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.

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.

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.

First off let me start by thanking Wizards owner Ted Leonsis for correcting my error in an earlier post. I wrote “Pollard family” when it should have been “Pollin.” The Pollins have been pillars of this community since long before I lived here, so I feel unusually bad about this typo.

More broadly, I’m afraid I’m going to have to say that the outlook for the Wizards as the NBA season begins is extremely bleak. Projections for this to be a somewhat below-average squad involve being (a) unduly optimistic about the recovery of Gilbert Arenas’ knees, (b) unduly optimistic about the performance of John Wall, and (c) probably too optimistic about how good Arenas ever was. Last year’s team was bad, and we’ve now lost a lot of players who were solid contributors. Wall would have to do something totally unprecedented to raise this team to anywhere other than awful. I should note that I say this not out of specific John Wall skepticism, but simply to note that now that very talented prospects don’t stay in college for very long rookies tend to be pretty bad. LeBron James and Kevin Durant both lived up to the hype—eventually—but as rookies were just guys who took and missed a ton of shots.

Beyond that, I agree with Arturo Galletti that the injury to Mike Miller is a bigger blow to the Heat than might be clear at first glance. The way this squad is put together there’s very little room for error. I think questions about LBJ, Wade, and Chris Bosh “coexisting” are overblown. The Eastern Conference playoffs will, however, give us a good look at how much matchups matter since I don’t see anyone on this team who’s going to defend Dwight Howard successfully.

The other thing I think people are kind of sleeping on is the Portland Trailblazers. This was a good team last year—fifty wins—and I don’t think their injury situation is going to get worse. What’s more, this is a squad that, if healthy, has the size and depth to match up with the Laker bigs.

The world of Jewish sports fans has been roiled for a week now by speculation around New York Knicks acquisition Amare Stoudemire’s trip to Israel and Twitter-born hints of Jewish roots. The Wall Street Journal delivers the clearest explanation of the situation that I’ve seen:

Mr. Stoudemire said it was his family’s dedication to biblical scripture and his attendance at Sunday school that planted the seeds of an affinity to Judaism that he says has grown over the past decade. While he doesn’t consider himself religiously Jewish, he said he feels spiritually and culturally Jewish. [...]

Mr. Stoudemire’s interest in Judaism coincides with a stepped up relationship over the past three months with Idan Ravin, a private trainer who works with NBA players. Mr. Ravin says Mr. Stoudemire’s Hebrew comes from lessons in recent weeks with Mr. Ravin’s Israeli mother, a teacher in a Jewish school in Washington, D.C. Mr. Ravin, who accompanied Mr. Stoudemire on the trip, said Mr. Stoudemire is a quick read on foreign languages, and he speculates the skill is linked to his ability to decipher an opposing defense.

Not nearly good enough for the Law of Return, but should be good enough to serve as a marketing aid in the NYC market.

Arturo Galletti explains an under-understood element of NBA contract structure: “a typical NBA contract is structured around a base year salary and an 8% increase by Year. This means for example that a five year contract for $25 million (like the rumored Miller deal) only counts for 25 divided 5.8 or 4.3 million against the cap.”

One question to ask yourself is what underlying model of the economy justifies the idea that annual guaranteed 8 percent raises should be should be “typical”? It would make sense if you thought there was reason to project 8 percent nominal revenue increases for every franchise, but that doesn’t really make sense. Or if the players being signed consistently got better with every passing year. But that’s not the case. NBA player performance peaks, on average, at age 25 which means that with the exception of rookies signing their first contract extension you’re normally talking about purchasing a depreciating asset. The result is that teams time and again find themselves signing contracts that are fine for now, but turn into millstones within a few years.

Part of the issue, pretty clearly, is an agency problem. General Managers are likely to get fired now if their teams fail to improve. Consequently, dealmaking in both the free agent market and the trade market discounts the future at an irrationally high rate.

With Chris Bosh joining Dwyane Wade in Miami, my first instinct was to say the pairing would be weak compared to the Wade/Shaq duo that won a championship in 2005. I looked it up, however, and I’m not sure that instinct was correct:

That’s pretty comparable. The difference, if there is one, would come largely on the defensive end. I haven’t seen Toronto play much, but Bosh’s reputation is as a weak presence in the middle.

With all the craziness in the NBA free agent market this offseason, it’s worth giving some acknowledgment to the kind of solid, modest move represented by a four-year, $4 million per year contract for Steve Blake to go to the Los Angeles Lakers.

Blake’s a solid contributor, he plays the position where LA is weakest, and the real value of the contract declines over time which is appropriate for a player of Blake’s age. It’s surprising to see something so sensible happen.

I don’t know anyone who’s optimistic about the Washington Wizards’ outlook for next season or who’s really looking forward to the Yi Jianlian Era. But the outlook in terms of Wins Produced is truly terrifying:

Based on last years WP48 numbers and the numbers for the average rookie, it is possible for next years Wizards to fail to employ a single above average player. I would be surprised if that happens, especially if Gilbert returns reasonably healthy. But even if Gilbert returns to his peak level of play, there is a very good chance this team will be the worst in the NBA. If they struggle with injuries, it is possible they challenge for worst in NBA history.

I think you’d have to say that with so many crappy players, somebody’s bound to start grabbing an abnormally large quantity of rebounds and end up doing better than their historical WP rating would indicate. But still, things are grim. It seems to me that the only thing that really matters for the franchise at this point is to avoid acquiring any bad contracts that extend beyond the life of Gilbert Arenas’ deal.

In a just world, the Lakers’ victory last night in spite of a brickeriffic 6-24 shooting performance from the “best player” in the league should give people some perspective on the Kobe Bryant legacy question. Robert Horry has seven championships with three teams, and Karl Malone has none but those are the breaks of the game not reflections of who was the superior power forward.

Fans of the losing team always complain about the refs, but I do want to note a complaint from a Celtics loyalist about “how the refs inexplicably decided to call touch fouls on the Cs in the 4th qtr leading to 21 laker FTs. That’s on pace for 84 FTs for the game.” I haven’t gone back and watched the tape or anything, but it was definitely my sense during the game that the officiating standards suddenly tightened in Q4 for no real reason. There are always a lot of complaints out there about the quality of NBA officiating, and I think they’re generally a bit overstated once you consider the inherent difficulty of the job. But it really is crucial that even if things sometimes get missed that people still feel there’s some kind of consistent theory of what the rules are, and I really don’t get that from the NBA.

Kobe Bryant (Wikimedia)

Every time the Lakers win another big game, out come the Kobe Bryant partisans who want to argue that he’s not only a very talented basketball player but literally the best player in the league right now or one of the greatest players of all time. Preposterous comparisons get made to Michael Jordan. On the Jordan issue, I’ll just say again what I’ve said before—Jordan scored more points, did his scoring more efficiently, was a better rebounder, and dished more assists. The essence of being the best to ever play the game is that lots of very good basketball players (viz: Kobe Bryant) are substantially worse than you are.

Kobe’s just had an unusual career. The pre-Gasol Lakers were slightly worse than the Pau-led Memphis Grizzlies teams of those years. But Memphis is a small market and the Grizzlies have no franchise legacy, so Pau Gasol wasn’t a well-known player when he got shipped to LA to join forces with Kobe and return the Lakers to contention whereas Kobe was a “star.” And not just a star, but a star who’d already won multiple championship rings on teams led by Shaquille O’Neal but that made Kobe super-popular because perimeter players are always more popular than big men (during the heyday of the Yao-McGrady Rockets, it was McGrady who had the best-selling jersey in China) and thus was poised to reap the credit when his team improved.

None of which is to deny that Kobe is a good player. He scores a ton, and it’s pretty efficient. But he’s not dramatically better than any number of other wing players who just haven’t had the same career trajectory. Paul Pierce, for example, actually has very similar numbers but he’d never played on a really good team before teaming up with Kevin Garnett so people have a much better understanding of his status as a good player on a good team who’s still far worse than the Jordans and the Jameses of the world.

I’m an NBA fan. But I resent the NBA aristocracy, the tendency of just a tiny handful of teams to monopolize all the championships. I thought it was really great in 2006 when the Heat played the Mavericks and we had a proletarian finals. And this year it seemed at various points that we had an excellent chance for an outsider team—Portland, Phoenix, Orlando, Cleveland—to win, or at least to create an exciting matchup in the finals. Then it didn’t happen. And it makes me sad. Here’s to hoping Greg Oden can stay healthy next year, and LeBron James steers clear of Chicago.

I don’t think you need to appeal to any particularly baroque statistical theories here to see that Wall’s only real asset over Cousins is that he played more minutes. What’s more, they’re both nineteen and I believe big men like Cousins generally take a bit longer to develop. If it’s really true that GM’s universally regard Wall as the better prospect, I guess I’d pretend to agree with them and draft him at number one then try to trade him for Cousins and a future draft pick (or something) citing the fact that we already have Gilbert Arenas as my reason.