Wages of Wins Podcast: Harden and Owners

Myself (@nerdnumbers)
Arturo Galletti (@arturogalletti)
Patrick Minton (@nbageek) from The NBA Geek
Mosi Platt (@mia_heat_index) from the Miami Heat Index

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We discuss the James Harden trade, how to judge managers and Arturo decides to completely throw point guards under the bus.

-Dre

16 Responses to "Wages of Wins Podcast: Harden and Owners"

joshweil says:

October 28, 2012 at 10:23 pm

The “franchise player” subjective distinction is meaningless. The fact Harden came off the bench in 2011-12 is meaningless. None of those matter to future winning.

What matters is Harden is a young superstar shooting guard (very rare!), and OKC let him get away. OKC’s consequences will be championships forgone.
TP says:

October 28, 2012 at 10:51 pm

I’m very angry that John Havlicek was NOT mentioned in the ‘franchise players that came off the bench’ argument. cmon guys!
dynamo.joe says:

October 28, 2012 at 11:57 pm

So, being a starter from year 1, a necessary but not sufficient condition for franchisiness?

The problem with that arguement is that it presupposes a good decision maker creating the lineups. Or maybe that the defining trait of franchise players is that they are so good that even people blind from birth with a long history of head trauma would still start them as rookies.
Rafael Montalvo (@racmontalvo526) says:

October 29, 2012 at 3:19 am

Or that certain teams always start their best players? Because the reason guys like Harden came off the bench was to both orchestrate the defense of the second unit and to provide an X-factor.
James Washington says:

October 29, 2012 at 8:45 am

@Mosi

Atlanta has historically misjudged who there franchise player is/was (this decade). They have had Al Horford and Josh Childress and did not build around either. Childress is a superstar and has come off the bench his whole career, as has Ginobili. They thought the franchise player was Joe Johnson (bwahahahaha).

Also (and it hurts me to say this) the Wizards thought their franchise player was Gilbert Arenas and he has never been within .05 WP48 of being a superstar. Talent evaluators miss identify talent all the time.

Finally you are judging Harden versus the other people’s whole career. People thought MJ, Magic, CP3 etc. could be great, but they didn’t KNOW 100%.
JRStroud says:

October 29, 2012 at 10:18 am

It always seems like Morey gets an undeserved bad reputation around here. You say snake oil salesman because you haven’t agreed with some of his moves but Patrick is right in that every move from the last few years has to be viewed through the lens of does it make you more able to aquire a superstar level player. That unfortunately requires aquiring players and picks that, while questionable from a Wins basis, have value to other teams. Cheap potential almost always has move value than the fully developed product through a rival GM’s eyes (Unless that player developes into a superstar). I think more in depth analyisis is required on each teams situation to fully be able to distinguish a transaction with purpose and one without. It’s all about salary flexibility and trade value. Case in point, a lottery pick has more value to OKC than Kyle Lowery. You don’t make that trade, you don’t get Harden and he was blasted for that here. Same for the Dallas pick in the Derek Fisher trade (even though Fisher was cut before he ever played a game).
JRStroud says:

October 29, 2012 at 11:20 am

I’m also pretty sure Morey is just trolling the league. He’s major league jacked NYK, CHI, and OKC. Pretty sure he robbed Jeremy Lin from NY at gunpoint. Taking advantage of team’s unwillingness to pay their undervalued assets.
Kai Xiong says:

October 29, 2012 at 12:21 pm

@Mosi, After watching this Podcast, I’m a little confused at why you are a contributing member here. No offense but you ignored every statistical argument offered by Dre and Auturo. According to the very own WP metric used by this very website, James Harden is and has been historically good. Better than good. Franchise defining good. As for superstars coming off the bench during their first few years. KOBE BRYANT came off the bench his first year behind Eddie Jones, least you forget. It’s just a bad argument that franchise players start from Game 1. More recent example as Auturo pointed out is KLove who must of slept with Rambis’s wife or something because he was consistently benched despite being amazing. I’m fairly disappointed at the pointed lack of depth in your argument that boils down to: “This is not how superstars are normally treated/played, he must not be a superstar,” when WP and the Numbers say: “This guy is a superstar, you GM’s are fools for not seeing this (well except Morey, Someone give that guy a COOKIE!)”
Thomas Baldwin says:

October 29, 2012 at 1:07 pm

Whilst I don’t agree with Mosi regarding the definition of a Superstar player, I do think that Harden has yet to prove himself to be a superstar, as I don’t prescribe to the notion of WP48 superstardom.
motherwell says:

October 29, 2012 at 4:07 pm

Question: would Harden have played many more minutes if he started? He was 70th in the league in MPG which makes him, at worst, top 3 for any team in the league (more likely top 2).

Also, why wouldn’t teams keep one of their best players on the bench? Lets use really simple numbers. If two players each play 32 minutes a game, they can be oncourt together between 16 minutes (one always on court) and 32 minutes (always on together – never apart). I wonder why the 16 minutes – where one of the two is ALWAYS on court – is not the best solution?

Seems top me that, to win, a team needs to play 48 quality minutes, and as a Suns fan, I can tell you how awful it is to throw out 5 scrubs for 12 minutes a night, and watch leads whittle away. Harden leading a second unit, or Ginobli in SA, lets a team pick flawed bench players, and have the best player oncourt, well, all 48 minutes.
joshweil says:

October 29, 2012 at 5:33 pm

Motherwell makes an interesting point I’ve been thinking about recently. If there are diminishing returns to having your two best players on the court at the same time, a team’s optimal strategy would be to hold minutes constant and minimize the best player overlap.
reservoirgod (@MIA_Heat_Index) says:

October 29, 2012 at 6:36 pm

@TP: Damn. Forgot about Havlicek. As a Celtics fan, Arturo should be ashamed of himself.

@dynamo.joe: ” the defining trait of franchise players is that they are so good that even people blind from birth with a long history of head trauma would still start them as rookies.” You got it.

@James Washington: The Hawks haven’t had a franchise player this decade & the Wizards have gone even longer without a franchise player. As for comparing Harden to Magic, Jordan & CP3… see http://bkref.com/tiny/ZzyUa. Harden’s 1st 3 seasons: 6.3 WS48, Magic’s 1st 3 seasons: 13.2 WS48, Jordan’s 1st 3 seasons: 10.1, CP3 1st 3 seasons: 9.8

@JRStroud: “what’s the difference between MBAs hustling billionaires in the NBA with ‘advanced’ quantitative analysis vs. MBAs hustling billionaires on Wall Street with the same?” http://miami-heat-index.blogspot.com/2011/03/adjusted-plus-minus-hustling-outside.html. The Knicks didn’t re-sign Lin because he pissed Dolan off by raising the price on him.

@Kai: Take it up with management.
Charles Connaughton says:

October 29, 2012 at 7:12 pm

Efficiency aside, the Thunder had three high volume scoring options last year. It’s perfectly reasonable to think that they’ll step on each other somewhat and that you’re better off having 2 of them on the court at a time while the other rests than putting them all on the court at once.

Thabo Sefolosha is no slouch either; he’s not a huge scoring threat, but when you already have two huge perimeter guys in Westbrook/Harden/Durant on the court taking a lock-down defender and low volume guy to compliment them does make sense.

If you come at it from the perspective of not wanting to start Westbrook/Harden/Durant together because you’d rather stagger them, and you have to pick one of them to come off the bench, making it Harden made sense coming into this last year; he’d only been in the league two years and you’d just given Westbrook a huge contract.

The decisions leading up to that point may be questionable, but I don’t think giving Harden big minutes off the bench to break up their big 3 outside guys was a bad play at all. I would only feel the need to criticize if they didn’t give him minutes. This isn’t baseball with its strict substitution rules, or football where you simultaneously have strict depth charts and swap guys in every play; it barely matters who starts, minutes is way more important, and I’d look much closer at who is finishing tight games to identify the go-to 5 than who plays the first 3 minutes.
Adam Welter says:

October 29, 2012 at 11:06 pm

I don’t know if I appreciated Mosi’s opinion on this subject. He refused to listen to reason, even though the wins produced model clearly shows he is wrong. If I’m not mistaken, Harden was the best wins producer per 48 minutes at the SG position this last year. He kept bringing up Harden’s first two years, when they are irrelevant at this point. The bottom line is he’s the best SG in the game right now, according to WP. Then he also chose to use meaningless terms like “franchise player.” I come here because this is a place where those types of analyses don’t fly. If you don’t believe in the WP model, i don’t want you on the podcast. I appreciate that he brought an alternative viewpoint to the table, but he didn’t use anything from the wins produced model to back up his case. I really like the wages of wins journal, and i felt like he took away from the best parts of this site. Otherwise, just want to say thanks while I’m here, for all the work you guys do. Love what you guys do. Looking forward to this upcoming season.
julienrodger says:

October 30, 2012 at 5:53 pm

The Love-Harden comparison Arturo made is interesting. As far as I’m concerned Harden’s upside is underrated for the same reason Love’s was, for both their greatest strength is their feel for the game and spatial awareness, which is something not credited much in the NBA as a part of talent. In reality it is every bit as innate as athleticism is. It’s also why Kyrie Irving got deemed a “low upside” #1 pick when he came out, because he wasn’t credited for having amazing feel for the game.

I have a system grading a player’s physical tools, skill level and feel for the game that lists Harden as absolutely a superstar talent. Physically he is near the top of the list due to his size and underrated speed and his ballhandling helps him attack the basket extremely well. His feel for the game is absolutely among the best for 2 guards or players period. And he’s a strong outside shooter and skill player overall. By the way I numerically score these categories Harden cruises to a superstar score. I think the comparison is Brandon Roy who I felt was an MVP conversation caliber player. As for Kyrie I actually have him as having the upside of not only a superstar but one of the best players of all time. That may seem crazy to people, but certainly the stats don’t go against it as he had a top 20-25 rookie season in history, and the best for a < 20 yr old rookie.
Quora says:

November 3, 2012 at 5:31 pm

Does the James Harden trade confirm that the NBA’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement is counter-productive towards achieving competitive balance for small market teams?…

No, in the examples above, it has nothing to do with the new CBA or Parity. This is one of my favorite subjects and one that gets me in the most trouble. Let’s start with the following: As currently constructed (30 teams) Parity is impossible in the N…

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