2016-2017 NBA Thoughts (1,753 views)

[eric]

stats c/o basketball reference and nbawowy

Dellavedova has had an odd little career. He was an exceptionally efficient scorer and a good but not great passer in college, and in the one year he played with the pre-LeBron Cavs he was stuck behind Jarrett Jack, Dion Waiters, etc. on the depth chart... but this was a Mike Brown coached team so we shouldn't take that too seriously. He continued his college form with 47% shooting on long twos and 37% on threes and improved his passing to around 3 ast:tov. All in all a pretty straightforward backup PG.

He had his little coming out party in the 2015 Finals (even though his box score stats were lol terrible), and kept it rolling in the next regular season where he had an amazing +8 on/off, and his play was a big reason Kyrie ended up with -0.2 in that category. If we look at the starters (Kyrie JR LeBron Love Tristan) over 549 minutes they scored 1184 points per thousand possessions and allowed 1053. That +13 is to use a technical term a really friggin' good margin, but if you swap Delly in for Kyrie in that lineup over 200 minutes it goes 1238 against 976 for a comical +26. The sample sizes aren't huge but the point here is that Delly is a quality point guard, certainly overqualified to be a backup.

Where things get weird is that after playing 25 minutes a game in the regular season, his minutes dropped to 12 in the playoffs, and dropped even further to 8 in the Finals with even that only coming in garbage time after game two... in favor of MO WILLIAMS! Mo was good for about a year and a half back when Bush was President. He was as should surprise no one an absolute disaster, the Cavs being outscored by 15 per 100 with him on the court, and still Delly got a fat DNP-CD in game seven.

That's weird!

But in any event he signed his deal with Milwaukee and left the Cavs without any real backup point guard. So far they seem to be using Iman Shumpert in that role, which is kind of a shock. He does plenty of defense against point guards, and in year one of the LeBron Cavs did that pretty much full time when he started at shooting guard. It's hard to measure but he seems to do fine. Offensively, woof. He gets less than 1.5 ast:tov on his career which is bad even for shooting guards, let alone point guards. He had a little more passing volume in college but the efficiency was still very poor.

The Cavs of course have a huge amount of non point guard playmaking in LeBron and Love, and so far their rotation seems set to have Iman always be on the floor with Love when he's playing point guard: of the 12 minutes Iman has played without Kyrie, 11 have seen Love on the floor too. This makes a lot of sense. It's not that hard to throw a post entry pass, although a shocking number of NBA players struggle with it, and Love's shooting in the pick and roll covers up Iman's relative lack of playmaking/penetration.

I feel like they're gonna need a traditional point guard somewhere along the way. When Shumpert was concussed in the Knicks game they resorted to DeAndre Liggins. That's not gonna cut it, and you gotta rest LeBron and Love sometimes so "we'll just have our stars do all the playmaking" isn't gonna cut it either. It's an interesting plan, we'll see how it goes as the season progresses.

[Odin]

nice

[MJ]

Orlando is he worst team in the NBA

[eric]

Brook Lopez was never a good mid range shooter. Okay? Never. Over the eight years of his career before now he took 16% of his shots from long two and made just under 40%. That's bad.

This year he's taken a single step backwards. Instead of 16% long twos 1% threes, he's taking 1% long twos 32% threes. He's only making threes at 33% - not good even for a big man in Barack Obama's NBA, but the point is that 3 * .33 > 2 * .4 by a wide margin.

This in a nutshell is why long twos are so dumb. Not because three is greater than two, but because three is so much greater than two that it overwhelms the hit you take on your field goal percentage. And the common refrain that threes take you away from your rebounding duties is dumb for the same reason. 22 feet or 23 feet, you're not getting any offensive rebounds, so you may as well stand at 23 feet and get 50% more points per shot and 500% tighter defense. What does that mean? You take one step inside the three point line like a bozo, your defender will take five steps in and chill right by the paint. Why wouldn't he? You taking a 40% two is a winning play every time for the defender.

[eric]

Ten Game Hot Reads

The Pelicants

The Pelicans aren't as bad as they seem. Pythagorean theorem puts them at a 3-7 record: not great by any means, but better than their 1-9. Common sense tells us that superstar Anthony Davis is laboring under the weight of a dismal rotating door supporting cast of deplorables.

OR IS HE???

Last year Anthony Davis had a negative on/off, a measurement obtained by subtracting from a player's ± that of his team's when he is sitting. Ostensibly this controls for a player's teammates though of course playing time is not randomly distributed and yadda yadda yadda. The point is that negative is still a pretty bad sign, and so far this year he's at a mere +1. Even more shockingly, the pu pu platter that is the rest of the Pelicans' starting lineup to a man have better on/offs than him: Solomon Hill +2, Tim Frazier +4, E'Twuan Moore +5, and the Great Omer Asik +19.

I don't expect those numbers to continue. I expect Davis to have the best numbers on the team by the end of the year. My point is only that "narrowly has the best numbers on a bottom three team" is not evidence of superstardom. We were all in a big ol' dang rush to crown Davis after his excellent 2015 season, then in 2016 he was merely a good player. There's only so much you can hang on supporting cast, I think we should take the Pelicans' results this year seriously and if they're cellar dwellers again start to ask if Davis is as much a part of the problem as he is the solution.

[eric]

Ten Game Hot Reads

The Warriors: Ultimate?

The Warriors have fallen off in a big way from last year, and it starts at the defensive end. The Warriors ranked top six in DRtg the past three seasons - only other team that can say that is the Spurs. The Warriors' DRtg is currently 17th in the National Basketball Association, and against an extremely soft schedule whose average ORtg rank is 20. That's not gonna get it done.

The big question going into the season was how they would integrate Durant into the offense. So far the hit in touches has been reasonably egalitarian. Year over year has seen Curry go from 40 to 33, Durant from 30 to 22, Draymond from 29 to 26, and Klay staying at about 11. Previous super teams have gone with an odd man out strategy, where one player takes a big hit and the others stay pretty much the same: Allen in Boston, Bosh in Miami, Nash in Los Angeles, Love in Cleveland. It'll be interesting to see how this dynamic unfolds if expectations continue to exceed results.

On/off paints an interesting picture as well:
-Zaza Pachulia has been an absolute albatross, posting a brutal -15 so far. "But the Lineup of Death!" you might protest. That's a good story, but Bogut posted a positive on/off all four years he was in Golden State, so no. Zaza is just terrible.

-Klay is at -2. You expect him to turn that around once his shot starts falling, but this is the thing about Klay. He's a mediocre passer, a bad rebounder, and his defensive rep is overstated. If he's not scoring with incredible efficiency he really doesn't give you anything.

-Durant is at +9, which is by no means a bad number, it's actually better than all but two years he posted in his time in OKC and Seattle. The concern I see is team ast% on/off: when he walks on the court the Golden State offense ast% drops by 5%, the biggest drop of any rotation player. What makes this number especially worrisome is that Curry and Draymond increase the Golden State ast% by 6% and 11% respectively, and at least one has been on the court for 67% of Durant's minutes. What this all means is that Durant's ball stopper urges are much greater than even the very pointed math shows, which is yet another source of potential friction as the season wears on.

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Then again, maybe they don't need to pass as much when Durant's on the court, maybe his mere presence allows them to get just as good looks anyway. One way we can measure that is to look at the number of field goal attempts that are corner threes, open threes, and catch and shoot threes. It turns out those ratios (in order of importance) are well correlated with ORtg, and it further turns out that they're down across the board year over year for the Warriors: 7% for the first two, 1% for the last. Obviously the 2016 Warriors present a very high standard, and it is still early for the feeling out process (though I should point out not that early for sample size accrual).

The net is that when you look past the highlights and dig into the numbers there are multiple causes for concern in Golden State.

[kn88]

Fact: Beal's contract is already one of the worst in NBA history.

[eric]

Ten Game Hot Reads

Get Pumped for the Timberpups

Tom Thibodeau is a great coach. He ran some really putrid offense in Chicago but that's massively not the case in Minnesota. There's tons of movement, off ball action, crisp passing. Maybe he came to pace and space Jesus during his sabbatical, or maybe the problem in Chicago wasn't the coach but the personnel: you can only do so much with a lineup featuring Derrick Rose, Keith Bogans, and Taj Gibson. In any event I was very pleasantly surprised by what I saw on offense. He's leveraging his players' strengths and covering up their weaknesses, and nobody brings more of both to the table than...

Andrew Wiggins! The strides he's made this year are astonishing. Obviously his 3P% is going to dip but Gaussian noise can only bring it down to 37% at 95% confidence, if he can shoot it that well he'll have a very long career. He gets tremendous elevation on his jump shots and his balance looks great this year, so there's no reason to think he can't shoot it at a decent percentage. His finishing at the rim has dipped slightly and he's not getting there as often, but I would anticipate those bouncing back and he's still drawing a ton of fouls.

Now the bad news. The proportion of his field goal attempts that are threes has come up this year but it's still well below league average. He still doesn't have a good feel for the game: where to go, when to go there, how to get there. Some of this can be coached around, but not all. For example, Thibs is running a ton of cross screens for Wiggins and Towns under the basket. This is a fairly common action, but what makes it unusual is that Wiggins is the one setting the screens, getting Towns open for jumpers. This is smart for so many reasons. It doesn't fall into the trap of dogma, it makes a basic adjustment for the team's personnel. It keeps Wiggins active and moving, which keeps his defender active and moving. This is critical because if he's not involved in a play he'll stand around staring off into space, which is a step up from last year when he was hunched over with his hands on his knees, but only barely.

Like I said, though, coaching only goes so far. One play in particular stood out to me. Dunn brings the ball up the court, Wiggins at the right elbow Dieng on the left, Towns a little lower than Wiggins. LaVine sprints in a circle getting brush screens from each player, throwing in a stutter step for good measure. He's not going to catch the ball and shoot in rhythm sprinting away from the basket, but that's not the point. The point is to leverage his athleticism and either force his defender to expend disproportionate energy or give up and switch, which gives you a mismatch somewhere. The play is set so that as soon as he gets the ball Dieng is ready to screen for him coming back the other way, just a brutal gauntlet for the defender.

That alone would make it a good play, but as LaVine goes past the Towns screen Towns resets and screens for Wiggins to pop to the corner. The ball's not going to Wiggins, and Wiggins hasn't really proven he can shoot yet anyway, but again that's not the point. The point is to keep everyone involved and moving, which keeps every defender involved and moving. Great play! The problem is Wiggins doesn't pop to the three point corner, he pops to one step inside the three point line. Ugh! His defender glances at him and promptly camps out next to the paint. He won't be able to strongly contest if the ball skips to Wiggins, but he can contest a little, and a contested long two is always a win for the defense. Wiggins only needs to take one step back and he fundamentally alters the shape of the defense, and it would be so easy to do so, which makes this and his "come off the pick and roll and take a 22 foot two" routine so frustrating. (LaVine ended up drilling a step back three on this play so the extra paint defender didn't matter this time, but still.) He still jogs back in transition, he still doesn't have his hands up on defense. Doesn't matter how long your arms are if your hands are down, doesn't matter how fast you can sprint if you aren't in fact sprinting.

Going to a broader view, he's still a very poor passer and an astonishingly poor rebounder given his athleticism, and I don't see those ever changing because they both fundamentally come from the same flaw: he doesn't have a feel for the game. The rebounding isn't that big a deal because he's a guard, but the passing is a very big deal if his shooting turns out to be a mirage. You just can't be a star perimeter player without two of penetration, passing, and shooting.

Going to an even broader view, his PER has risen in step with his USG. That's a lot better than lagging behind, but he's still at -10 which is not good. His WS/48 have gotten above league average, but not by a heck of a lot, and it's getting harder and harder to take him seriously as a good defender when the Timberwolves as a whole are one of the worst defensive teams in the league.

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I really hope Minnesota sticks with Thibs. He seems to have addressed all the problems he had in Chicago, and all this youth is at a critical stage. By basketball-reference.com's simple rating system the Timberwolves are in a dogfight for the 6-7-8 playoff seeds, and I would only really worry about Portland catching them from below. Get some playoff reps, give Thibs another training camp to implement his system, and the future is bright.

[eric]

Ten Game Hot Reads

How Cavalier

Cavs are dominating just like everyone expected. There are two interesting wrinkles so far that might be related.

First, the Cavs don't have a backup point guard. They just don't. After playing 518 of their 3971 minutes last year without one of the big three on the court (13%) they have played only 10 of 480 this year (2%). This number will rise as they get more blowouts and rest players but still the plan is clearly to be a massive drop off from last year. Shumpert is nominally the backup but of the 116 minutes he's played without Kyrie he's been on the court with LeBron (65) or Love (21) or both (25) for 111... 96%! These figures stands in stark contrast to Delly's 848 (prorated to 160 over ten games) and 81% over that span where Kyrie was healthy last year.

What might be a consequence of this or what might be the long awaited natural progression of LeBron's game is that he's finishing possessions at a career low rate so far. He doesn't have the ball in his hands any less, though, because he's being assisted on those finishes less than last year and assisting others at a far higher and career high rate. All things considered the only year he's had the ball in his hands more was 2010, when he finished with 29 points, 7 boards, 8 assists per game, 50% shooting from the field, only Michael Jordan had ever done that before or since, you know, ho hum. This year's numbers are unlikely to join such storied company, although the fact that he's doing it in year fourteen is pretty eye popping, and it'll be interesting to see if the evolution of his game pays dividends. It makes a ton of sense on paper, because beating a defense with the pass takes a lot less energy than beating them as a human battering ram, but they don't play the games on paper.

Kyrie and Love have both seen their rate of assisting others drop this year so my guess is it's LeBron maturing(/declining) more than the Cavs compensating for not having a backup point guard. This team is on cruise control until the Conference Finals anyway, so it could just be an experiment too. We shall see.

[Heynong Man]

Damian Lillard is good at basketball imo

[MJ]

Nov 16, 2016 23:30:37 GMT -6 Heynong Man said:

Damian Lillard is good at basketball imo

Mario hezonja is not

[Delap]

the Mavs depress me. So very bad.

[Deleted]

Nov 20, 2016 8:46:06 GMT -6 Delap said:

the Mavs depress me. So very bad.

At least we have our picks

[eric]

Small Sample Size Theater Update

Andrew Wiggins
Career 30% shooter from three.
Starts the season 23 of 44: 53% ± 15%
2 of 20 since: 10% ± 13%
Threw in a game with 19 field goal attempts (of which he made 2), 10 free throw attempts, 0 rebounds, and 0 assists.
This actually puts him in pretty fabulous company since 1984: only George Gervin and Allen Iverson have done the same.

Dwyane Wade
Career 28% shooter from three.
Starts the season 12 of 28: 43% ± 19%
8 of 24 since: 33% ± 19%
After posting a +8.5 on/off his first ten years has been -2.0 since, including -4.4 this year.
(Still not as bad as Rondo for these Bulls though.)

DeMar DeRozan
Still putting up fabulous and by far career high numbers from 10-16 and 16-23 feet.
Still putting up putrescent and by far career worst on/off.
Worst on/off of all twelve Raptors to play at least one second (s/o Fred VanVleet).
Is making his team worse on offense the third straight year: lower eFG%, lower ORB%, lower AST%.
Is making his team worse overall for the fifth straight year.

[eric]

watching the Knicks-Wolves game, so essentially watching the Snapper and KAT

Porzingis is so much taller and longer than everyone, even KAT, that it's unreal. He's still a half step late on a lot of rotations and it doesn't even matter. He's got good instincts and understanding of space, he just needs to catch up to all the motions and decoys in good NBA offenses.

And speaking of good NBA offenses, the Timberwolves! KAT looks so much better on offense than Porzingis, especially in the pick and roll, although the Zinger is already getting away with a ton of illegal screens which is a good sign. KAT is dramatically stronger, guys just bounce off him all over the court. That's something Porzingis can catch up on (presumably). It's also a much better understanding of offense in general though: the way he moves off of screens, the way he posts, his footwork, everything. A lot of that looks like skill, but I can't help feeling that KAT would look a lot worse playing for the putrid Knicks offense. They've both got a ball stopping wing, a point guard that can't shoot, and a non spacing frontcourt partner, but for whatever reason the Minnesota offense is visibly more healthy. Ball movement, man movement, good shot selection (outside of Wiggins), it just breathes. There's no oxygen in New York, so it's hard to really compare the two men head to head.

Still, my feeling is that KAT is better right now. Porzingis puts on 20 pounds of muscle and the gap might close, but we'll see.

[Lazy Pete]

Zinger to SG

[eric]

Everyone knows Russell Westbrook is on track to be the only player besides Oscar Robertson to average a triple double.

What less people probably know is that LeBron (and Westbrook obviously) is on track to average 8 8 and 8 which involves somewhat more but similarly distinguished company:

1961-65: Oscar Robertson
1968: Wilt Chamberlain
1981-83: Earvin "Magic" Johnson
1989: Michael Jordan
1990: Darrell Walker
2007: Jason Kidd

MJ's is by far the best season on the list (and will still be even if LeBron and Westbrook stay at their exact rates the rest of the season) and Darrell Walker's is by far the worst, but how many Hall of Famers are you on a list with pal? Anyway the weirdest thing about those 1990 Bullets was that Walker, a 6'4" point guard, led the team in rebounds... by 210!!! And while power forward was a rotating door that year, center Charles Jones (not to be confused with Charles A. Jones) (yes, they were teammates) started eighty one games.

Westbrook is also leading his team in rebounds, and like Walker it's not totally clear why - although Baby Sabo is fifth among starters (and even trails two bench guys), it seems like Steven Adams should be taking care of business. We'll see how it goes as the season goes on, but Westbrook did outrebound Ibaka last season.

[Lazy Pete]

80s and 90s era Bullets was such a weird time

[eric]

You Wanna Start Something?

Zaza Pachulia is currently on track to start 82 games and average 17 minutes in each one. That seemed unusual so I looked up how many times an NBA player has started 70+ games and played 20- minutes per on the great basketball-reference, which has a record of starts going back to the 1982 season, and it turns out there have been twelve prior to this year.

The Hatchet Men
Many of the names on this list are big men averaging 3+ fouls a game, which is really really hard to do in under twenty minutes: Jerome James (the year BEFORE the Knicks signed him in free agency), Olden Polynice, Jim McIlvaine twice, Felton Spencer, and Mark West. Marc Iavaroni narrowly missed the cut but added not blocking shots and turning the ball over a ton to his moderately high foul rate, and what's especially confusing about him starting is that he wasn't on tanking squads or anything, he was playing for the defending champion 1984 76ers and the 1988 and established good team Jazz.

The Bums
Interestingly, the upper list covers everyone up to 2001 and Jerome is the only big since, in 2005. Recently the NBA has moved the putrescence onto the perimeter with guys like Michael Curry (no relation), Dahntay Jones, Nic Batum, and Keith Bogans.

Wait a minute, Nic Batum?? Yes, in his rookie year of 2009 Nate McMillan responded to a Martell Webster season ending injury by started Batum 76 games next to Steve Blake, Brandon Roy, LaMarcus Aldridge, and Greg Oden When Healthy But Mostly Joel Pryzbilla, but only gave him 18 minutes per game. What makes this especially odd is that the guy who got the bulk of the small forward minutes was Travis Outlaw, who was basically the same player as Nic that year anyway.

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I'm on the record being a Zaza skeptic before the season started, but this is worse than I expected, and it's going to be very interesting to see how they handle rest/injury to their stars. So far Durant and Iguodala are making up the minutes gap for the bigs and the minutes of Barbosa/Rush not being made up by McCaw/Clark. Obviously that's great player to player, Durant and Iguodala are a lot better than any of those guys from either year, but you can't just play your best guys every minute. Injuries happen, rest matters.

[eric]

Early Thoughts on MVP

The MVP usually goes to the player with the most Win Shares from the top two teams in either conference. By SRS the top four teams right now are...

Cavs, Raptors, Pistons, Bulls
Warriors, Clippers, Spurs, Rockets

There are sixteen players projected to hit twelve Win Shares, with teams listed if they are in the above eight...
Kevin Durant (Warriors)
Jimmy Butler (Bulls)
Chris Paul (Clippers)
James Harden (Rockets)
Anthony Davis
Stephen Curry (Warriors)
Giannis Antetokounmpo
Russell Westbrook
Blake Griffin (Clippers)
Kawhi Leonard (Spurs)
Rudy Gobert
Kyle Lowry (Raptors)
LeBron James (Cavaliers)
Gordon Haywood
DeMar DeRozan (Raptors)
Kevin Love (Cavaliers)

It's really hard to pick an MVP out! The Warriors vote should be split, the Clippers could be, the Cavaliers and Raptors just don't have anyone in the top tier, Butler and Harden make great cases except their teams probably won't be in the top two, the Spurs and Kawhi have quietly not been as good as they look, nobody cares about any Piston, the fringe team guys (AD, Westbrook, Giannis) haven't been good enough to warrant their bad teams having an MVP. If I had to guess the finish right now I would go Paul / Kawhi / LeBron / Curry / Butler, but who knows. I wouldn't be at all surprised if voters remember last year's Finals and how much they hate Kevin Love and make LeBron the unjustified MVP, and it would be a nice makeup call from 2011, but Paul deserves a makeup after 2008 too.

Some more on the fringe guys. They're each looking at about 14 Win Shares, which is a very nice number, one of the top 200 or so seasons by Win Shares... but remember that defending MVP Michael Jordan posted 20 in 1989, averaged 33 8 and 8 on 54% shooting and just under three turnovers, led the league in scoring, and finished second to Magic Johnson because the Bulls only managed 47 wins, which seems about where the Thunder are gonna end up. We're all very impressed by Westbrook's triple doubles, but he's shooting 43% from the field and on pace for 460 turnovers. The all time record is 374. Yeah.

[FectaDEEZ]

My guess is that Harden or Russ gets the MVP this year. Too many votes spread out among Warriors and Cavs and they are both having brilliant individual seasons. If Russ averages a triple double he will get it.

[eric]

Dec 8, 2016 10:41:24 GMT -6 FectaDEEZ said:

My guess is that Harden or Russ gets the MVP this year. Too many votes spread out among Warriors and Cavs and they are both having brilliant individual seasons. If Russ averages a triple double he will get it.

i think Russ on a top two Thunder team would make a very interesting argument because his efficiency is just so abysmal. There will definitely be voters who give him #1 regardless of efficiency or team position if he averages a triple double though, which will split the vote even more, but i think enough people are tuned in to efficiency these days that he's no gimme.

Harden is having a better season but i'm just as skeptical of the Rockets breaking into the top two as the Thunder, plus he'll get a ton of comparisons to Steve Nash. it's a very dumb comparison for a lot of reasons but people will still hold it against him.

[Lazy Pete]

I think this will be a statistical aberration year where a player from a team outside of the top 2 conference finishers wins the award

[eric]

Watching the Cavs Knicks game from last night, some thoughts on top five MVP finishes.

LeBron has been in it since 2006. Eleven straight years, tied with Jerry Larry and Magic for third longest ever. Wilt's streak was 13. Kareem 16. No one will ever break Kareem's record. The next longest active streak, no s!@#, is two. (Tie. Curry and Westbrook.) But everyone knows LeBron is a top five player ever. What interested me is this:

Noah was 4th in 2014.
Carmelo was 3rd in 2013.
Rose, as you may have heard, won in 2011.

The Knicks are the only team in the NBA with three former top five finishers. Not just since 2011, top five finishers at any point in their careers.

Everyone knows the Warriors have two (Curry and Durant).
People could probably guess the Spurs have two (Parker and Kawhi).
I was a little surprised to learn the Clippers have two (Blake and Paul).

And that's it, everyone else is a singlet. Atlanta Howard, Cleveland LeBron, Dallas Dirk, Houston Harden, Miami Wade County, New Orleans Davis, and Oklahoma Westbrook.

.

Another thing that struck me was how the Cavs seemed to be bypassing Kyrie in ordinary point guard situations. Two examples.

Tristan Thompson comes down with a defensive rebound. There's some Knick half heartedly pestering him, you know how little guys are, so he's looking for the friendly shirt in the backcourt. He pivots, looks at a wide open Kyrie, pivots again and passes to a wide open LeBron instead.

Love's got the ball at the top of the key with a live dribble. LeBron is posted up on the right block. Get the ball to LeBron, duh. Kyrie again is wide open on the right wing, normally the big makes an easy pass to the point guard, point guard to the post up, basic basketball. Instead of that Love dribbles literally right past Kyrie and makes the pass himself.

It's just two plays, and it could be a fluke, and obviously there's nothing wrong with Love making a pass or starting the offense through LeBron - those are actually very very good options! It's just something that struck me.

[eric]

I noticed the other day that the Bulls starters managed two threes in a game. Thinking about it more, Taj Gibson and Robin Lopez have one career made three between them, Rondo has always been a very low volume guy, Butler and Wade are also low volume, and none of them shoot a good percentage. So I looked up made threes per game by starters, and sure enough the Bulls were dead last.

What interests me more though is the year over year change...

Last year there were seven teams below three makes per game by starters: Bulls, Heat, Bucks, Pelicans, Timberwolves, Grizzlies, Nets bringing up the rear with 2.2. This year there's only the Bulls.

Last year there was one team above seven makes per game by starters: Warriors with 10. This year there are five: Rockets 10, Warriors 10, Cavs 8, Celtics 7, Trailblazers 7, and the league average as a whole is up over one made three per game.

We're a long way from the end of the three point revolution. It wasn't over when the 07 Spurs played Duncan at center, it wasn't over when the 13 Heat played Bosh at center, it isn't over when the Warriors play Green at center. This isn't a curve that's leveling off, it's picking up speed. I think about this a lot when people try to talk up the midrange as a necessary shot when other teams want to take away the three - of course they want to, but everyone else is figuring out how to get even more threes anyways while you're taking Gimbels shots in an Amazon Prime world.

[eric]

Here's a graph of moving three year averages for the percent of field goal attempts that were attempted from three bins leaguewide:



The measurements only go back to 2001, but we still can see a very interesting effect. Up to about 2007 threes mainly increased at the expense of 10-16 footers, with 16-23 footers remaining pretty well constant. After that period 10-16 footers have continued to decline but much more gradually, and the main source has been from 16-23 footers. The total number of shots taken beyond 10 feet have remained in a narrow band of 55% ± 1%, variations much smaller than we see here.

[eric]

all stats c/o basketball-reference

Anthony Davis.
Karl Anthony Towns.
Myles Turner.
Joel Embiid.
Kristaps Porzingis.

It's the new Golden Age of Centers.

So why do their teams all stink?

.

Anthony Davis finished fifth in the 2015 MVP vote, was All-NBA First Team, and was often touted as the best player in the game. Then he didn't make All-NBA in 2016, which infamously didn't trigger a massive pay raise, and this year the Pelicans are just as terrible as ever: even when he's on the court they're outscored by three points per hundred possessions, and it doesn't take a math whiz to know that scoring less points means a losing team. They're on track to win 27 games, which even in the garbage Western Conference leaves them nine games out of the playoffs.

The answer I think is the obvious one: injuries. Take a look at the percentage of his field goals that were attempted at the rim by year:
47%
40%
35%
30%
24%(!)

His decline in dunks is even more alarming:
21%
16%
14%
15%
5%(!!!)

This is not normal. LeBron, Durant, Boogie - no scoring big I can think of sees this dramatic decline. Even Dirk's getting to the rim ability didn't fall off the table until year 13. Maybe it's still early and AD's numbers will pick up, or maybe he's still recovering from surgery, or maybe his knees have just sustained permanent damage. With his jumper also having deserted him and having never been a great defender to start with, the Pelicans' woeful standing suddenly seems a lot more explicable.

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Karl-Anthony Towns won rookie of the year, had two high flying running mates in Andrew Wiggins and Zach LaVine, was getting a great coach in Tom Thibodeau, watch out for the T Wolves! Whoops, they're even worse than the Pelicans, and their defense is horrendous. LaVine has always been criticized for his defense so there's one weak link, but take a gander at one of the many don't trade Wiggins pieces back in the day:
"He defends the whole floor."
"he’s still likely going to be one of the best perimeter defenders in the league."
"has a great chance to be a defensive destroyer"
an extended analogy comparing Wiggins to Scottie Pippen

Similarly glowing if not quite as hyperbolic praise has been heaped on Towns, and on Rubio although obviously in proportion to his much lower general media exposure. So if Wiggins is a great defender, and Towns, and Rubio, how is the team defense so bad? LaVine's no Gary Payton but he's not out there literally dunking on his own basket. Times like these call for nbawowy, which lets us see splits by team composition.

Towns, Wiggins, Rubio in general: 114 DRtg, would be even worse than the overall Timberwolf 111
Those three sans LaVine: 111, definitely better but still very poor
+13 Wiggins on/off with Towns off (that is, the defense gives up 13 more points per hundred possessions)
+07 Wiggins w/o Rubio
-03 Rubio w/o Towns
+22 Rubio w/o Wiggins
+24 Towns w/o Wiggins
+07 Towns w/o Rubio

Bottom line, probably all three of them stink. Defense is hard to measure but still. It's still early in his career so he could get good, we just need to abandon the assumption that he is good at d right now.

.

Sim Bobcat great Myles Turner is the first big in this post not to have taken a step back this year: getting to the rim more, drawing more fouls, taking more threes, putting up a sublime 1.06 pts per long jumper, makes the Pacers better on both sides of the ball. They stink but it doesn't look like he's to blame - starting two undersized guards who can't shoot is not ideal, Paul George trying to be a first option is not ideal, Nate McMillan is not ideal. There's at least six quasi-.500 teams in the East so the Pacers could easily finish anywhere from 5th to 10th, but .500 in year two isn't a big cause for concern.

.

Joel Embiid is in year one on an NBDL team. He gets a pass.
Kristaps Porzingis has to play with Carmelo and Rose. How's that goink?

.

Basketball has always been and will always be a big man's game. A player's team doesn't have to win a championship for him to be good. Eventually it does have to win games though.

[MistleTacoe]

I think The Lativian Gangbanger is gonna be a baller for years to come. KAT will be great too.

Just feel like those guys need better teammates except Turner who I don't think is that great. He got abused by Boogie last night.

[eric]

Twenty players have posted seasons with 35+ USG.

Four have done so at least twice:
Michael Jeffrey Jordan (2)
Tracy McGrady (2)
Allen Iverson (4)
Kobe Bryant (3)

Two are poised to join that club this year: DeMarcus Cousins and Russell Westbrook. That's pretty crazy, but not that crazy.

Westbrook is currently at 41.

That's crazy.

He's already one of three to post a season with 38, along with Jordan and Kobe. To jump to 41 would be like if someone in the game of the base ball set the home run record at 61 and it stood for thirty years and then it suddenly went to 66. Inconceivable, am I right? On top of all that, the top USG man has only been in the top ten of AST% six times in the 1978-present history: Jordan's 89 was eighth, TMac's 07 was ninth, LeBron's 08 was seventh, Wade was fifth in 09 and eighth in 10 and then he slapped Pat Riley in the mouth and told him to get him some f!@#ing help already (canon), then Westbrook's 15 was second.

He's first this year.

First in AST% and USG%.

Not bad.

Pretty good.

[eric]

some current statistical standings, Win Shares c/o b-r, Wins Produced c/o boxscoregeeks, RPM Wins c/o this new company i heard about called ESPN

There were fourteen players in the top twenty of all three stats. I normalized each stat to the leader and summed, so if a player led all three stats he would get a 3, if a player had half the leader's value in all three stats he would get a 1.5, and so on. The results:

2.86 James Harden
2.85 Chris Paul
2.76 Kevin Durant
2.57 Giannis Antetokounmpo
2.52 Jimmy Butler
2.44 Kyle Lowry
2.38 Rudy Gobert
2.38 Russell Westbrook
2.37 Kawhi Leonard
2.31 LeBron James
2.20 Stephen Curry
2.03 Draymond Green
1.87 Anthony Davis
1.77 Kevin Love
My feeling going into the season was that the Warrior and Raptor votes would be split and thus make it very difficult for any one of their players to get enough for MVP. That seems to be playing out with the Warriors although Curry is a lot further back than I expected, and having less wins year over year is going to cost Durant votes too. As far as composite stats are concerned there's only one Raptor worth talking about, though, and that's Kyle Lowry. DeRozan is tied for 17th in Win Shares which is very respectable, but he's 49th in Wins Produced and 59th in RPM Wins, which is not. His per game numbers have sagged and while it's obvious nobody's going to take the per game vote from Westbrook, he's no longer even ahead of Harden there. If this keeps up Lowry could get all of the Raptor vote, which could be enough this year to take home the MVP.

LeBron continues to not produce at an MVP level, which in year fourteen should surprise no one, and we should expect his numbers to dip even more once Ty Lue cuts his minutes. Additionally, Kevin Love is flirting with Minnesota Love production, and if he keeps that up the Cavs vote could justifiably be split too. There is a 0% chance Love actually wins the MVP, but he should take enough votes combined with LeBron's lack of production to prevent LeBron from doing so.

Harden and Kawhi are the only guy on their respective teams within miles of this list. (LaMarcus Aldridge shockingly isn't top fifty in any of the stats.) With Blake's injury they're the only serious contenders for the two seed, a traditional requirement for MVP, but I think that if the Spurs finish as a close enough third people are going to look at Harden's defense and Kawhi's defense and come down very strongly for the latter, so I still think it's Kawhi's MVP to lose.

The other guys continue to be on terrible teams: it would be a shock if the Pelicans made the playoffs, it wouldn't be a shock if both the Bulls and Bucks missed the playoffs, the West is so crappy that it's hard to imagine the Thunder or Jazz missing the playoffs but they still stink. What's interesting to me is how far ahead Chris Paul is of Russell Westbrook in the composite stats given how unsexy his line score is:

18 points on 46/87/43, 5 boards, 10 assists to 2 turnovers a game
vs
32 points on 43/82/34, 10 boards, 11 assists to 5 turnovers a game

Like I said the Blake injury probably takes the Clippers out of contention for an MVP level seed anyway, but I think it would have been really interesting to see how people talked about Paul vs. Westbrook. We have a lot of data telling us Paul is better on and more valuable to a better team, but we also have ten fingers so we're fascinated by Westbrook's line score. Which one of those would have turned out to be more important? What would that have said about the analytics revolution? The world may never know.