Archive for the 'Analysis' Category

According to ESPN's MVP Watch, Steve Nash is currently your frontrunner in the race for the NBA's most prestigious individual award, and our own MVP tracker doesn't disagree much -- it lists Nash second behind the incumbent, LeBron James. Could it be that Nash is on track to capture his the third MVP of his career, giving him the same number of trophies as Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, & Moses Malone (and more than Tim Duncan, Karl Malone, & Bob Pettit)?

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There's a surprising name atop the Southeast Division these days, and it's the Miami Heat, winners of 3 straight and 6 of their first 7 games. How have they been doing it? Well, with Dwyane Wade powering the attack (via 31.8 pace-adjusted P/40) you might think they were an offensive team, but it's actually been their 3rd-ranked defense that's staking Miami to the hot start. After the jump, check out the box score-based defensive stats for the Heat so far (league average pts/possession = 105.9):

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Today at ESPN, J.A. Adande wondered if Kobe Bryant is playing better now than ever before, ultimately concluding that if not, then he's doing a pretty darned good approximation of his peak. Well, that's a sentiment I can agree with -- Kobe Bryant is nothing if not mega-consistent, and this year he's defying both the aging curve and the natural complacency you'd expect from someone who just won his 4th title. Take a look at his career numbers, adjusted for pace (after the jump):

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Today I would like to unveil a new feature on the site: the NBA MVP Award Tracker. Before I say much more, let me get two disclaimers out of the way:

• The NBA MVP Award Tracker ranks candidates based on a model built using previous voting results. This list does not represent the opinion of this site. Rather, these are the players that the voters are likely to target.
• I am not trying to come up with a formula to pick the MVP Award winner. In my opinion it would be silly to use a single formula as the basis for determining who should win an award.

Got it? Good. Now moving on…

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Back in September '06, Doug Drinen wrote a post over at PFR about how Tom Brady would have to spread the ball around in the passing offense more than ever before after the Patriots traded away their #1 receiver, Super Bowl XXXIX MVP Deion Branch (yes, there was a time when Branch was New England's #1 receiver... what would he have been, like, the #4 receiver on the '07 Pats?). Anyway, the post looked at which historical teams had spread the ball around most amongst their receiving corps by looking at how balanced a team's top 6 pass-catchers were in terms of receiving yards, with the '89 Bears coming out on top.

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From the files of, "Gosh, the wacky things you find in the plus/minus data"...

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The b-ball blogosphere has been full of Kevin Durant chatter this weekend, after Wayne Winston criticized the young Thunder star for his poor adjusted plus/minus numbers. TrueHoop's Henry Abbott called Durant's rather pitiful APM performance to date (it was -8.62 last year, which is just ridiculously awful) a "conundrum", and there's really no other way to frame the situation than to say that apparently Durant's on-court impact is not matching that which you'd expect from his gaudy box score stats or his considerable basketball talent. In other words, he should have a better APM than he does.

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Quick, name the NBA's leader in minutes played over the past four seasons...

OK, turn in your answers!

I see a lot of Kobe Bryant... LeBron James... a stray Joe Johnson here and there. But the answer is actually:

Andre Iguodala.

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This week, the news Knicks fans have been hoping to hear finally came: David Lee and Nate Robinson re-signed with the club, each inking 1-year deals in the $5-7 million range that (most importantly) will not interfere with the Knicks' long-awaited free agent pursuit of LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, or any of the other headliners in the star-studded FA class of 2010.

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No, this isn't meant to excoriate new Hawk Jason Collins in the same brutal fashion as when we went after Desmond Mason a few weeks ago (BTW, sorry Des, but man, you've sucked for four years now)... In fact, I was once a big Jason Collins supporter because of his tremendous defensive impact, as quantified by his adjusted +/- and his on/off team defensive efficiency numbers. And I wasn't the only stat guru high on Collins' D, either. But in recent years, it's been harder and harder to find anything redeeming about Collins' play, even on defense. His 2-year adjusted plus/minus, one of those "hidden impact" numbers where Collins once thrived, was an horrifying -8.66, meaning that for every possession he was on the floor, he'd cause an otherwise average team to play like a 20-win one. Yikes.

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