Interesting article on Wages of Wins about evaluating coaches: http://wagesofwins.com/2012/09/26/evaluating-the-coaching-the-coach-is-wrong-redux/#more-12005 Two big takeaways that jumped out at me: 1. Rockets' coaches ranked #11 during the '80s, #3 during the '90s, and #30 (dead LAST in the entire league) since 2001. 2. The author's comment: "...Daryl Morey led Rockets track as consistently among the worst franchises at properly using the talent available to them..." Ouch. Is that the coach's fault? Morey's? Both??
I was floored that Adelman was not among the coaching elite over the years when it comes to evaluating his players properly. Then again, he's more of a system guy than a "put your best 5 guys on the floor" guy.
Not sure how they evaluated these things, though. Does the article account for which player is actually available each game?
Chart shows Adelman leading the league last year... but bottom of the league with the Rockets? /confused
I just quickly skimmed over it, so I maybe missed something, but it looks like its ranking coaches based on how closely their players "minutes per game" correlates to their per-minute performance (based on "wins produced"). So players who miss games due to injury wouldn't affect this. However, a good player who's minutes are limited for good reasons (like Yao during much of his career) will reflect poorly on the coach based on this analysis. Also, through much of the 2000s the Rockets had some high-usage/low-efficiency players soaking up big minutes at a few positions and lots of solid, high-efficiency role players in a supporting role. Basically, the WoW philosophy is that players like Tracy McGrady or Allen Iverson hurt their teams more than they help their teams. So because the "wins produced" stat favors the so-called high-efficiency players over the high-usage players, it will appear that the Rockets have really mismanaged their rotation when McGrady was our go-to guy.
Thanks for the clarification. The Rockets have generally won 50+ games a season during the last decade when they had Yao and McGrady (or Yao and Artest in 08/09) relatively healthy and 40 games a season after losing these two. According to the WoW guys, would the Rockets have won more than the 52-55 games that they won with Yao and McGrady had the coaches played "more efficient guys" longer minutes? Not sure this can be supported given that the Rockets won 10 games a year less after losing them.
Adelman played a ton of Love and Pekovic, who are super high efficiency player according to the WoW metric (I believe they really value offensive rebounds) and had plenty of scrubs like Darko who didn't warrant playing time. Thus, he got rated highly. While with the Rockets, he played "low efficiency, high volume" wings like McGrady and later Ariza plenty of minutes. Not sure if he had a better choice, though, no matter what the metric says.
Wages of Wins comes out with a lot of really stupid things. Some of the stuff they wrote in their draft prospect profiles were completely ridiculous.
Article is full of ****. Adelman overachieved with his bunch, we overachieved last year, and I think we've generally had pretty good coaching. If they want to see bad coaching, they need look no further than Vinny Del Negro. That offense is a joke. They might as well have Chris Paul be the coach.
ok...spent a bit more time reading this article...and still think the stats behind this is still flawed...He had a huge statistical fallacy...the MPG that a player plays doesnt correlate to wins...infact playing more minutes per game has nothing to do with wins...points matter...the team with the higher point wins...and i dont understand how he accounts for this extremely fundamental point.
WTH! We had only 2 losing seasons in the last 12 years. How does that equate to dead last in coaching or making effective use of your roster. Are they saying we were an elite team talent-wise and should have won 70+ a season? Balderdash! Harrumph!
Wages of Wins & Wins produced ranks poorly. See: http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showpost.php?p=7087661&postcount=1647
That's incredibly flawed math. I'm not even going to try to prove it, it's so worthlessly bad. So some site creates charts on the internet, so that must mean their conclusions are accurate. hogwash. The litmus test is "Had a poster here created those tables and posted this as a link, would he have been torn to shreds." The answer is Yes.
The reasoning behind the article is that the coaches should be playing better players more minutes to win more games. Better players will outscore their opponents by more if they are on court longer than the worse players. It uses WS/48 min to define better players. The Rockets have had benches that were nearly as good as the starters a lot. Bench players can go all out. I think the fallacy in the rational is that a guy will be as effective at 35mpg as he is at 15 mpg. While I like per minute stats and do think it can tell a coach he should be playing certain guys more in a lot of cases, it isn't everything.
Agreed...my point is that MPG is something that cant be used to determine WINS...those two values cant be compared...the best player on the Bobcats might play the most minutes on their team...but that doesnt correlate to wins...The worst player on the Miami heat might also play a significant amount of minutes...but that doesn't correlate to a win... Offensive scoring efficiency and Defensive scoring efficiency in the terms of points per possession are much more attributed to coaching. The coach has to find a way to balance scoring and get good defensive effort whenever his stars are on the bench...The key being Points! That can directly be attributed to coaching styles...Good coaches get the most scoring out of their team and limit opponents scoring...Bad ones dont do either... BOTTOM LINE: MPG has very little to do with WINS and therefore cant be used to evaluate coaching...
So if Miami played Lebron 20 mpg and Udonis Haslem 40 mpg, it would not affect Miami's ability to win? WS/48 still has problems with defense and usage. Adelman going from a horrible coach to a good coach shows that WS/48 has huge issues, but the idea that good coaches play their better players more is sound. This methodology just isn't there.
