2012-2013 Regular season Rockets team and player stats

Interesting, we can look a bit into that.

Turnover Per 36 / USG% / TOV%

Lin: 3.2 / 20.8% / 18.8%
Holiday: 3.7 / 26.7% / 17.3%
Rubio 3.7 / 21.2% / 21.2%
Rondo 3.7/ 21.7% / 22.6%
Westbrook 3.4 / 32.8% / 13.2 %
Irving 3.4 / 30.2% / 13.8%
Vasquez 3.3 / 23.0% / 18.6%
John Wall 3.5 / 29.3% / 15.3%
Stephen Curry 2.9 / 26.4% / 13.7%
Damian Lillard 2.8 / 24.2 / 14.5%

So yes there is something to this argument, though there are still guys who's TOV% is higher after factoring USG in such as Rubio / Rondo and gusy who's pretty much the same like Vasquez. and of course, one should note that this collection is well above average with 2 top 5 guys and a lot of promising young guys, the worst of the group is probably Vasquez who's pretty solid.

We could also look at the assist to turnover ratio for this group.

Lin: 2.1
Holiday: 2.1
Rubio: 2.4
Rondo: 2.8
Westbrook: 2.2
Irving: 1.8
Vasquez: 2.8
John Wall: 2.3
Stephen Curry: 2.2
Damian Lillard : 2.2

He's on the lower end but isn't the worst guy in here .

At the end of the day, stats say Lin's basically an average NBA player this year, like... the definition of average since his PER and WS/48 are both less than 1% from the setting of average . That's not what you like for 8 million, but that's also not THAT far off since the average salary is also close to 6 million anyway. And there's enough there for you to see that it wouldn't be surprising if he were worth that money or more next year.

In terms of what Win Share actually say on that collection of players. besides Lin....

Holiday: Believe it or not, he had a pretty bad WS/48 this year, mostly because it's a story of two halfs for him, he was very good in the first and was a all star, but completely fell off a cliff after the ASB and sucked bad, his final WS/48 was just .055 (Lin was .099) . his true shooting percentage ended up bad and a first option scoring 17 per 36 is pretty bad.


Rondo: Rondo is a polarizing guy for good reasons and bad, his WS/48 this year before he got hurt was .108 , meaning barely better than average. if you look at his last few seasons despite being something of an assist genius his offensive outcome is pretty bad because he can't shoot at all, his career 24% 3 shooter(!!) and under 70% FT shooter (for a guard!). Interestingly, his defense is actually great. but his offensive game massively overrated.



Rubio: Very very similar to Rondo in this sense, his overall offensive game is pretty terrible, as he simply can't shoot. his overall WS/48 is .085 and that's mostly from the defensive side, you think all that passing makes the wolfs a good scoring team? they were 20th in points per game and 25th in offensive rating ( a strong point here, assist total does NOT correlate much with overall offense.)



Westbrook: Another very polarizing guard in his own way, Westbrooks is like the reverse Rondo in a sense, he's also not a great shooter (but certainly much better than Rondo) and he also plays great defense, but the thing is he really don't pass the ball much at all, instead he's the most ball dominant player in the league not named Carmelo, his assist ratio is super high.... so when he does pass the ball good things usually happens (well it also helps that Durant will make most of the tough shots. ) but the overbearing point is simply that he takes most of the shots anyway.

Interestingly, there is a strong method to this seeming madness and his WS/48 comes out great at .195, well into star territory and really it's super star territory if you consider that he played every game and super heavy minutes.


Irving: Irving's overall WS/48 came out at .125, which you think is probably too low for him, but the reason is generally that he's a disaster defensively, he coughs up a lot of his offensive value (which is well into star territory.) back defensively (which is almost Nashian.) This is a very common problem for young Guards in general, they can run the offense alright or even more than that, but simply can't defend the position, even if you try to hide them there is only so much you can do there. not surprisingly the Cavs came out 27th in defensive ratings.



Vasquez: .068 WS/48 , for reasons similar to Irving except that his offensive game is merely good and not great.



John Wall: Wall is a rather interesting case as well, he's like Rondo, can't shoot a 3 to save his life (though there was a brief period towards the end of the season where he could, we'll see) however, his overall offensive game is still quite good because the dude can drive, he's built like Harden but has a great passing touch, if he can shoot 3s at even an average rate he's a super star, as he can defend really well too unlike many young PG, but the thing is obviously that he can't (yet at least) and he's also been unable to stay healthy. WS/48 is .134 but overall WS is just over 4.5 where as Lin was almost 1 win more.


Stephen Curry: The major breakout player this year, he took the leap from above average guy who can't stay healthy to super star, his WS/48 of .180 generally bear this out, especially he was getting better towards the end, and manged to play in 78 games with very heavy minutes. a good play maker and obviously one of the greatest shooting seasons of all time for a primary starter. His defense wasn't great but it's in the Harden / Lin range of "able to contain the damage enough most of the time."



Damian Lillard : Lillard won the ROY, but he's very similar to Irving ... except that Irving's actually much younger and better at their strength. his WS/48 came out at just .088 which should tells you right away that he's a terrible terrible defender and can't even hide it . he was pretty good offensive player but probably isn't good enough as a #1 option, at least right now. At the end of the day he's probably more Tyreke Evans than Kyrie Irvings in terms of career.


Looking at it from a WS/48 perspective you'd be surprised at a lot of things, and thinking it more in the team context you'd realize most of it make sense, it probably overrates solid role players on great teams and good reserves a bit too much (for example Birdman had a WS/48 over .200 this season, he's not going to be much more than an average player as a starter on most team.) . but otherwise it's a great tool.


There's more you can talk here, but that's already a huge post.

 

Lin's doing that and he isn't the main ball handler, plus his TOV% is a lot worse. But people just like to argue.

 

Keep up the good work OP...well done.

 

I love the OP. I love this thread. Would rep if I could, but I don't think I can rep anything, being such a new member. =(

 

One of u TO guys tell me how many times Harden turned it over when he was hacked or held in the lane, no foul called, and lost the ball cuz of it. Harden constantly attacks, and many of his TO's are due to that, or aggressive passing. He needs to tone it down on TO's, but at his usage, I can live with it.

 

That kind of information is basically impossible to get via publicly-available data. Unfortunately, as mentioned in this thread, the "quality" of a turnover is not measured in the box score - only whether the official gamekeeper thought that a particular act constituted a "turnover" by the player in question.

Even if you looked at play-by-play data it's hard to tell because all you will see is "Turnover by J. Harden" or something along those lines - it doesn't actually tell you what he was doing immediately prior to the turnover or who was around him or attacking the ball at the time.

 

So essentially, DrTG rewards guys who gamble for steal and grabs rebounds... (well I think we all agree a block is always good though) even if they're out of position. I think I see it now , as in why say.. Kobe would have actually half decent DrTG, since he often grab out of position rebound.

Both Lin / Harden / Parsons gamble for steals a bit too much, Lin's generally the most successful, Harden grabs the most board though at times that seem to be due to him not contesting shots.

It's an interesting notion, you think on / off stats have serious merits to defense projection then?

 

I agree that the DRtg issue becomes pretty apparent once you see how it is calculated - this is why I've always personally been very wary of defensive metrics based on box score data in general. At least with offensive metrics you can focus the scope of data on personal possessions (just as ORtg does) to account for the "team noise" issue. With defense, stopping the man without the ball is nearly as important as stopping the man with the ball (or, to use an even more convoluted example, rotating on the correct player after a screen can be more important than "staying on your man" depending upon the context of the play).

Basically, the reason Harden, Parsons, Lin, Asik, et. al. all have very high and very similar DRtg numbers is because the team as a whole generates very porous defense. They allow a lot of points, which is reflected in the relatively high DRtg when compared to other players on other teams.

In a lot of ways, it actually makes more sense to just look at an individual player's Stop% and then run the actual comparisons to get context (against the league average, the team average, positional player average, etc.). The way DRtg is calculated, it's too easy to conflate team performance with individual performance, and huge swings in value between players is largely a reflection of variations between teams. If the metric is supposed to measure individual performance, then it doesn't do a very good job...


Re: RollingWave
Stats like plus/minus don't have to deal with this because they innately contextualize team performance within the numbers themselves - that is, you can't make any sense out of a given player's plus/minus unless you look at his team's performance (and the league's performance) over at least one season's worth of data (in addition, the plus/minus figure also automatically takes into account competition, because you and your team's performance will reflect the level of competition faced, which can then be normalized over the course of a season while looking at other teams' performances as well).

This is why it's good to note the people who throw plus/minus numbers from individual games - because at that point it's clear that those posters are just looking for anything to support their opinion without even bothering to understand the underlying data. In other words, don't use plus/minus from a single game - it takes pretty much a year or two of data to make any sense out of the figures being produced.

The problem with plus/minus is that it is impossible, without additional work, to differentiate between a point added and a point prevented. However, it would be possible to do this if they differentiated the data over the course of each possession (i.e., the plus/minus for a player when his team has the ball vs. when the opposing team has the ball). Which doesn't make sense, because teams only score when they have possession of the ball, right? Which is why I said you would have to do additional work beyond that point (e.g. taking into account time of possession, efficiency of possession, whether the possession ended in a score vs. a turnover vs. something else, etc. etc. etc.).

 

I just found this thread, great job!

 

If you're a true rocket fan, you'll have to appreciate the greatness of maury. Fact is, you can replace harden with Courtney lee and this team will rack up the points like we did when we had an 6'1 center =).

to reach 50 wins, the coaching staff needs to trust team ball. Yeah, I get it, coach doesn't call for Isos. Well then it's up to the coaching staff to preach team ball even more than just "balls got sticky" after every game.

Once harden decides to try on D, and not just try to take 10 men off the dribble, we will be glorious. Championship contenders!**






**all star power forward not included.

 

I think it has to do with usage rate also. Magic Johnson used to have the highest turn over rate when he was with the Lakers because he had the ball in his hands a lot. Since Harden always has the ball, he should have the highest turnover rate in one of the fastest paced teams in the league.

 

I'm not sure about this one.

 

The only thing with this is that there aren't that many great SG/SF scorers in this league anymore, and Harden gets the easier assignment every game (Parsons, Delfino and Garcia take the better scorer every game)

 

RickyNewport will only adjust Lin's TOs for usage rate, but wouldn't for his scoring or assists. It is who he is.