The NBA Stats Thread: The 15-year chain reaction that led to the NBA's current offensive explosion

It really wasn't a knock on westbrook at all :lol: :lol: I just felt like from an analytics perspective, that that would be worthy of note.

It's a shocker to many including myself that Westbrook is a below average finisher in the league, which is literally all I was getting at :lol: The reasoning behind it, what the numbers really mean / represent, his overall production, etc. has not even a little bit to do with my point. Literally it was just an observation.

You wouldn't be surprised if I told you that a guy like Steph Curry, or say a Kyrie Irving is a better finisher than Westbrook?
 
shoeking2101 said:
It really wasn't a knock on westbrook at all :lol: :lol: I just felt like from an analytics perspective, that that would be worthy of note.

It's a shocker to many including myself that Westbrook is a below average finisher in the league, which is literally all I was getting at :lol: The reasoning behind it, what the numbers really mean / represent, his overall production, etc. has not even a little bit to do with my point. Literally it was just an observation.

You wouldn't be surprised if I told you that a guy like Steph Curry, or say a Kyrie Irving is a better finisher than Westbrook?
Click to expand...

Kyrie and Curry layup game are elite tho. Kyrie prob has the best layup game I've ever seen tbh.
 
GalaxyNexus said:
Kyrie and Curry layup game are elite tho. Kyrie prob has the best layup game I've ever seen tbh.
Click to expand...

True. Feel the same way. Kyrie's finishing is always a sight for me. He makes the craziest layups consistently without finishing above the rim ever :lol: plays the backboard better than anyone i've ever seen.
 
Kyrie makes it look so easy too. It's like the game is in slow motion and he has time to assess exactly what he needs to do to avoid getting blocked. Always perfect amount of spin on the ball off the backboard too.
 
mgrand15 said:
Kyrie makes it look so easy too. It's like the game is in slow motion and he has time to assess exactly what he needs to do to avoid getting blocked. Always perfect amount of spin on the ball off the backboard too.
Click to expand...

It's really unfair. Plus he can shoot the 3 at an elite level. Plus his handles. Smfh. I'm heated
 
Kyrie and Westbrook are the best finishers at the rim along with LeBron of course IMO. Rose during his MVP season though was just as good at the rim as anyone.
 
Dean Smith Was Pioneer in Use of Analytics

For decades, Coach Dean Smith would tell his players, both at halftime and after a game, how many points they had scored and had allowed per possession. In the 1960s, he began to assign managers to track the statistic.

“That was always something we went over,” said Jeff Lebo, now East Carolina’s head coach, who played for Smith at North Carolina from 1985 to 1989. “ ‘We’re 1.2 per possession, the other team’s 0.6.’ We knew what that meant.”

Today, employing statistics that are calculated per possession — or per 100 possessions — is as commonplace as sending five men out on the floor. Most coaches and analysts consider such figures more useful than raw numbers, which are not adjusted for teams that play quickly or slowly.

But Smith — who majored in mathematics at Kansas, and who told his longtime collaborator John Kilgo that he would have been happy to be a high school math teacher — emphasized possession-based analysis as early as 1959.

“Forty years later,” said Dean Oliver, director of player personnel and analytics for the Sacramento Kings, “this was still below the radar.”

Smith, who died Saturday at 83, is being remembered by his many fans, including President Obama, and his former players, including Michael Jordan, for his accomplishments on and off the court.

To the list add this: Smith was one of the most innovative basketball coaches ever, and the most prominent early proponent of possession-based analysis, which is now standard operating procedure in college basketball and the N.B.A.

“All signs point to him being the father of basketball analytics,” said Daryl Morey, the Houston Rockets’ general manager and one of the leading proponents of advanced statistics in the sport.

Smith was so ahead of the curve on basketball analytics that, as Morey noted, “it didn’t have that name at the time.”

In an article on ESPN.com posted Sunday, the ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas wrote that Smith’s 1981 book, “Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense,” was “still the best book on basketball I have ever read, and it was the first time I ever heard of ‘points per possession’ long before the current age of analytics.”

Lebo said that frequently changing rules and rosters drove Smith’s innovations.

Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage

Dean Smith, the North Carolina basketball coach, after the Tar Heels defeated Georgetown for the N.C.A.A. championship in 1982.

Coach Dean Smith, Champion of College Basketball and of Racial Equality, Dies at 83FEB. 8, 2015


From left, Sam Perkins, James Worthy and Michael Jordan with Dean Smith in 2007.

Sports of The Times: A Basketball Mind in Tune With the Social Fabric FEB. 8, 2015


The four-corners tactic that Smith loved to use — a way to drain the clock to protect a lead — helped push the Atlantic Coast Conference and then the N.C.A.A. to introduce the 45-second shot clock in the 1985-86 season. Smith won one national title before the shot clock, and one after it.

Similarly, Lebo said that North Carolina’s offense changed for the 1986-7 season, Lebo’s sophomore year, when the N.C.A.A. introduced a 3-point line. (The A.C.C. had experimented with one a few years earlier.) Smith used to demand that his players get the ball inside to big men for high-percentage shots, but after the introduction of the 3-point line, Smith designed plays to produce open looks for strong shooters like Lebo and Kenny Smith.

Continue reading the main story

Continue reading the main story

“He was always really good at devising ways to play when the rules changed,” Lebo said.

Even so, Smith’s favorite shot remained the free throw.

“He was a firm believer that the best way to play offense was to get to the foul line,” Kilgo said.

This tactic has been endorsed by advanced statisticians who value players, like the Rockets’ James Harden, who are good at being fouled and then converting.

Like his other advances, Smith’s emphasis on per-possession statistics was a logical response to circumstances.

Specifically, the college game’s talent disparity and more variable paces (first, without a shot clock; then, with a 45-second clock) made per-possession analysis especially useful.

“Teams — especially in college, where Coach Smith coached — played at very different rates, especially prior to the shot clock,” Morey said. “So if you’re trying to judge how good of a defense you were, you couldn’t just look at the raw number of points you gave up. That wouldn’t tell you a lot. You had to look at points and divide it by chances.”

In “Basketball: Multiple Offense and Defense,” Smith pointed to possession-based analysis as part of the “statistical basis” of his system.

It seems likely, Kilgo said, that Smith also left an imprint on “The Importance of Possession Statistics,” a section of “Defensive Basketball,” a 1959 book by Frank McGuire, then North Carolina’s coach, for whom Smith was an assistant.

The importance of possession statistics, then, was not a stray insight, but rather a key aspect of Smith’s worldview. In both books, its discussion appears in the opening pages.

It was also seen as Smith’s distinctive innovation. According to another player Smith coached, Tony Shaver, now William & Mary’s head coach, per-possession statistics were known in the 1970s as Carolina efficiency ratings, in much the way that Bill Walsh’s 49ers schemes were called the West Coast offense.

Although Smith was esteemed as brilliant and worldly, his innovations appeared to arise from no motive beyond competition.

“He was pretty fearless in the causes that he stood for and also the things he did on the basketball court,” Kilgo said. “He never coached not to lose. He coached to win.”
Click to expand...
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/s...early-zeal-for-statistical-analysis.html?_r=3
 
Was talking to my boy about this. Do you agree with this. Defensive rebounds caught from a missed FT should count as 0.5 DREBS
 
I wrote this article about Ty Lawson, it's advanced stats heavy. click the link to see the shot chart.

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2373055-ty-lawson-is-the-most-underrated-point-guard-in-the-nba

Despite playing in the Mile-High City, Ty Lawson is flying under the radar this season.

The 5’11” 195-pound point guard has silently put together a career year with the struggling Denver Nuggets.

Second to John Wall, Lawson is dishing 9.9 assists per game, and he’s only turned the ball over 136 times in comparison to Wall’s 206. He also ranks 15th in the NBA in double-doubles with 22 which is third best amongst guards—trailing Chris Paul (26) and Wall (30).

The Nuggets haven’t been as successful as Paul’s Los Angeles Clippers and Wall’s Washington Wizards, but without Lawson's contributions, Denver would be competing with the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers for the NBA’s worst record.

Lawson's wins above replacement are 6.42 which is ninth best amongst 1's, and in the three games he's missed this season, the Nuggets are 0-3. In 2013-14, Denver went 7-13 without Lawson, and 29-33 with him.



Why Lawson Doesn’t Get Enough Credit

USA TODAY Sports
Point guard has become one of the NBA’s deepest positions in recent years—flanked with numerous All Star talents such as Russell Westbrook, Damian Lillard, Stephen Curry, Rajon Rondo, Derrick Rose, Kyrie Irving, Jeff Teague, Wall, Paul and Kyle Lowry.

Lawson doesn’t have the luxury of playing in a large basketball market that garners enough attention to offset his team’s lack of success.

Denver's struggles could be attributed to its poor defense and inefficiency from the field.

The Nuggets sport a defensive rating of 105.2 which is in the bottom 10 of the NBA. Despite Lawson providing quality looks for his teammates—the franchise is shooting at or below league averages across the court, as indicated by the graphic below:

http://on.nba.com/14msY3v
In wins, Denver shoots 47.1 percent from the field, and 40.7 percent in losses. Kenneth Faried, JJ Hickson, Jusuf Nurkic and Lawson are the only players shooting better than 44 percent.

Lawson isn't a premiere defender, and that negatively affects the way he is perceived. With him on the court, his opponent's turnover rate is 13.2—without him, 14.7. His opponent's effective field goal percentage while competing is 50.2 percent, when resting, 48.6 percent.

In his free time, he's had a few mental lapses that taint his production. His most recent mishap being the practice he missed on Feb. 18 while stuck in Las Vegas.

Via Christopher Dempsey of the Denver Post, “Lawson failing to show is the latest in a string of incidents that have upset management in the past two years. He had a domestic incident in the summer of 2013, a case that was eventually dropped. He missed a team breakfast meeting late last season and was held out of the starting lineup. In January he was arrested on suspicion of DUI.”

Lawson addressed his most recent mistake on his Facebook:

Travel plans got derailed ....but I'm always ready to go war with my bros... I know the season hasn't gone the we all wanted to but I'm a nugget until the day I die ‪#‎nuggetsnation ‪#‎letthehatecommentspileup

He hasn’t helped his cause off the court with his periodical lacks of focus, but his offensive impact under the lights cannot be denied.



Why He’s Worthy of Praise

USA TODAY Sports
Lawson is a quick guard capable of getting into the paint on command. He's most effective in the pick-and-roll, and breaking down defenses and feeding an open big man.

Aside from scoring 16.9 points per game to go along with his 9.9 APG, Lawson is posting a player efficiency rating of 19.53, via ESPN.com with an assist to turnover ratio of 3.76 that trails only Paul's 4.27.

Lawson can push the ball in the open court and ignite plenty of fastbreaks, which the Nuggets must continue doing in order to counteract their shooting woes and embrace its athleticism. Denver's pace or possessions per 48 minutes is fifth best in the league at 98.40 with Lawson's personally at 101.11.

He's second in assist opportunities per game with 20.3 to Rondo’s 20.5 (with the Boston Celtics), and he’s second in points created by assist per game with 23.2 to Wall's 23.5, via NBA.com.

Lawson is also second in free throw assists per game with 0.9 to Wall’s 1.1—categorizing only players that have competed in at least 20 games thus far.

He’s averaged the third most minutes in the NBA this season with 36.7, and he’s third in drives per game with 11.5, and third team points per game on drives with 13., trailing only Tyreke Evans (13.2) and James Harden (14.2).


SHARE
TWEET
Lawson sports an adjusted production per 48 minutes of .305 which is fourth best amongst point guards—behind Westbrook's .333, Paul’s .407 and Curry’s .437, via Box Score Geeks. His wins produced are also third best amongst 1s, checking in at 9.9 with Curry and Paul ahead of him with 13.5 and 14.2, respectively.

His win shares are down this season from 2013-14 with 5.6 to 6.3, but his turnover percentage has decreased to 14.6 percent from 16.9 percent the season prior, via Basketball-Reference.com.

Joe Boozell listed his top-10 point guards in the league on NBA.com, and Lawson for some reason wasn’t named, despite having a better year than Jeff Teague (10th), Tony Parker (9th), Kyrie Irving (8th) and Mike Conley (7th).

Lawson has been unfairly snubbed and hasn’t received the praise he deserves. He’s become the league's most underrated point guard even though he's in the upper echelon of various statistical categories.

In some instances, reputation has superseded reason—such as Parker's ranking in the top-10 despite having the fewest win shares (1.9) and the first negative value over replacement player of his career (negative-0.3), via Basketball-Reference.com.

Lawson is silently having a tremendous season that would be even more prolific if he was surrounded by competent shooters. There isn't much more the 1 can do with Danilo Gallinari and Wilson Chandler shooting 35.5 and 41.5 percent from the field, respectively.

Unless Denver fields a more competitive roster, Lawson's trajectory with the organization will continue down this underrated path. The Nuggets have two talented bigs in Faried and Nurkic, but its perimeter players are subpar and there's little Lawson can do to remedy that ailment.

The 1 can elevate his shooting and perhaps become more aggressive as a scorer, but that won't be enough to turn the tide for the franchise.

Denver has a good foundation with Lawson, Faried and Nurkic, but until better shooters and more consistent wings are brought in, the organization will continue wasting the effort their point guard contributes each night. As talented as he is, a point guard at his size cannot be the only perimeter player shooting well from the field if you want to be a contender.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

The ultimate sneaker enthusiast community.

NikeTalk was created as a way of giving back to both the sneaker enthusiast community and to the greater global community of which we are all a part.

NikeTalk is NOT affiliated with Nike Inc. in any way, shape, or form. All opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect those of Nike, Inc.

© 1999-2024 NikeTalk.com

Share this page

Back
Top Bottom