Archive for January, 2009

The reserves for next month's All-Star Game in Phoenix have been announced. And now...

Let the second-guessing begin!

This morning I woke up to the following message in my inbox:

Can Reggie Miller's HOF chance really be .037? That seems inconsistent with traditional stats and modern stats.

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Kevin Pelton of Basketball-Prospectus.com chooses his All-Star reserves. Quibbles: in the East, I would replace Rajon Rondo with Ray Allen and Vince Carter with Rashard Lewis; in the West, I would replace Shaquille O'Neal with Nene and Paul Millsap with Kevin Durant.

Back in December we went through the Keltner List for Bernard King. (Recall that the Keltner List is a series of questions designed to assess a player's Hall of Fame worthiness.) With the recent retirement of Alonzo Mourning, we thought we would dust off the Keltner List once again to see if Zo should be making plans to travel to Massachusetts in five years.

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I have some very sad news to pass along regarding Neil Paine, BBR's blogger extraordinaire. Neil's father passed away this weekend, a very sudden and unexpected event. Understandably, Neil is going to take a leave of absence for a few weeks. Neil may post from time to time, as he said it might help him deal with everything that is going on, but I am going to handle most of the blogging duties while he deals with this terrible tragedy. Everyone at Sports Reference would like to pass along their deepest sympathies to the Paine family.

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. --Matthew 5:4

In the latest installment of his great "Every Play Counts" series, Basketball Prospectus' Kevin Pelton takes a look at Shawn Marion, who was so good for so long as Steve Nash's running mate in Phoenix, only to become so ordinary alongside Dwyane Wade on the Heat. What happened to him, and why is Miami such a bad fit for his talents?

A few days ago, we linked to a post complaining about some of the All-Star fan voting injustices -- specifically, foreign voters stuffing the ballot box to get their countrymen (or prominent teammates of their countrymen) into the starting lineup. One of the most glaring examples of this bias was the fact that Yao Ming's Houston Rockets teammate, Tracy McGrady, was leading Chris Paul in the balloting among Western Conference guards despite his production (and durability) being vastly inferior to CP3's.

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A board member at APBRmetrics named "back2newbelf" recently did some research on the viability of our SRS method as a predictor of future games. The result? Over a massive 27,779-game sample, SRS outperforms regular point differential (albeit slightly) in a variety of ways.

For all of you fantasy players out there, 82games' Erik Wong hands out his 2008-09 midseason awards in his latest post. Take a bow, LeBron James and Chris Paul -- and those owners lucky enough to have been able to draft them.

After adjusting for his teams' perpetually fast pace, Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus finds that Mike D'Antoni, frequently characterized as an "all offense, no defense" coach, is actually not a bad defensive coach at all -- in fact, he frequently takes bad defensive players and molds them into a league-average D.