Archive for the 'History' Category

As you might imagine, Len Bias' name comes up quite a bit in Bill Simmons' new Book of Basketball. As a lifelong Celtics fan, I understand the emotions that surround the very mention of Bias' name -- for instance, my father was convinced Bias was going to be almost as good as Bird, and take the torch from Larry Legend as he extended the C's dynasty into the 1990s. (Instead, Reggie Lewis died, and we got Rick Pitino & Antoine Walker. Go figure.) So I can see why Bias is such a burning "what if?" for the NBA, and Celtics fans in particular, because he represents untapped potential and a posthumous legend that's only grown by leaps and bounds since his tragic demise. But I want to know -- coldly, rationally -- how good Bias could have legitimately been if we put down the green-tinted glasses: What were his college numbers like? What were people saying about him before the draft? In other words, I want to remove the James Dean aspect from the Bias story and focus solely on the facts at hand.

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Perhaps you've heard Keith Law's name come up this week a time or two? Well, sorry to disappoint, but this link has nothing to do with his Cy Young ballot... Instead, it's a piece about the old ABA -- basically a handful of nuggets about the renegade league that changed pro hoops forever. And of course, if you like the ABA, I'd be remiss if I didn't also highly recommend Terry Pluto's Loose Balls, one of the best sports books ever written.

Man, this was a physical series...

(more 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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As you may or may not have seen, Tim Hardaway had his #10 jersey retired by the Miami Heat last night. I don't need to tell you that any discussion of Hardaway is invariably going to lead to (if not begin with -- heck,  look at this post) the topic of the homophobic remarks he made in February 2004 on Dan Le Batard's radio show. What Hardaway said was unquestionably wrong, hateful, & ignorant, but it's unfortunate that those comments have overshadowed Tim Bug's career, because when he was in his prime the man could really play. Let's evaluate how the merits of that play stack up against the standards of the Hall of Fame...

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Last November, we used Win Shares to look back at the players who took the floor alongside the most talented offensive players over the course of their careers. Unfortunately, in that article I only looked at offensive teammate quality, and we only had Win Shares going back to the 1973-74 season. Today, though, Justin's efforts have given us WS extending back to every season for which the NBA tracked minutes (through 1951-52, in case you were wondering). So I thought now would be as good a time as any to revisit the topic of teammate quality using offensive, defensive, and total Win Shares since 1952.

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Chris Paul's new children's book, "Long Shot: Never Too Small to Dream Big," is about how a young CP3 was able to overcome his short stature to become an NBA superstar. It's a feel-good story for the whole family, I'm sure, but it also begs the question: where does Paul stand among the great small guards of all time?

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Well, it's finally here: today's the big day when we induct BBR blog favorites John Stockton & David Robinson, in addition to Michael Jordan, the greatest who ever played the game, into the Hall of Fame. And what better topic for a post than to see where this year's star-studded class ranks among the great classes of all time. The metric we'll be using, of course, is Win Shares, which luckily enough have recently been expanded to include every NBA (and ABA) season since 1951-52, the first year minutes played were tracked. So we basically have all of modern pro basketball history at our disposal now to run lists like this, which is very cool and makes this kind of exercise possible. Oh, and another note before we move to the numbers -- like we did in this article, I'm valuing an ABA Win Share at 25% less than an NBA Win Share (the reasoning behind this is explained in that article as well).

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Following up on our post from Monday, where we looked at the % of minutes played by common players between teams in back-to-back years, here's a list that uses the same methodology -- but instead of minutes played, we're looking for the smallest % of common individual possessions used (as defined by Dean Oliver in basketball on Paper) between players on a team in consecutive seasons:

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