Archive for February, 2011

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Tom Haberstroh had a great piece at ESPN last week in which he broke down the ongoing Derrick Rose-vs-LeBron James MVP debate. To me, the key passage was this:

"Oddly enough, what's not helping Rose's MVP case is his plus-minus numbers. And implicitly, this is where most Rose supporters state their case. When his advocates ask, 'Where would the Bulls be without Rose?' the question is meant to be a rhetorical one. The obvious implication is that a Rose-less Bulls squad would instantly become a basement dweller. But rather than blindly accept it, we can actually see how the Bulls have managed without him on the court. And how have they fared with Rose benched? By beating opponents by 51 points on the season, or an average of 4.9 points every 100 possessions. Why? Whether Rose is in the game or not, [Tom] Thibodeau’s game-changing defense remains."

I don't want to get into Rose-vs-James specifically here, but I do think what Tom wrote is a very important concept to apply to all NBA MVP debates in this modern age of plus/minus.

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During Chris Bosh's brickfest last night, all I could think of was, "Wow, this is a John Starks-ian performance." Turns out it was even worse, albeit in a much less critical situation than Game 7 of the Finals.

Using offensive statistical plus/minus (OSPM), I put together a list of the most detrimental offensive games in our box score database (this spans 1987-2011 for the regular season, and 1991-2010 for the playoffs). For every game, I calculated the player's OSPM, the team's offensive rating, and what the team's offensive rating would have been had the player turned in a league-average performance. The most detrimental performances were the ones that sucked the most points from a team's offensive rating. I also added one requirement to qualify for the list: the player's offense must have cost his team a win -- i.e., with an average offensive performance from a player in his minutes, they would have outscored the opponent, but instead lost the game.

Let's use Bosh as an example. Last night, Bosh had an OSPM of -15.18, which means for every 100 possessions he was on the floor, he drained more than 15 points away from Miami's offensive rating relative to a league-average performance. Miami's actual offensive rating was 95.3, but if Bosh had just been average, Miami's rating would have been 108.5 -- meaning he cost them 13.16 points of offensive rating over the course of the entire game. Worse yet, Chicago's offensive rating was 99.6, so if Bosh had been average (or even merely below-average), Miami would have won the game. That's why Bosh qualifies for the list, because his poor offense cost his team a win.

Anyway, here are the most detrimental offensive performances in our database (mouse over column headers for descriptions):

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2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on February 24, 2011:

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It is rare for a player who just played in the All-Star Game to be dealt to another team before the end of the season, but this week it happened twice. For this week's column I took a look at some of the more recent deals involving these players:

Keeping Score: Big Trades Don’t Come With Guarantees

This column appears in today's print edition as well.

I've been thinking about this concept for a while, but I want to throw it out there for the readers and see what they think...

Everyone knows we already have a Basketball Hall of Fame. But from an NBA perspective, a lot of people think it's broken -- as the argument goes, too many non-NBA people get inducted while great NBA players are left out in the cold. So there's a growing push to create an NBA-only Hall of Fame. How do you stock such a Hall, though? It seems like the other major sports have a pretty clear focus in their induction processes: baseball's hall is largely about longevity and statistical milestones, while football's hall is heavily focused on guys who won championships and/or changed the game.

So what should the NBA's angle be? I want to propose that this hypothetical Hall be about "relevance". As in, who were the relevant players in a given season or span of seasons? Who were the essential names? When you tell the Story Of The NBA, which players would it be inexcusable not to mention? If the Hall of Fame is about celebrating the history of the league, then including the guys that fundamentally shaped the narrative is a pretty good mandate. And if we can tell the NBA's story without mentioning a certain player, it's hard to argue that he belongs in the Hall.

The good news is that you can generate the majority of this list by setting up a basic checklist of requirements. But I want to know what you think those requirements are.

Off the top of my head, here's a basic list of requirements that capture the "relevant" players each season:

• Top 3 in each season's MVP voting
• Every Sporting News MVP
• Every season's 1st-team All-NBAers
• Every Finals MVP
• Top 3 players on each NBA champion
• Best player on Finals runner-up
• Best player on team with NBA's best record
• PER leader for seasons 2000-present
• Win Shares leader for seasons 2004-present

This is the list of players generated by those criteria:

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With noted shot-creator Carmelo Anthony on the move, I was wondering which players have a hand in "creating" the highest percentage of their team's shot attempts when on the floor.

If we're just looking at a player's own shooting attempts, this is pretty easy. You can look at the percentage of team FGA a player takes when on the court (all leaders minimum 1,366 minutes):

You could also take it a step further and factor in free throws as well, calculating the percentage of each team's True Shooting Attempts (FGA + .44 * FTA) each player takes while on the floor:

But I think you need to take assists into account as well.

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Well, it's (quasi) official now: Carmelo Anthony is a member of the New York Knicks.

Finally, we can put aside the trade speculation and ask the really important questions about the deal. No, I'm not talking about how this shifts the balance of power in the East, or if 'Melo and Amare Stoudemire can coexist in the Big Apple... I'm talking about where Carmelo ranks among all-time players who were traded in the middle of the season.

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Everyone who has spent time studying historical player stats knows this phenomenon: You've seen a player's name for years, but you only know him as a series of numbers on a page. He retired before you were born, and you haven't even seen so much as a trading card with his picture on it... yet, instinctively wanting to humanize him, you imagine what he was like. You know his height, weight, all of the vital stats, everything except his ethnicity. So you make an educated guess based on his name. You now have an idealized picture in your mind's eye of the player in his prime, a man to go alongside the numbers.

The only problem comes when you do see him for the first time -- and he looks quite a bit different from the imaginary version you created years ago.

This is the concept behind Bill Simmons' Reggie Cleveland All-Stars, a "list of sports figures whose names would seem to indicate that they are of a different race or ethnicity than they actually are". Its namesake? Cleveland, a 1970s-era pitcher whom Simmons just assumed was black until learning otherwise when he joined the Red Sox.

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