Archive for September, 2009

Since everyone seems to be jumping on the projection bandwagon right now, here are the preliminary projected standings for 2010 (I'll explain the process at the bottom):

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Kevin Arnovitz has a nice post over at TrueHoop about Kevin Martin's "hidden" efficiency... Similar to low-batting-average/high-on-base-percentage baseball players like Carlos Pena or Dunn (at least before this year — in '09 Dunn's hitting a respectable .283), Martin's low shooting percentage obscures the awesome impact of his scoring. Like those low-average sluggers who mitigate their BA by walking a lot and hitting plenty of home runs, Martin makes up for his .420 FG% by knocking down 3-pointers at a high rate (.415 3P%), drawing a ton of fouls (his .650 FTA/FGA is downright monstrous for a guard), and making the most of his chances at the stripe (.867 FT%). In 2009 it all added up to a .601 TS% and an offensive rating of 114.9, much better numbers than you'd expect if you merely looked at his raw FG%.

I've gotta be honest, ever since John Hollinger moved to ESPN and went all digital on us, I've missed the steady presence of an NBA preview book you could hold in your hands. That's why I'm excited that our friends at Basketball Prospectus, Kevin Pelton and Bradford Doolittle, will be penning an actual hard-copy preview for this season, scheduled to be released in October. It also comes in a digital edition, similar to the way Football Outsiders released their annual this season, but I for one am going to relish the ability to take a book with me and read a preview without having to be in front of the computer.

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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Sporcle time: Can you name the all-time NBA leaders in turnovers?

Everyone knows how we love to talk about underrated players... but how about underrated Basketball-Reference tools? Because in my opinion, one of the most slept-on features on the site is the simple but amazingly useful Linkify Tool. What does it do? The name says it all -- it "linkifies" your text.

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Over at TrueHoop, Henry Abbott raises some interesting points about LeBron James' new autobiography -- co-written with Buzz Bissinger -- and talks about how James essentially blew an opportunity to tell his own story in a way we hadn't heard before (no small feat, considering a good deal of LeBron's formative years were played out before a national media audience). Instead, Henry argues, James' tale is stale, an "unnecessary" book that offers nothing we didn't already know already from the scores of LeBron bios already on the shelves. No chances are taken; everything is strictly by the numbers. Worse yet, it's apparently not all that difficult to know whose voice is telling the story -- James sometimes, but in other cases obviously Bissinger.

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From Blazers Edge, a very interesting and detailed post about the Portland offense a year ago. At first glance it seems a bit dissimilar to the stat stuff we do here (there are a lot of Xs and Os, play diagramming, and game-film analyses involved), but in the end you'll see that it's not really that different at all -- good analysis is good analysis, no matter what approach it takes... Because we're all about allowing ourselves to pause for a moment and acknowledging that the owl's claws are the same ones that once drew blood from the shoulder of Pallas.

(Hat tip to Henry and TrueHoop.)

From NBA.com, the same folks who brought you the early David Robinson highlight reel, here are some Hall of Fame-worthy plays from a young Pasty Gangsta:

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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