Archive for the 'Layups' Category

From Ian Levy of Pickin' Splinters:

Mid-Season Anti-Awards | Pickin' Splinters

Bizarro categories include the Shawn Bradley Award for tall players who get their shots blocked, the Jahidi White Award for lowest Ast/FGA, and the Darrick Martin Award for lowest FG%.

Forbes Business Of Basketball, 2011 - NBA Team Values

According to Forbes Magazine's annual rankings, the Knicks are now the most valuable franchise in the NBA, surpassing the Lakers. NY's value went up 12% over the past year; other big gainers included the Heat, Nets, & Warriors. The biggest declines in value belonged to Cleveland (-26%) and Detroit (-25%). The Pistons and Cavs had been the 4th- and 5th-most valuable franchises, respectively, as recently as December 2009.

Forbes' numbers also show that 17 of the 30 NBA teams operated at a loss last year (compare that to the NFL and MLB, where Forbes' numbers show only two teams lost money in each sport).

Here's a fun post from Ryan DeGama of CelticsHub:

Semih Erden: Greatest Of All Time? | CelticsHub.com

In it, Ryan examines whether or not Semih Erden can eventually overtake Sean Higgins, Don Reid, and Zeljko Rebraca as the top player ever to be selected last in an NBA draft.

(Hat tip to TrueHoop for the link.)

In the absence of a runaway choice, there's an ever-growing push among traditional media members in favor of Derrick Rose's MVP candidacy -- and to be totally honest, the advanced boxscore-based stats don't see it. Rose is having a tremendous season, without a doubt, but he's currently 9th in Win Shares, 17th in WS per 48 minutes, 14th in Player Efficiency Rating, and 14th in Statistical +/-... Not exactly the most impressive MVP resume from the stathead's perspective.

However, there is one advanced metric that does validate the love for Rose: Adjusted Plus/Minus (via BasketballValue.com). Sure, the standard errors are huge, and Mike Dunleavy Jr. shows up as the 2nd-best player behind Rose (yikes!). But at least there is some numerical evidence that Rose is making Chicago better in ways that aren't being detected in his box score numbers.

I finally got around to calculating the standard errors for our team Simple Ratings today:

Then I set up a little Monte Carlo sim to estimate what is the probability of each team being the NBA's best (aka the team with the greatest "true" SRS skill). After 10,000 simulations using the estimates and standard errors above, here were the results:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here's a good post from frequent BBR commenter Imadogg at his blog:

Best Blockers in the League: Who Recovers the Block?

Dogg looked at the top shot-blockers in the NBA by blocks per game, and did some digging through play-by-play data to determine how often the blocker's own team recovered the ball immediately after the swat (this is basically the first half of the "Bill Russell stat" Simmons talks about in The Book of Basketball). For instance, 67% of the time league leader Andrew Bogut blocks a shot, the Bucks end up with possession; compare that rate to 44% for Pau Gasol at the low end of the spectrum.

Nate Silver is primarily a baseball guy. (Or is that a politics guy?) But he weighed in on basketball last weekend -- specifically, the prospect of Carmelo Anthony joining the Knicks.

Some advanced stats underrate Anthony because they assume a quality shot can be created at will, every time down the floor. The logic is that if Anthony (an inefficient scorer) doesn't shoot, the team will just find someone else who can convert at a similar rate. And since Anthony isn't the most complete player in the world when you look beyond his scoring, it stands to reason that formulas which undervalue shot creation will see little reason to pay him top dollar.

But as Nate argues, Anthony is making his teammates better by taking the pressure to create off of them. His skills allow a team to surround him with defense-minded, low-usage players that compliment him, setting up something of a division of labor on the court. Silver lends credibility to this notion by showing that when players play alongside Carmelo, their offensive efficiencies increase.

I tend to agree with Silver's premise. This is why I constantly harp on "skill curves" and usage-efficiency tradeoffs, and why offensive statistical plus-minus contains a squared term for true shooting attempts per minute -- because there's a great deal of evidence that the marginal cost of possession usage declines as a player's offensive role increases. Unlike baseball, where "usage" is evenly spread out across all players and the only concern is an efficiency metric like OPS, the ability to create "at bats" is an important consideration.

In that way, Carmelo Anthony is just the latest in a long line of players who have been confounding statistical analysts for decades (before him, it was Allen Iverson). But as Silver, Kevin Pelton, and Henry Abbott are noting this week, one measuring stick for the evolution of basketball analysis is precisely how it deals with players like Anthony. I can't say he'd be the best fit for the Knicks specifically (New York -- 7th in offense, 23rd in defense, & featuring a player who already commands 31% of possessions -- seems a curious destination for an offense-only gunner), but in general it's useful to recognize his offensive value beyond pure efficiency metrics.

As a follow-up to their post about minute-weighted team age, Hoopism took the advice of our commenters and re-ran team ages, this time weighted by Win Shares:

Mapping Average Age to Success in the NBA

Comparing side-by-side with the raw roster averages, this has the effect of allowing you to see which teams' most productive players skew especially young (Miami, Orlando, LA Clippers) or old (Phoenix, Boston, Houston).

SI's Zach Lowe has an illuminating post about one reason the 2011 Cavs are struggling so much:

"The Cavaliers are on pace to be the worst defenders of the three-point shot in league history. As we reach the midway point of the season, Cleveland’s opponents have hit 42.4 percent of their threes — by far the highest mark in the league.

...

Since the league instituted the three-point line in the 1979-80 season, only one team has allowed opponents to shoot 40 percent or better through an entire season, according to Basketball-Reference: the 2008-09 Kings, who allowed opponents to shoot 40.6 percent from deep."

Yikes. And to make matters worse, Zach goes on to provide evidence that one of the talents LeBron James took to South Beach was... you guessed it, the ability to hamper an opponent's long-range game.

Good visualization here from Hoopism:

Who is the Oldest Team in The NBA? 2010-2011

They give both the raw average of the entire roster, and the average weighted by minutes played, with a line indicating the change as a result of the different weighting. For instance, the Bulls have a lot of veterans on the team, but give more minutes to their younger players; conversely, the Cavs have a lot of young players, but give more PT to their older players.

(H/T: TrueHoop.)