Last night Kobe missed more than he made and committed seven turnovers. And the Lakers also lost the game. But Kobe did score 33 points. So Chris Mannix – of CNNSI.com – wrote the following:
Stellar Bryant can’t rescue Lakers
Okay, I am going to avoid writing another lengthy post on Kobe. But feel free to write your own.
- DJ
P.S. Just to get you started… Kobe has shot below 40% from the field in Boston (yes he has taken 51 shots and only made 20).
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This afternoon – somewhere around 4pm EST – my phone rang in my office. On the other end was Tom Van Riper of Forbes.com. Tom was working on a story on over-paid athletes and he wanted to ask me a few questions. Our conversation lasted only a few minutes, and in that time we touched upon why teams might overpay for aging stars and the inconsistency of NHL goalies (the latter topic is covered in Stumbling on Wins).
After the call was over I went back to work (I still have to put some finishing touches on some studies that will be presented at the Western Economic Association meetings at the end of this month).
And then a few hours later, Tom posted the following at Forbes.com.
As you can see, the words I spoke at 4pm EST were posted at the Forbes.com website at 6:30pm. Not sure I can remember a phone interview with this sort of turn-around.
By the way, Tom noted in our conversation that the last story he wrote that mentioned Stumbling on Wins – Is LeBron Really the Best – received more than a million hits. Of course, it helped that this story was picked up by Yahoo.com. Hopefully something similar happens this time.
- DJ
P.S. One more by the way… I went to post this earlier in the evening and Word Press was down. At that point, I didn’t think the Internet was that amazing.
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Tball is an attorney practicing in relative obscurity in New Hampshire. Beyond a demanding home life, an active practice, and occasional rambling on this site, he devotes an obscene amount of time volunteering at the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Nashua (online donations are accepted). Likes include pop economics, behavioral analytics, and audio nonfiction. Dislikes include irrational, close-minded, egocentric, sports journalism posers and light beer. And please, if you have a criticism voice it – it may be helpful if I volunteer to do this again.
Dave Berri posited the other day that Jeff Ma’s intuition over statistics argument has led to Ma’s Smackdown success this year, but is hardly a formula for predicting a Celtics like upset in the future. Similarly, cherry picking a third of the season when a team played well and using that select performance to predict future performance — while ignoring two thirds of the season — is untenable except for rationalizing activity after the fact. I took that as a challenge to find a rational mathematical means of predicting the C’s advancing to the finals (*** Spoiler Alert *** I failed).
These Celtics have been compared to the Houston Rockets who won the title in 1995. That team rose from a six seed to defeat four very strong teams on their way to a championship. That year, The Dream was unavailable for a chunk of the season, but strong and healthy for the playoffs. In addition, Clyde Drexler was also unavailable for much of that regular season (because he was still a member of the Portland TrailBlazers).
Similarly, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce were unhealthy for a chunk of the second half of the 2009-10 season. Furthermore, Doc Rivers has indicated he worked hard to rest his players and manage their health for the playoffs. Although a coach can manage minutes, we expect that once a player steps on the court they play to their ability. So while the Celtics point differential for the regular season may have been skewed by injuries, regular season WP48 should be relatively reliable.
So this line of thinking led me to the question, “How good would the Celtics have been this year if their players had been available for 82 games averaging the same minutes they are playing in the playoffs [using regular season AdjP48]?” To answer that question, I give you Table 1:
Just to be clear… Table 1 looks at how many minutes each player on the Celtics logged in the playoffs. It then allocates the players across the five positions. With positions assigned, a player’s WP48 is calcualted utilizing each player’s regular season ADJ P48 [to see how this is done, please look HERE].
After all of this we see that the Celtics project to be about a 60-win team if they could have maintained the health of this roster and played this rotation for 82 games. Of course, the playoffs are different than the regular season because of rest between games. Added minutes are also assigned to starters (normally 2-6/gm dependent on age and position) and the bench gets shortened, a process that hopefully eliminates the least productive players from the rotation. For an apples-to-apples comparison, I’ve completed the same exercise for the Cleveland Cavaliers, Orlando Magic, and LA Lakers. Again for each team, I have asked the following: “How would this team have performed this year if every playoff player was available for 82 games averaging the minutes they have averaged in these playoffs [using regular season AdjP48].
Pull up a chair, here is the analysis of the LA Lakers….
the Orlando Magic…
and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
Using this system, you would not have predicted any of Boston’s upsets. So – as noted above – this approach didn’t quite work out as hoped. That being said, the difference between the Celtics and Magic is not quite as great as the season numbers (i.e efficiency differential and wins) would suggest. In other words, the Celtics certainly had a reasonable chance of upsetting Orlando.
Here are a couple other thoughts appeared while looking at these numbers. Shortening the bench should get your best players more playing time in the playoffs. However, there were exceptions to this rule in the playoffs. For example, Varejao and Moon lost PT in Cleveland; although this change in minutes would not lead us to think Cleveland was not going to defeat Boston. In fact, no matter how you twist and cherry pick the numbers, these numbers cannot be arranged to predict a Cleveland loss in the playoffs, at any level.
I also didn’t find much fault in LeBron’s play in the playoffs. For the sample size and higher level of competition, his playoff numbers do not seem to deviate significantly with his MVP performance in the regular season. For example, on the days in which LeBron had more than 48 hours to rest (whether it was the elbow or something else), he posted a 0.614 WP48 [a mark estimated from LeBron’s Win Score]. Such a performance is beyond what we saw in the regular season. However, on the days in which LeBron had only 48 hours to rest, he only posted a 0.271 WP48. While still very good, that LeBron would be produce about 10.5 fewer wins across a season. This would obviously make the Cavs on those days inferior to the Celtics.
Turning to the NBA Finals, the above tables show the Lakers’ rotation to be worth 60.7 wins over the regular season and the Celtics’ rotation to be worth 59.8 wins. How close is that .9 wins? About 2 extra minutes of KG in place of Davis is worth .9 wins or, if KG had played his average 34 minutes in the one playoff game he missed — replacing 34 minutes of Big Baby/‘Sheed — you’d have Celtics team expected to total 60.7 wins. In other words, very little separates the talent of these two teams (remember, defined according to the minutes the coaches assigned to allocated this talent). So if this method of predicting series outcomes were useful (huge if), I’d still have to say the NBA Finals is a coin flip.
- Tball
Editors Note: Tball did submit this before the NBA Finals began. But the editor was a bit slow. The minutes for the Lakers and Celtics have been updated for the first three games of the NBA Finals.
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Such is the argument offered by David Biderman in the Thursday edition of the Wall Street Journal. The argument depends a great deal on Wins Produced. More specifically, it depends on the Wins Produced playoff numbers provided by Andres Alvarez.
Although Wins Produced consistently indicates Kobe is not the top player on the Lakers in the regular season, one suspects this argument – despite the latest in the Wall Street Journal – is not going to be accepted by many NBA fans. Last night Kobe led the Lakers with 29 points. But he attempted 29 field goals to achieve this point total (and missed 19 of these). It seems fairly obvious that a player who is not shooting efficiently is not helping much. But in the NBA, this observation is missed. The discussion of the game at ESPN.com listed Kobe as “the top performer” on the Lakers.
Once again, wins in the NBA are determined by shooting efficiency, rebounds, and turnovers. This should be obvious to any NBA fan. Teams win when they take the ball from their opponent (before the opponent scores), avoid giving the ball to their opponent (before the team scored), and convert their possessions into points. This is an argument made in The Wages of Wins. It is essentially the argument Dean Oliver offers in Basketball on Paper. Yet, scoring totals persistently dominate the evaluation of NBA players. And such totals can be manipulated by just taking more and more shots (as every scorer in the NBA must realize).
Okay, enough on Kobe. The next post will barely mention Mr. Bryant (I think).
- DJ
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Is Kobe Bryant really the best clutch player in the NBA?
This is the question posed by Alan Siegel at Slate.com. His answer draws upon research and numbers from 82games.com, Wayne Winston, Dan Ariely, and an obscure economics professor from Southern Utah University. The answer… well, Kobe doesn’t appear to be the best player in the clutch in the NBA.
What follows are two extra tables that will support the evidence Siegel provides. 82games.com reports “clutch” data for the regular season, where clutch is defined as “4th quarter or overtime, less than 5 minutes left, neither team ahead by more than 5 points.” The data includes – with the exception of personal fouls – all the standard box score data. And with the help of Arturo Galletti, this data was used to estimate each player’s Win Score , Wins Produced, and Wins Produced per 48 minutes [WP48]. The top 10 players in “WP48” clutch across the past three regular seasons is reported below. As one can see, Kobe only cracks the top 10 once. Meanwhile, LeBron is ranked first or second in each of the three seasons examined.
And the following table explains how clutch performance for LeBron and Kobe compares to what we see in the regular season. As one can see (and as Seigal notes), LeBron is essentially better at everything in the clutch. And Kobe… well, he is not (by the way, numbers in red indicate the player declined in the clutch relative to the regular season — and except for turnovers, a decline is not good for each number).
With this data in hand, we might offer more on clutch performance in the future. For now, though, I hope everyone enjoys the Siegel article.
- DJ
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