Daily Archives: February 10, 2012

The biggest losers in the NBA

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Losing is a disease as contagious as bubonic plague attacking one but infecting all.
-The Natural (1984)

.0986 Wins Produced per 48 minutes or thereabouts.

What’s that you ask? The average production of player in the NBA for the 2011-12 season as of all games played by February 9th. Why should I care? Because that’s what your team and your players need to beat to be a winning team.

That is the top 6 in terms of minutes for every team in the league as of the morning of February 10th of 2012. Please note the column in the middle called point margin per game. This column has a very simple explanation. Take for example Mr. Nick Young of the Washington Wizards. His point margin per game is -3 points. What does that mean exactly? It means that if Mr. Young plays a game for your team at his average of 30.7 minutes per games at his average level of performance (-.054 wins per 48 minutes) vs average opposition (.0986 wins per 48 minutes) his team, the aforementioned Wizards will be three points in the hole at the end of that game solely because of that player’s efforts.

Simply put playing this particular player is a losing proposition. The interesting bit is that he is not alone. Let’s talk losers.

Here come the losers (Image by Jack "The King" Kirby)

Let’s look at the 20 worse offenders in the league at this point by game and for the season.
How exactly does this kind of thing happen? Of the 30 teams in the league only 16 show up on this list of ignomy. Let’s focus on them.

8 teams show up with one player (Lakers, Raptors, Thunder, Wolves, Mavericks, Clippers, Bucks and Heat).  A few of these are understandable.

  • World Peace is generally undervalued by the model as his contributions are hard to measure. The Lakers get a bye for keeping the Peace.
  • Perk is in a similar category for the Thunder.
  • Wesley Johnson is young and still has room to grow for the Wolves. Norris Cole gets the same pass for Los Heat.
  • Odom is missing the beach apparently and playing way below standard for the Mavs. I don’t expect this to continue indefinitely.
  • Brian Cook is tenth on the rotation for the Clippers and can be considered a warm body at this point.
  • The last two in this group (DeRozan for the Raptors and Captain Jack for the Bucks) are indefensible . Captain Jack should not be #2 on the depth chart for a team with playoff aspirations at this point in his career. As for DeRozan? If he is your number 1 option in the rotation, you have real problems. Then again, sadly this is an old story for the Raptors.

There are 6 teams with 2 players in the Losers’ bracket:

  • Cleveland: It could be argued that they need to have Jamison out there to sell. Mychel Thompson falls under the warm body category to me.
  • Detroit: A rookie (Knight) and yet another warm body (Daye).
  • Houston: A rookie deep in the rotation (Morris) and a player in Scola who seems to be in a precipitous decline.
  • New Jersey: Two bench players on a bad team in Shawnee Williams and Okur who like Scola may be in rapid decline.
  • New York: Amare,who I will continue to argue, is miscast totally in the Melo iso show and could be decent with a better PG, say a Harvard grad and Toney Douglas who is probably out of a job.
  • Orlando: On behalf of all Celtic fans, I’d like to thank the Magic front office for taking Baby off our hands. God bless you and protect you. You’ll need it. Larry Hughes is there collecting a paycheck.

The last two teams on this list are just terrible with three and four players on this list:

  • My old friends the Wizards , have two players in Nick Young and Jordan Crawford who at this point, based on the data, will not ever reach the level expected from a bench player on a good NBA team. Andray Blatche might reach that level but he should not be drawing more than the NBA minimum.
  • The Bobcats, my lord, the Bobcats are a mess. Corey Higgins is a deep in the rotation rookie and given the talent drought on this team they should really be playing him more to see if they have anything. Byron Mullens is another unknown quantity so they might as well play him. Corey Maggette may be ready for the glue factory at this point after a respectable twelve year career which is long. Tyrus Thomas probably needs out of the Queen City.

At the end of the exercise, what can we conclude? There are a few key reasons why these lovable losers get playing time on these teams. Most are understandable (or at least come with a good story): they’re defensive contributors on good teams, they’re having an off year, they’re losing the battle with father time, they’re dealing with injuries, they’re inexperienced rookies or unknown quantities getting their shot at the big time. There’s only a few cases of truly bad management in the bunch.  To me, the Raptors, Magic and the Wizards are all guilty of throwing good money after bad and doing it consistently year in and year out. They pay,play and trade for bad players. Where I a fan of these teams I would be very pessimistic about the near future prospects of my team.

-Arturo

 

Are the coaches better voters than the fans?

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As always our numbers come from the great NBA Geek.

When it comes to the All-Star games the fans get a free pass for bad voting. The argument goes that the fans should get to vote in who they want to see. As such, production and proper basketball need not be requirements. The coaches pick the reserves and their job is to use their nuanced basketball knowledge to pick the most deserving players. How did they do?

I took a look at all players with at least 25+ MPG and at least 20 games so far this season. I then looked at their per minute production using Wins Produced (WP48) via NBA Geek to see how good the players the coaches picked were, as well as their rank. For reference 0.100 is average and 0.200 qualifies as “star” level.

The coaches picked measured by performance

West Reserves based on performance
Player Team WP48 WP48 Position Rank
Steve Nash Phoenix 0.280 1
Tony Parker San Antonio 0.120 25
Russell Westbrook OKC 0.091 31
Kevin Love Minnesota 0.261 3
LaMarcus Aldridge Portland 0.162 16
Dirk Nowitzki Dallas 0.054 39
Marc Gasol Memphis 0.182 9
East Reserves based on performance
Player Team WP48 WP48 Position Rank
Deron Williams New Jersey 0.042 43
Andre Iguodala Philadelphia 0.267 2
Paul Pierce Boston 0.196 10
Luol Deng Chicago 0.152 20
Chris Bosh Miami 0.110 27
Joe Johnson Atlanta 0.103 30
Roy Hibbert Indiana 0.154 11

It’s hard to give the coaches that much credit. With a total of 14 picks they only managed to hit 5 players in the top 10 for their respective categories. What’s more they picked three below average players in Dirk, Williams and Westbrook. A common belief is that because coaches have been around the game they get the little things that make players good. Is it possible they are susceptible to other factors? Let’s take a look!

Another look at the coaches selections

West Reserves by Points and Team Performance
Player PPG PPG team Rank Team Team record Team Playoff Rank
 Deron Williams 20.9 1 New Jersey 8-19 11th
 Joe Johnson 18.6 1 Atlanta 17-9 5th
 Paul Pierce 18.4 1 Boston 14-11 7th
 Luol Deng 16.0 2 Chicago 22-6 1st
 Andre Iguodala 13.0 3 Philadelphia 18-8 3rd
 Chris Bosh 19.2 3 Miami 19-7 2nd
 Roy Hibbert 13.6 2 Indiana 17-8 4th
West Reserves by Points and Team Performance
Player PPG PPG team Rank Team Team record Team Playoff Rank
Russell Westbrook 22.7 2 OKC 20-6 1st
Tony Parker 18.9 1 San Antonio 18-9 2nd
Steve Nash 17.2 1 Phoenix 11-15 12th
Kevin Love 25.0 1 Minnesota 13-13 10th
LaMarcus Aldridge 23.3 1 Portland 14-12 9th
Dirk Nowitzki 17.6 1 Dallas 15-11 5th
Marc Gasol 15.0 2 Memphis 13-13 10th

Let’s break down the coaches secret formula.

 Coaches like winners

Out East all but one of our players (we’ll get to Williams in a second) are on winning teams that currently would make the playoffs. Out West all but one of our players (we’ll get to Nash in a second too!) are on teams with records at or above 0.500. In short, our coaches seem to think to be an All-Star you must be on a team that stands a shot at making the playoffs.

Coaches like points

Almost all of our players lead their teams in points per game. Only three of our players weren’t the top scorer available for their team (don’t forget, fans like scorers too). The only position the coaches don’t seem to really care about a player being the top scorer is center. Of course Hibbert and Gasol are the second best scorer and top rebounder on their team. So as an All-Star you can be the second scoring option if you’re the top boarder.

Coaches like themselves

As mentioned, only Nash and Deron are on teams that look like they’re going nowhere fast in the playoff race. Williams does score a lot of points (although not in a good way), so we kind of get the pick. Still, both of these players stand out. Until we consider that both of these players have been All-Star picks before. What’s more they’ve been picked by the coaches. Williams was an All-Star reserve the last two years. Nash was a reserve in 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2008. It turns out we are more likely to think a decision is good if we’ve made it before! A player’s bad record or low points might dissuade a coach from picking a good player. That is unless, they look back and see they’ve said that player was good in the past.

Progress

For the most part the coaches picked the top scorer on a winning team. This isn’t the worst heuristic but given the pedestal coaches are placed on, I’d expect more. I will say that Andre Iguodala was picked and this is progress. Picking Iguodala means coaches may just listen to their own rhetoric about what it takes to win. Of course Joe Johnson and Deron Williams were picked as well so I wouldn’t expect a revolution just yet.

-Dre