Archive for the 'Layups' Category

At The Painted Area, M. Haubs lays out very clearly the case for pro hoops to have its own Hall of Fame: Many of the inductees in the current Naismith Hall are ridiculous from an NBA standpoint, the current Hall is too NCAA-centric, and we have no idea who even participates in the voting process. I have to say that I agree with him — I think the NCAA ought to have a separate Hall of Fame from the pro game, because accomplishments in one are currently being unfairly equated with accomplishments in the other, when it's clearly easier to have success in college than it is in the pros (just ask Adam Morrison, J.J. Redick, and many others).

(Hat tip to TrueHoop.)

This is apparently an old blog that hasn't been updated in quite a while, but when it was active it ran for a few years... A guy named John Marzan took the time to type in many of the player comments from the old Zander Hollander 1986 Complete Handbook of Pro Basketball. If you're an eighties-era NBA head (which I expect almost all of you are), odds are you read the Hollander books back in the day, and even if not, these are fun scouting blurbs to look back on.

With Michael Jordan's Hall of Fame induction looming, it's going to be a well-deserved lovefest this weekend for the greatest basketball player of all time. But as Henry Abbott points out at TrueHoop, with all the legitimately interesting MJ stories out there, we don't need to artificially inflate His Airness' legacy by repeating the one about his being cut from the varsity team at Laney High — especially because it isn't really true.

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.

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

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:

Sporcle! And yes, I know, there are some non-basketballers on there, too. But feel free to focus just on NBA Live and NCAA Basketball if you're a stickler.

(By the way, was anyone else disappointed that they didn't trace NBA Live's lineage back through the original Lakers vs. Celtics game? Because around these parts, we consider it all to be part of one series...)