Many sound points in John Hollinger’s latest column but this makes me scratch my head:

The bench continues to struggle despite what appears to be solid individual talent; for some reason Jeff Green, Delonte West and Nenad Krstic haven’t clicked with their roles.

As previously reported on the Yglesias Blog, the glaring fall in Boston’s decision to acquire Jeff Green is that Jeff Green is a bad basketball player. Nenad Krstic is also a bad basketball player, though I had previously thought this was so widely known that it didn’t need to be emphasized. Green continues to click in the role of a poor rebounder who shoots with low efficiency and plays defense badly. I’m not sure why it required a move to Boston for people to see that he’s not good, but the low quality of his play is very consistent.

Given that the media seems to have pre-emptively designated Chicago Bulls point guard Derek Rose as the NBA’s Most Valuable Player, I suppose it’s not too early to start complaining about how crazy this is. Nor is it too early to start noting that it’s based on a very simple analytic error—ignoring defense.

The case for Rose is basically that he’s the main offensive initiator on a very successful team. But why is Chicago so successful? Is it because their Rose-initiated offense is hot stuff? Well, no. They score 105.4 points per hundred possessions. League average is 104.5 points per hundred possessions. If you combined their Rose-led offense with an average defense, you’d have a team with a modest winning record bragging about its 6th or 7th seed in the East. San Antonio and Denver both score 109.5 points per hundred possessions. The gap between the best offenses and Rose’s crew is as large as the gap between Chicago and the lowly Minneapolis Timberwolves.

The reason the Bulls are so successful this year is their stellar defense. They only give up 97.4 points per hundred possessions. That’s the best mark in the league. And obviously Rose is doing his part in that. But does anyone think Derek Rose is the best defender in the NBA? That he’s the key to Chicago’s defense? Of course not. But if you’re going to credit someone for Chicago’s success, you need to credit someone who’s making a huge difference on the defensive end.

I think Carmelo Anthony is a widely overrated player, but the deal announced today for the New York Knicks to acquire him seems like a good trade anyway. That’s because they managed to give up assets—Danillo Galinari, Wilson Chandler, and Timofey Mozgov—that aren’t worth a huge amount either. Swapping Raymond Felton for Chauncey Billups at point guard obviously makes you older and darkens the outlook over the long term, but Billups is still the better player today.

Best of all, the Knicks hang on to underrated low volume / high efficiency guy Landry Fields and also acquire underrated low volume / high efficiency guy Renaldo Balkman from Denver. He’s gotten very few minutes from the Nuggets, but he’s been good, and he played more in his earlier stint with the Knicks. A lineup of Billups, Fields, Anthony, Balkman, and Stoudemire as coached by Mike D’Antoni ought to be quite potent mix of complementary skills.

From a chat with John Hollinger:

Mike (Chicago)
I know you love PER, but it’s YOUR made up stat. Why should fans trust it when clearly our eyes can tell us that D Rose is playing way better than Paul and when PER doesn’t account for how a player has to play when teammates are hurt?

John Hollinger
I trust you reached this eye test after watching all the Hornets’ games too?

Everybody’s right here. As Hollinger says, statistical measurements are absolutely necessary. You can’t watch all the games or distinguish by eye between a 91% free throw percentage and an 87% free throw percentage.

But it’s also true that Hollinger’s PER formula is an oddly arbitrary mix he dreamed up one day. I think you can easily see this my trying to total PER up and ask what the resulting number is supposed to be. PER, after all, is an individual stat representing a per-minute quantity. So if we take a player’s PER and multiply it by his minutes played, we’ll get that guy’s PERMinutes. Then we can add up all of a team’s PERMinutes and we get . . . what?

The idea of a system like Dave Berri’s “wins produced” is that if you add up all the “wins produced” of the individual 2009-2010 Los Angeles Lakers you get a number that’s approximately equal to the total wins of the Los Angeles Lakers. People can (and have, and do, and should continue to) raise questions about whether the Berri formula is accurately allocating credit for these wins to individuals, and also can (and have, and do, and should continue to) raise questions about the predictive value of these quantities. But there’s no question of what’s being measured. By contrast, what happens when I add up the 2009-2010 Lakers’ PERMinutes:

What is this supposed to be a model of? If you calculated the total team PERMinutes for each time, would the resulting quantities have a strong correlation with team performance? If so, I’d love to see Hollinger work up the spreadsheet.

But I have my doubts. For starters, by definition the average player has a PER of 15. And if you take the Lakers’ aggregate PERMinutes and then divide them by minutes to get a measure of the quality of a statistical construct “Laker,” the team turns out to have a 15.73 PER—just slightly above average. But the team in question won 57 games and the NBA championship.

Someone asked for more basketblogging, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to say that I think the value of acquiring Carmelo Anthony is being widely overstated in the basketball press. Like suppose you had to choose between Anthony and Knicks small forward Wilson Chandler, both of whom play 35 minutes per game this season.

Well if you care about rebounds, Anthony is doing quite a bit better, snagging 8.3 per game. His career average is only 6.3 but he’s having a career-high rebounding year right now. Chandler grabs 6.3 rebounds per game. Advantage Anthony. They’re the same in steals, Chandler blocks more (1.4 per game versus 0.6) and Anthony turns it over more than twice as often (1.4 to 2.9 per game). Then of course there’s scoring. Anthony, I’ve been told by broadcasters, is the “best pure scorer in the game” reeling in an impressive 23.9 points per game while Chandler settles for a measly 17.7 PPG. But then again, Anthony’s TS% is only .527 while Chandler’s .579 is considerably more impressive.

Opinions differ about the merits of volume scoring versus efficiency. But Carmelo Anthony is currently paid $17 million to Chandler $2.1 million, so you would need to think Anthony was a lot better for a straight-up swap to look appealing. What’s more, Anthony is currently 26 years old and looking for a maximum extension, meaning that four years from now you’ll be paying him much more, though he’s overwhelmingly likely to be a worse player by then. Chandler will be getting paid more four years from now than he’s paid today, but he’ll still be cheaper than Anthony and he’ll be three years younger to boot. In general, it seems to me that NBA GMs underplay the problems with giving out max deals to Anthony-type players. Given the scale of the annual raises normally built into NBA contracts, a max extension for a 26 year-old is a kind of leveraged investment in a depreciating asset. There are circumstances under which that might make sense, but they’re pretty rare.

I’m continually blown away by the fact that DeJuan Blair slipped into the second round of the NBA draft. This particularly egregious because it’s not like he was a seventeen year-old playing in an obscure foreign league. He had two college seasons under his belt, and based on his play there his success in the NBA was very predictable. But he slipped because he stands at the intersection of two frequent errors in NBA drafting.

One is an irrational aversion to “undersized” big men. NBA teams correctly note that college success does not directly correlate with NBA success, so beyond raw numbers they look for physical tools that are likely to lead to success. This is reasonable as far as it goes, but different things project better or worse and rebounding in the NBA actually correlates pretty highly with rebounding in college. It’s also true that size helps with rebounding, but the point is that if an undersized player has success at rebounding in college, he’s likely to continue doing so in the pros.

The other issue is injury aversion. Kevin Pelton covered this issue in an article I linked to yesterday, but the problem here is that GMs seem to vastly overrate the value of your average draft pick. There are 30 players picked in the first round of the NBA draft and 30 more picked in the second round. There’s only 30 teams, and in practice most teams play an 8 or 9 man rotation even though rosters are bigger than that. That means that even in the first round there’s a very high ratio of draft picks to rotation spots. And of course some rotation players are actually pretty bad. On top of that, lots of times you draft a good player (LeBron James, Shaquille O’Neal, etc.) and then they leave in free agency. The upshot is that if you get a good year or two or three out of someone before their career is ruined by injury then you’re coming out ahead.

Now of course it matters if you’re talking about the number one overall pick or something. But teams drafting in the second half of the first round have absolutely no business worrying about injuries. What you should be worried about is whether or not the guy you get will be any good at all.

On November 15, I wrote:

What I actually think, meanwhile, is that Miami’s +9.4 point differential is tied with New Orleans for best in the league. So if Miami doesn’t step things up, we should expect them to assemble one of the best records in the league over the course of the next 72 games. What’s more, the currently injured Mike Miller is an underrated player whose return will help the team a lot.

So my prediction is that Miami will be fine, and by the end of the season sports pundits will be offering us a lot of narratives about the improved chemistry among the big three.

And here’s a screen grab from ESPN:

Right now their point differential is +8.7, which puts them third in the league behind Boston and San Antonio. Point differential based on a small sample size is an imperfect predictor of future performance, but it’s a much better one than win-loss record.

A reader asked me to comment on the surprisingly weak performance thus far of the 6-4 Miami Heat. The issue, obviously, is that the team has no chemistry. With Wade and James on the same squad, there’s no “alpha dog” player. And the lack of such a dog means the team lacks “killer instinct” and doesn’t inspire fear in its adversaries. These guys are friends, they came to Miami together because they wanted to play together. That’s nice, but there’s no friends in sports. A winning team is led by stone-cold assassins who want to beat the best players in the game, not chums who’d prefer to team up and hang out. Something like that.

What I actually think, meanwhile, is that Miami’s +9.4 point differential is tied with New Orleans for best in the league. So if Miami doesn’t step things up, we should expect them to assemble one of the best records in the league over the course of the next 72 games. What’s more, the currently injured Mike Miller is an underrated player whose return will help the team a lot.

So my prediction is that Miami will be fine, and by the end of the season sports pundits will be offering us a lot of narratives about the improved chemistry among the big three. It’s possibly the case that the return of Miller will play a role in this narrative, since him getting on the floor should in fact lead the team to get better. The fact that Miller is a white guy further militates in the direction of underrating his actual basketball abilities, but vastly overstating his ability to provide “veteran leadership” that provides his talented African-American colleagues with the “intangibles” they need to win.