Archive for the 'Layups' Category

Another great quiz from our friends over at Sporcle: can you name the all-time leading scorer for every franchise?

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

Let the second-guessing begin!

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.

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.

In what's really a yearly ritual for him, ESPN.com's John Hollinger gives us his picks for the All-Star Game starting lineups. The results of fan voting were disclosed here, and for the most part the fans got things right, but JH has two legit beefs: why did Allen Iverson and Amare Stoudemire get nods over Devin Harris and Dirk Nowitzki?

Be The Three has a nice stat-centric post up about the similarities (and differences) between this year's Celtics and last year's World Championship squad. Not much has changed, but they still need to find somebody to fill the James Posey & P.J. Brown roles from a year ago.