a decision to sign him?

But my problem with this article isn't only about the assualt on common sense. It's the liberal use of anonymous sources that has become so prevalent in sportswriting. First off, we have "According to sources, after the final buzzer against Boston, Celtics forward Kevin Garnett turned to Maggette and shouted . . .." Really? We need unnamed sources to describe what happened in an arena in front of 20,000 people? I realize Garnett can seem kind of intense and scary at times, but he's not in the mafia -- he's not going to kill anyone who happens to describe what they witnessed. This stinks of journalistic laziness. (Also: KG, you used to be cool, and I've always loved your game. But between this and getting involved in Bosh's business, you're starting to turn into Brett Favre. Please stop).

Then, the quote from an unnamed Eastern Conference Scout. Putting aside the fact that even a scout from the Eastern Conference should know Maggette's game by now, I don't understand why the scout can't be named. He's not outing a spy here, he's describing something that anyone watching could see.

And finally the "team sources." I can see why they might not want to be named. Because they are complete idiots if they are surprised.

Re-Imagining Defensive Rebounding (plus some bonus thoughts)

2008-12-02T21:36:00.001-08:00

A few early bonus thoughts:

While watching the Kings-Jazz game tonight, I heard Kings color-commentator Grant Napier refer to Spencer Hawes and Brad Miller as the "Ivory Towers." I did some research and found that Hawes was the one who originally came up with the term, which sounds about right. Hawes is a solid player who's improving every time I see him, but his sound bites are as goofy as ever.

Also: Caught this at a fun blog, thought you might enjoy it. Click the link for more.

Also, a random question: does anyone know how to use greasemonkey scripts with google chrome? I'm sort of tired of having to open up separate browsers, and I like surfing with chrome but all of my scripts only work in Firefox.

Ok, on to the main point. The last two nights, there were two very close games in which the game turned on a timely offensive rebound. The big story at the end of yesterday's Heat-Warriors game was Beasley's steal in overtime, but the game never would have gotten to that point if Udonis Haslem hadn't grabbed an offensive rebound and scored at the end of regulation. Then tonight, the 8-8 Pacers beat the 14-1 Lakers on a last second tip-in by Troy Murphy. In both cases, the moments were fitting, since Miami retrieved 45.7% of their missed shots and Indiana retrieved 36.5% of theirs (on the season, the Lakers only allow their opponents to grab 25.1% of their misses). So I've had offensive rebounding on the brain. But not in the sense in which it was discussed before, as a boon to offensive efficiency. Instead, I am wondering about how well a player helps his team prevent opponents from getting offensive rebounds.

Here's what our stats currently measure: At the team level, we have defensive rebound percentage, which tells us exactly what we want to know -- how well a team stops its opponents from getting second chance opportunities. However, we have no good way of parlaying that knowledge down to the individual level. Instead, we have individual raw defensive rebounding numbers (per game, or per 36 or per 48 minutes), and we have individual defensive rebound percentage, which tells us roughly what portion of an opponent's misses a player rebounds himself. The problem is that defensively, the goal isn't to get a defensive rebound, it is to stop the offense from getting an offensive rebound.

Those two goal statements may sound the same, and at the team level, they are. However, at the individual level, stopping an offensive team from getting a rebound involves both going after defensive rebounds and not allowing the opponent to be in a position to rebound, and it's this latter part of the equation that isn't really measured. There's a bit of an analogy here to shot-defense, another important aspect of the game that isn't measured by any traditional stats. A big component of stopping an opponent from scoring is challenging shots and forcing low-percentage shots, but at the individual level there isn't any measure of how a player is defending opponents' shots. Seen through this analogy, defensive rebounds become as blunt of an instrument in measuring individual defense as blocked shots. (For both defensive shooting percentages and team defensive rebounding percentages, 82games.com does a good job of showing a player's effect in terms of on-court vs. off-court, but there are a number of limitations to that approach, particularly the inability to extract the impact of an individual player versus the effect of the lineups he's most likely to be a part of. 82games also does a good job of showing player and player-counterpart production, but doesn't separate offensive and defensive rebounds).

So, some preliminary thoughts that will hopefully inform the discussion:

1) When I read it, I found this study very enlightening. At the same time, I thought it supported an intuition I had anyways -- that, basically, a lot of times if a player doesn't get a particular defensive rebound, one of his teammates might still end up with it; whereas with offensive rebounds, that isn't usually the case. That intuition is presented in terms of the marginal values of individual offensive and defensive rebounds, but the gist (for this discussion) is: individual defensive rebound rates aren't really additive -- putting two prolific defensive rebounders next to each other (for instance, Chris Kaman and Marcus Camby on the Clippers this year) doesn't guarantee a great defensive rebounding team, since these rebounders are often just taking rebounds away from each other and their other teammates, as opposed to taking them away from the opposition (the study hints that on the offensive end, this isn't the case).

2) After the Ron Artest trade, I wondered about whether Houston would be able to remain one of the better defensive rebounding teams in the league, given Artest's historically lower rebound rates. However, so far this year the Rockets are 3rd in the league in defensive rebounding.

3) In a recent post on Nene, I discussed the fact that Denver is performing just as well this year in terms of defensive rebounding as they did last year, despite the fact that Nene has a much lower defensive rebounding rate than Marcus Camby did last year. (2) and (3) seem to provide examples of the point I'm trying to make -- that an individual can contribute to a defensive rebound without actually getting credit for that rebound, and that this contribution isn't really measured.

4) I have a feeling that defensive rebounds by point guards might be more valuable in terms of stopping the opposing team from getting a second chance than rebounds from other positions, and this link seems to agree, a little bit.

Ok. So, it's easy when watching a game to get an idea for who's doing a decent job of boxing out and who isn't, but there aren't great statistics to get a feel for that kind of thing at a summary level or for games you can't watch, and there won't be until defensive box-outs are kept as official box-score statistics. So instead, we're left guessing. For instance, I didn't get to watch tonight's Lakers-Pacers game, but I saw the recaps and the boxscores and the four factors information and the popcornmachine recap afterwards. What I gathered (other than the fact that I was right to worry about T.J. Ford) was that Troy Murphy and Rasho Nesterovic were primarily creditable for the Pacers' impressive offensive rebounding showing against the normally stingy Lakers defense. But for the Lakers, which players were responsible for the collapse? Murphy and Nesterovic combined for 4 offensive rebounds in the first half of the third quarter, when they were presumably being guarded by Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum. However, Nesterovic grabbed four offensive rebounds by himself in the last 5 minutes of the fourth quarter (during which time the Pacers went on a 14-4 run), while Bynum was on the bench and Lamar Odom was in the game -- I'm assuming that at this point Nesterovic was Gasol's responsibility (during the same stretch Murphy, who was being guarded by Odom at that point, didn't get a single offensive rebound until the game-winner). Combined with the fact that Gasol himself only got 5 defensive rebounds in 36 minutes (and the fact that Odom was a +10 for the game while Gasol was a -6), I can sort of assume that he was the one getting beat the most often (while still acknowledging that defensive rebounding is a team responsibility). But as you can see, the process is roundabout and filled with guesswork.

There's a number of cool stats that I've always thought could and should be part of normal boxscores. For instance, FGM-against, FGA-against, and points-against, which would track the efficiency of shots when a particular player was the closest defensive player to the shooter as well as the number of times a player was challenged during a game (here's an example of Kevin Pelton charting this type of data). Another cool stat would be a completion percentage on post-entry passes, which could add another layer of understanding to the passing game on top of assists. And now, I'm thinking I should add defensive box outs to that list, maybe with a box-out success ratio (how often a player's box-out stopped the boxed out player from making the rebound).

Heat 130, Warriors 129 (OT)

2008-12-01T22:33:00.000-08:00

I just finished watching this heartbreaking (for Warriors fans) game, a very exciting game (unless you're a fan of defense), and had a few very quick thoughts:

1) Jamal Crawford is to getting fouled while shooting three pointers as Mickael Pietrus is to accidentally stepping out of bounds as he makes a move.

2) New Named BoxScore: The Corey Maggette. A Corey Maggette is when a player scores 25 or more points on 12 or fewer shot attempts. Charles Barkley was an early practitioner of the Maggette. With a very different style but similar boxscore results, Reggie Miller and Kevin Martin have also shown an ability to put up Maggettes. Maggette himself came close to scoring a Maggette tonight, with 29 points on 15 shot attempts. On that note, Dwyane Wade was 3 turnovers away from scoring a D-Wade Triple Double (points, assists, turnovers).

3) Watching Wade got me kind of curious about how often he goes left vs. going right, so I did a quick calculation. Did you know that so far this year, Wade takes 35% of his shot attempts from the left side of the court, vs. just 9% from the right side? (He also takes 14% from the middle of the court and 42% from way inside, right at the hoop).

4) The Heat won this game with offensive rebounding. They retrieved a whopping 45.7% of their missed shots, which is completely unacceptable for the Warriors to allow. It's impossible to stop an NBA team from scoring when they're getting a second chance attempt after every other miss. Shawn Marion and Udonis Haslem led the way for the Heat, combining for 13 offensive boards between the two of them. So while it looks bad that the Warriors' starting guards combined for just 1 defensive rebound in almost 100 combined minutes of playing time (which is, in fact, pretty bad), I place some of the blame for the rebounding fiasco on Brandan Wright and Ronny Turiaf, who not only combined for just 4 defensive rebounds in 49 minutes, but also failed to box out Haslem at key moments (Maggette often boxed out Marion only to find him jumping over his head to grab a rebound -- this was just a mismatch as opposed to a lack of effort on Maggette's part). Turiaf in particular was so focused on blocking shots that he jumped himself out of rebounding position on several occasions (he did have 5 blocked shots in just 18 minutes, though). Part of the reason that Turiaf and Wright (who also had 2 blocks in 31 minutes) were forced out of rebounding position, though, is because of how easily Dwyane Wade was getting into the paint (Wade had 37 points and 13 assists, and also had 3 of his shots blocked in the paint) -- and that is on Stephen Jackson.

5) Watching the parade of Warriors' free throw attempts (they took 52 free throws in the game), I got to thinking of the value of Corey Maggette. Last year, the Warriors were 25th in the league in free throw line scoring, averaging 20.8 made free throws for every 100 field goal attempts. So far this year, they are 9th in the league, at 25.8. Meanwhile, the Clippers were 5th in the league last year at 26.4, and this year they are 26th in the league at just 19.6 made free throws per 100 field goal attempts. Players like Maggette, Paul Pierce, and Dwyane Wade help everyone on their team get free points. For instance, last year Stephen Jackson scored 26 points from the free throw line for every 100 shot attempts he took, Andris Biedrins was at 21, and Kelenna Azubuike was at 17. This year, Jackson's at 29, Biedrins is at 28, and Azubuike is at 24. Some of this increase has to be attributed to Maggette getting opposing teams into the penalty early in quarters. His style doesn't make for the prettiest or smoothest of games, but it does lead to a lot of points. (Stats from KnickerBlogger).

6) Jamal Crawford is the bizarro-O.J. Mayo. He ended up having a nice-looking scoring night, but almost every single one of his shots looked like a bad decision until it went in. Earlier this season, I mentioned that Mayo had a really good-looking 5 for 20 shooting night. Tonight, Crawford had a bad-looking 11 for 22 (and this is something Crawford has done throughout his career).

Close Readings - Bynum's D, Durant's O

2008-11-30T22:07:00.001-08:00

I thought it would be nice to take a close look at a couple of early storylines as they play themselves out in game situations. For this episode, I'm interested in: Kevin Durant's offensive effectiveness since his move to the small forward position, and Andrew Bynum's defensive contributions against teams whose bigs stretch the floor.

Kevin Durant
One of the major changes in the Oklahoma City Thunder since Scott Brooks took over as interim head coach has been Kevin Durant's move from the shooting guard position to the small forward, where many observers feel he is a more natural fit given his skillset. The move allows the team to play another perimeter player (Damien Wilkins), creating more space inside and allowing Durant to work closer to the basket. Early in his career, Durant has struggled to be efficient as a scorer, and partly because of that the Sonics/Thunder have been a pretty poor offensive team in terms of efficiency.

Durant has now played 5 games at the 3 position under his new coach. It's still very early, but statistically, the results are promising. Under P.J. Carlesimo, Durant was shooting a pretty low 46.1 eFG% (recall that eFG takes into account the extra point that three-pointers are worth). Since the coaching change, he's improved that to a solid 52.4%. Further, he's getting to the free throw line 3 more times per game than he was before (7.8 attempts per game now, 4.8 before the switch). One unexplained stat is that Durant is attempting more three pointers per game (3.2) than he was before the switch (1.3), although he's maintained his impressive percentage (43.8%). His turnovers are also down since the move.

Here's a comprehensive look at Durant's performance at each of the two positions, including minutes played at small forward before the coaching change. It's a very small sample, but the fact that the team is 15 points per hundred possessions better on offense with Durant at the 3 as opposed to the 2 is encouraging.

All of that should, I hope, serve as some background. But I am aware that, this early in the season, with so few minutes played, not much can be concluded from a look at the numbers. So instead I decided to watch and take notes on Saturday's Thunder-Grizzlies game (hey, someone had to watch it, right?). These notes will only be about Durant's offense, so before I begin, I'll make a few random observations from the game: on defense, Durant repeatedly got left out of rebounding position without anyone to box out when a shot went up. He ended up with 7 defensive rebounds in 39 minutes, but the Thunder allowed Memphis to retrieve 31% of their missed shots, which isn't horrible but could be improved (league average is just 26.9% so far this season). Of particular concern were Greg Buckner and Javaris Crittenton combining for 4 offensive rebounds in 42 combined minutes, as well as a telling play in the first half: Durant was guarding Darrell Arthur, who went up to set a screen at the top of the key for Mayo; Durant hedged to slow Mayo down, but didn't recover quickly enough as Arthur rolled to the basket; Mayo drove all the way to the hoop and missed a layup, but by the time Durant arrived he was behind Arthur, who was in perfect position to grab the rebound and go back up with a dunk. O.J. Mayo had yet another brilliant game. This was the first I'd seen Crittenton this season, and I was impressed with his agressiveness (8 free throw attempts in just 18 minutes, and no turnovers). Russell Westbrook leads all point guards in the league in offensive rebounding -- this just seemed worth pointing out. Also worth pointing out -- Westbrook is one of the few players whose rebounds deserve to be highlights by themselves. And finally, the Section 209 Crew at FedEx Forum in Memphis have been giving life to a lifeless stadium throughout this year, and even though I'm only watching on television, I'm grateful for their presence.

Anyways, on to the game. It should be noted that this was the first game this season in which Russell Westbrook was the starter at the point. Below are specific offensive possessions in which Durant played an important role in a scoring attempt, although I've left out several transition buckets that Durant got:

1st quarter

At the start of the first quarter, with Darrell Arthur guarding Kevin Durant, the Thunder focus on getting the ball into Chris Wilcox in the post, working against Marc Gasol. Durant doesn't factor much for the first several minutes, and Wilcox didn't do that much against Gasol. I found the strategy odd, since Gasol is an excellent defender, but whatever.

Halfway through the quarter, Arthur went to the bench and was replaced by Greg Buckner, and Durant immediately began working in the post against the smaller Buckner.

Here's how his possessions went:
- Durant gets the ball isolated at the left free throw line extended and draws a shooting foul (he makes both FT).

- After a weakside block by Rudy Gay (I forget on whom), the Thunder grab the rebound and Durant drifts out to the left wing while Gay is still under the basket. Durant gets the ball at the arc and shoots the open 3-pointer with 10 seconds on the shot clock. Gay is late closing out, but Durant misses.

- Durant gets ball on the right wing, dribbles left around screen by Westbrook, puts up a contested 22 foot jumper and misses. Probably should have waited for a better shot here.

- Out of a timeout, Durant takes Gay off the dribble from the right wing, gets into the paint and kicks out to Damien Wilkins for an open corner 3, but Wilkins decides to pass up the shot and dribbles into the paint. Durant floats out to about 14 feet and misses a tough-angled shot off of Wilkins' penetration.

- Durant posts up Gay down low on the left block, backs him down for two dribbles and makes a right-handed jump hook over him. This seems like the sort of thing Durant should be able to do regularly against a lot of 3's.

2nd quarter

Durant sits for the first 4 minutes or so, returning with 8:25 left and is matched against Javaris Crittenton at both ends.

- At 7:36, he posts up Crittenton on the right mid post and calls for the ball. Crittenton tries to deny the entry and ends up fouling Durant. Immediately, Mayo comes in for Crittenton.

- Working off the ball, Durant comes off a Joe Smith baseline screen on the left side and receives a pass from the top of the key and he catches the ball at about 12 feet just left of the paint with an open shot. Darko Milicic comes out to challenge while Mayo continues to pursue Durant around the screen, leaving Joe Smith unaccounted for. Smith begins to roll to the basket and Durant throws a bounce pass perfectly leading him, but Mayo, recognizing the opening, grabs Smith's right arm and doesn't let him get to the ball. The foul isn't called, and the play results in a turnover and a transition dunk for Rudy Gay. This was a nice play, despite the result.

- Out of a timeout, the Thunder go back to the exact same play, and this time it results in a Durant assist on a Joe Smith dunk.

- After a Grizzly time out (and an O.J. Mayo basket coming out of it), the Thunder again go to the Smith/Durant baseline screen. This time, Durant runs up from the left corner to receive the pass at the left elbow as Smith screens Mayo. Marc Gasol is in at center instead of Milicic this time, and Gasol positions himself to shut down any driving lane for Durant, but doesn't give Smith an easy lane to roll to the basket. Smith comes off the screen and settles in at about 15 feet. Durant turns down the jump shot and passes to smith, who misses a baseline jumper that he can usually make.

After that play, we see a series of possessions that feature Durant isolated on the left high post against several different defenders.

- Durant is isolated in the left high post against Mayo. He turns and faces, but Mayo pokes the ball away as Durant begins his dribble. Durant recovers the ball and ends up taking a tough 17 foot jumper while falling to his left, which he makes. He's 3 of 8 shooting at that point, but he makes 5 of his next 8 shots and ends the day 8 of 16.

- The next time down, Durant gets the ball in the exact same place (left high post), isolated against Mayo again. This time he takes his time and backs him down into the paint. No help arrives, and Durant makes an easy layup over the much shorter Mayo.

- On the next trip down, the more physical Greg Buckner guards Durant. Durant has to work a little harder for it, but again receives the ball at the left high post. Buckner plays Durant closer and more physically, so Durant turns and faces and then easily drives baseline around Buckner straight to the hoop. No help arrives, so Buckner fouls Durant as he goes up. Durant makes one of two free throws. The last three possessions show some of the versatility in Durant's game that makes it hard to guard him one-on-one if he gets the ball in a position to score. While taller defenders might have a little more success, there aren't many taller players in the league who are quick enough to stay with Durant off the dribble. If Durant starts with the ball at the top of the key, on the other hand, there are a lot more ways to shut him down or force him into bad shots.

Anyways, during Durant's free throws, the Grizzlies bring Darrell Arthur back into the game.

- On the next offensive possession, Durant is again isolated at the left high post, this time against Arthur. Durant turns and faces, but Arthur steps back and gives him the shot. Durant takes the 18 foot jumper but misses (despite the miss, it's a decent shot). The Thunder retrieve the offensive rebound and get it into Jeff Green on the right side in the post against Rudy Gay. Green sees Durant open at the three point line on the left side, but the cross court pass is intercepted.

For the rest of the quarter, Durant mostly hangs out on the perimeter while the Thunder outscore the Grizzlies 6-4.

3rd quarter

- Darrell Arthur starts the 3rd quarter, but on the Thunder's first possession, Durant gets fouled by Arthur in transition and makes both FT. The foul sends Arthur back to the bench, forcing Gay to defend Durant again.

- Later, after a defensive switch caused by a Durant screen, Durant finds himself posting up Mike Conley. Unfortunately, Damien Wilkins can't get into position to get a good angle on the entry pass, so instead takes a tough 17-footer as the shot clock expires, and makes it.

After that, the Thunder again begin feeding Wilcox down low against Gasol. This takes up much of the next several possessions (with a little more success this time -- forcing back-to-back defensive 3-second violations leading to technical free throws for Durant) except for the following:

- At about 7:20, Durant gets involved again, getting a handoff from green at the right elbow and driving to the basket. From the paint, he kicks the ball back out to green, who misses a 3-pointer (leading to one of Russell Westbrook's breathtaking offensive rebounds -- he had 5 on the night).

- Durant passes from the top of the 3 point line into Wilcox at the left free-throw line extended, then cuts down to the baseline, rubbing his man off of Wilcox. He gets the pass back from Wilcox and hits the baseline jumper over Gasol.

- Durant gets a wide open dunk off a sideline out of bounds play, but I can't see how he got open because the camera was stuck on a closeup of O.J. Mayo's face for some reason.

After a few more Wilcox post-isolations, Durant gets involved again:

- At around 4:10, Durant ends up isolated at the top of the arc against Hakim Warrick, with the other four Thunder players spaced around the court. Durant takes a hard left-handed dribble and pulls up and makes the straightaway 20-foot jumper over Warrick.

- 3:36. Durant sets up in the left corner guarded by Gay, Green posts up Warrick at the right elbow, Earl Watson is in the right corner guarded by Mayo. Westbrook dribbles up to the top of the arc, guarded by Kyle Lowry, and makes the entry pass into Green, then runs down to the right corner and sets a screen on Mayo, forcing Lowry to switch onto Watson while Mayo chases Westbrook along the baseline up to the left corner, which Durant is in the process of vacating. Watson runs back up along the arc and gets the ball at the right wing from Green as Green screens Lowry, while on the weak side Durant runs up to the left wing while Wilcox moves down to the left elbow and Westbrook arrives at the left corner. Wilcox picks off Gay as he chases Durant, and Watson passes the ball to Durant at the wing. With Mayo sticking to Lowry in the corner and Gay stuck behind Green, there is a wide open driving lane and Durant doesn't hesitate, taking the ball straight to the hoop and getting fouled by Gasol as he goes up for the shot.

- At 1:45, Durant gets the ball at the right wing, and tries to drive. He loses the handle and the play results in a backcourt violation turnover. This is significant since it's one of the only times in the game he tries to attack from the right side, and it doesn't go well.

- :40, Durant gets the ball in the left post with good position against Gay and quickly turns and shoots and misses badly. I'm assuming he was going for the 2-for-1, because he could have gotten a much better shot if he had taken a little longer.

4th quarter

Durant sits out the first half of the quarter, and comes in at about 6:06 with the Thunder down by 1, 92-91. He spends the fourth quarter in a very small lineup with Jeff Green, Earl Watson, Russell Westbrook, and Desmond Mason.

- 3:20. Durant gets the ball in the low right post, misses a turnaround baseline jumper (there's that right side again).

- The next time down, Durant gets the ball isolated in the left high post, faces up and drives baseline, and gets to the basket easily with a left-handed drive, and is fouled in the act of shooting.

- On the next offensive possession, Durant gets the ball in the exact same position, and again easily faces and drives with his left to the hoop, but this time help arrives and Durant gets called for a charge at the basket.

After that, the Grizzlies turn the ball over and Durant gets fouled in transition. The subsequent free throws put the Thunder up by 7 with 48 seconds left, and after that it is a free throw shooting contest.

The Grizzlies' help defense wasn't great in this game (and even though Durant exclusively drove baseline when he drove, the Grizzlies were unable to shut off the baseline penetration), but it was still possible to see some of the possible advantages to playing Durant in lineups with an extra shooter. A lot of those isolations in the left high post were possible because there was less congestion down low, giving Durant the option of driving or backing his man down to the paint, in addition to taking the shot. Because the Memphis rotations were late most of the time, I didn't get a chance to see how well Durant would pass out of a double team if he got in close to the basket, but that will be key now that Damien Wilkins (shooting 40.9% from 3 this year) is in the lineup with him (in addition to Jeff Green, who is still shooting an impressive 46.9% from 3 this year). In this particular game, Oklahoma City went on runs of 10-0 and 5-0 in the fourth with the small lineup of Durant/Green/Westbrook/Watson/Mason. That won't always work, but it was nice to see the coach giving it a shot. Defensively, Durant might be better equipped to guard forwards instead of guards since he lacks the quickness to do the latter (in this particular game, Durant was able to spend a lot of time guarding Arthur and Buckner, who aren't really offensive threats, and that allowed him to rest/roam on defense. When he did end up matched up against Rudy Gay, he struggled). However, without an extra big in the lineup, Durant will be relied upon more on the defensive glass, and he'll need to improve there in order to make this change work.

Bynum
On Sunday, the Lakers hosted the Toronto Raptors. I was interested in this game since the Lakers have recently struggled defensively a bit with teams who have bigs who can contribute from outside the paint. Coupled with penetrating guards, these perimeter bigs have drawn the Lakers' shotblockers out of the paint and left it open for smaller guards, exposing the Lakers' inability to stop dribble penetration. These weaknesses were apparent recently in games against Detroit and Sacramento. The Raptors don't have the sort of penetrating guards that would be able to take advantage of the vacated painted area that Detroit (Iverson) and Sacramento (Salmons, Udrih) have, but I thought it would be interesting to watch how the Lakers dealt with Chris Bosh and Andrea Bargnani anyways.

While the Lakers played decent defense overall, they occasionally struggled staying in front of Roko Ukic and repeatedly lost track of Anthony Parker. Altogether, the Lakers allowed 32 points in the paint. But even though I started out watching for guard penetration, what I was most impressed by and distracted by was just how well Andrew Bynum took to the challenge of guarding Chris Bosh.

Bosh has been making a case for himself as an MVP candidate this year, with 27 points and 10 rebounds a game and shooting 54% from the field. But Bynum held Bosh to 12 points on 4-13 shooting, and 4 turnovers in 37 minutes. With help behind him, Bynum kept Bosh out of the paint most of the night (with the exception of a couple of memorable Bosh dribble-drives along the baseline), and challenged shots much farther away from the basket than he's used to. Bosh shot 2 for 8 on shots outside the paint, excluding his lone three-point attempt (which he made), and shot 1 for 4 inside the paint. Some quotes:

And if you like what you saw, credit the Captain with a big assist. After watching Bosh draw a foul against Drew and can a 21-footer in his face in Toronto's early possessions, he gave Bynum some advice during the first time out. Smiled Bynum, "Kareem was like, 'Make sure that you stay within the arm length of him and play his left hand, before he even makes a move, play him on to he left side.' And it worked."

Bosh on the defense:

"They come from that bottom spot and take every pass away except the furthest pass, which is in the corner and the backboard is in the way. I have two seven foot defenders on me. It was very tough."

It remains to be seen how the Lakers will adjust if Bynum is consistently guarding a threat outside the paint and the opposition has a player who can regularly get past the perimeter D, but tomorrow night's matchup against the Pacers might be a nice test. With Rasho Nesterovic and Troy Murphy stretching the floor, T.J. Ford and Danny Granger should find plenty of opportunities to get into the paint without any shot-blockers there to meet them. I would worry specifically about Ford.

An unrelated aside
He's only played 13 games so far, but Devin Harris is averaging 25 points (on 49% shooting), 6.4 assists, and only 2.1 turnovers per game. His offensive efficiency -- 129 points per 100 possessions -- is unheard of for such a high usage (he uses 28.4% of his team's possessions) player. Historically, the only players who've ever kept up anything close to that level of efficiency at such a high usage rate for an entire season are Michael Jordan (1990-91) and Adrian Dantley (1983-84). We can probably expect Harris to come down to earth a little bit at some point, but you might want to keep an eye on him just in case.

Happy Birthday, Chick!

2008-11-27T09:29:00.000-08:00

On this date in 1916, the greatest play-by-play man ever was born. Happy birthday and RIP, Chick Hearn!

For non-Laker fans, Chick Hearn was the play-by-play man for the Lakers from 1965 all the way through their most recent championship year in 2002 (and he never missed a game, working 3,338 games in a row, making A.C. Green seem like a wimp). His broadcasts were on both radio and television through the magic of simulcast, and he gave the basketball world such popular phrases as "slam dunk," "air ball," and "throws up a prayer...", as well as tons of other colorful and descriptive phrases. Here's a link to a collection of classic Chick-isms, although they make much more sense when you hear them than read them, so try browsing through the Old Golden Throat YouTube Channel.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are some old highlights:

Other favorites:

Magic faked him into the popcorn machine! He's got butter all over him!

The game's in the refrigerator! The door is closed, the lights are out, the eggs are cooling, the butter's getting hard, and THE JELLO'S JIGGLING!

And finally, here is a strange rendition of the Wazzup! commercials featuring the early 2000's Lakers:

Checking up on Nene

2008-11-25T22:30:00.000-08:00

When Marcus Camby was traded ("traded" might be a bit generous -- let's just say "sent") to the Los Angeles Clippers this summer, most of the stories were about Camby and his Denver teammates being miffed at the move, and the Nuggets trying to get under the luxury tax. Then, once the season started, other high-profile trades (Allen Iverson-Chauncey Billups, the Knicks deals) took the spotlight, and somewhere along the way the story of the man who took over for Camby got lost. We've maintained here at fruithoopz that, although Camby is a nice player, he might have been overrated due to his gaudy block and rebound numbers, and that Nene could, if healthy, do a solid job providing a lot of what the Nuggets have lacked in recent years.

So, 14 games into the Nuggets' season, let's take a look at what a healthy Nene has been doing. And healthy is the key word here -- Nene leads the Nuggets in minutes played so far this season, and is having the sort of start that could, if sustained, lead Denver fans to forget about Camby altogether.

Offense

At the offensive end, Nene has shown a few incremental improvements this year. For starters, he has a much-improved jumpshot. He's shooting a very impressive 48.8% on shots outside of 8 feet this year. For comparison, last year Camby, who shoots much more frequently from outside and has an offensive identity built around being able to hit outside shots, shot 37.7% on shots from more than 8 feet last year, and Nene himself, in his last healthy season in 06-07, shot 27.4%. Chances are that Nene's percentages will come down somewhat as the year goes on, but considering the fact that he's also shooting a career-high 74.6% from the free throw line (he's only shot 65.1% over his career), it's clear that Nene has improved his shooting ability somewhat. His shot chart shows how well he's playing the pick and pop game at the top of the key (90% of Nene's jump shots are assisted):

As is apparent from above, Nene continues to be extremely effective from inside, as he has been throughout his career. All in all, Nene has proved efficient enough to lead the league in field goal percentage and come in second in the league (behind only Delonte West in Cleveland) in True Shooting Percentage. He's scoring 15.4 points per game, while only taking 9.4 field goal attempts.

Nene continues to be active offensively, also, and takes 35% of his shots in the first 10 seconds of the shot clock.

Defense

While Marcus Camby was known for roaming for blocked shots and always accumulated large totals in that department, to the point of winning Defensive Player of the Year a couple of years ago and leading the league in blocks per game for three years in a row, Nene has been known as a better position defender in the post (some fans might recall Nene doing an admirable job guarding Tim Duncan a couple of years ago in the playoffs). The statistics bear this out, as this year Nene has held opposing centers to 11 points per 48 minutes on just 41.8% shooting. Again, as a comparison, last year Marcus Camby allowed opposing centers to score 19.3 points per 48 while shooting 52.5%.

In terms of defensive rebounding, Nene has not produced as much as Camby individually, but one very interesting feature of Camby's absence has been the move toward accomplishing defensive rebounding as a team. Currently, the Nuggets are rebounding 72.2% of their opponents' misses, which mirrors their 72.1% rate from a year ago, despite the fact that Camby rebounded 31.1% of opponent misses last year, while Nene, as his replacement this year, only corrals 18%. Looking a little more closely at the numbers, we notice that last year Camby's presence on the court only led to an increase of about 1.2% in defensive rebounding rate compared to when he was off of it, despite his prodigious individual rebounding numbers (meanwhile, this year the Nuggets see an increase of 9.1% in defensive rebounding rate when Nene is on the court vs. off of it). This year, the most glaring contributors to take over some of Camby's rebounding load are Carmelo Anthony and J.R. Smith, both of whom are on track to record career highs in defensive rebound rate and defensive rebounds per game. I've posited here before that many of Camby's gaudy rebound totals in recent years have been partly a result of a scheme that left Camby alone to secure rebounds while other players leaked out in transition. So far this year, Denver is averaging 5 fewer possessions per game (99.7 last year, 94.7 this year), meaning they're pushing the pace a little less this year (another way of looking at it: they're taking 35% of their shot attempts in the first 10 seconds of the shot clock this year, vs. 39% last year), and the entire team is involved in securing defensive rebounds.

(As a sidenote, how impressive would it be if Carmelo Anthony continues to average 8.9 rebounds per game, as he has so far this season?).

The Overall Effect

All told, Nene has the highest plus/minus rating (the difference between how the team performs when he's on the court vs. off of it) on the team, the second highest Player Efficiciency Rating or PER (behind Chauncey Billups) on the team, and leads one of the better teams in the Western Conference in minutes played. As long as he's healthy, the Nuggets shouldn't miss Marcus Camby.

The BFF Theory and other thoughts

2008-11-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

The BFF Theory

I watched the short-handed Knicks on Friday against the Bucks. The game wasn't particularly interesting -- Luc Richard Mbah a Moute and Ramon Session continue to be fantastic, pretty much all of the Knicks besides Chris Duhon had off-shooting nights (including some questionable shot selection from Wilson Chandler). Malik Rose lost the battle of the Maliks to Malik Allen.

But the story of this particular game wasn't the score, it was (once again) Stephon Marbury. He had to dress for the Knicks to avoid a forfeit as they wait for their new players to show up, but apparently refused to play. Most of the coverage of the event is focusing on the bizarre angle or the "Marbury-as-team-cancer" angle, so I'll ignore that. Instead, I'm concerned about how we're finding this story out. The story comes directly quoted from Mike D'antoni, while Marbury is refusing to comment (when has he ever refused to comment?). So Mike: why are you telling us this? Are we supposed to hate him? Feel sorry for you? I don't know, but I refuse to play along.

Anyways, since Marbury didn't play we saw Nate Robinson play 41 minutes and Anthony Roberson play 17. Robinson was active but off -- shooting 7-21 with 4 turnovers, seeming generally distracted, and I was wondering: is there any study of players immediately after their BFF gets traded away? We saw Rip Hamilton have his Chauncey Billups taken away earlier this season, and he has struggled at times, and now we see a distracted-looking Nate Robinson playing after losing his BFF Jamal Crawford. Thoughts?

In other news:

I was watching this snippet of an interview with Rasheed Wallace:

And it occurred to me -- Rasheed Wallace seems like the perfect elder friend to understand the life of Kwame Brown. Like Brown, Wallace has made a career out of not quite living up to the lofty expectations of others, but unlike Brown, Wallace has made a satisfying all-star career for himself out of his insistence on being exactly who he wants to be (not Kevin Garnett or Tim Duncan, but Rasheed Wallace). I really think Brown could find some peace by learning from Wallace.

I watched two Kings games (both losses) over the weekend, and I am super-impressed by rookies Jason Thompson and Bobby Brown. And Donte Greene seems like a poor man's Kevin Durant, and I don't know if that's a compliment or not.

Warriors rookie Anthony Randolph might be some kind of superhero who lurks in the shadows, jumps out intermittently to cause all manner of devastation, and then just as quickly disappears back into the shadows. On Friday (Pilipino Night at the Oracle Arena!), in 13 minutes, he did this: 10 points, 9 rebounds, 4 blocks, 1 assist, 1 steal, 2 turnovers, 2 fouls. In 13 minutes!

Speaking of superheroes, Trevor Ariza!! I don't know the proper imagery for what he does on the court -- he's a tornado of activity. He's not yet the sort of lock-down man defender he might become one day, but what he does fits in perfectly with the Lakers' team defense. On offense, he's added a couple of features to what he did last year (relentless offensive rebounding and cutting to the basket). I've pointed out the improved jumpshot already, but I haven't mentioned how much he's improved his ballhandling. That improvement shows up statistically in the fact that he's on pace to average a career-high in assists per game and assist percentage as well as a career-low in Turnover percentage (turning it over on just 8% of his used possessions).

There were a couple of coaching changes in the league also, as Eddie Jordan of the Wizards and P.J. Carlesimo of the Thunder were both canned. Both moves were, I think, pretty expected, so not much to say here. Here's an introduction to the Thunder's new coach, and here's another - that latter link includes a pretty insightful look into Kevin Durant and Carmelo Anthony. More on the Wizards' move later.

And I finally got a chance to check out the Cavaliers' new and improved offense when they played the Hawks this weekend. I'll write about it in a later post, but in the meantime, you can learn a lot about it through these two posts.