...but they also have very bad players getting major minutes. Corey Brewer is 67th in RPM among all shooting guards. Ty Lawson is third from last among all point guards. Terrence Jones is dead last among all power forwards. James Harden is 1st in RPM among all SGs. Dwight Howard is 4th among all Cs. Anyone blaming Harden and Dwight for the team's struggles should stop watching basketball. There's no reason for Jones and Brewer to get minutes over DMo and Thornton/Terry when healthy. Simply replacing terrible players with average players would give this team a huge boost. Focusing elsewhere is stupid.
You are using Real Plus-Minus, it doesn't really measure what you think it does (see below). By one year plus-minus, Harden is faring fairly badly. https://cornerthreehoops.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/explaining-espns-real-plus-minus/ 2. Real Plus-Minus does NOT measure how well a player has performed this season. Statistics can be divided into two categories. Descriptive statistics tell us about what happened in the past. For instance, I can check how many page views this blog post has. Predictive statistics try to forecast what will happen in the future. I could create a model that estimates how many page views I’ll get over the next 24 hours. This difference between these is subtle, but important. Real Plus-Minus is meant to be predictive. It’s interested in how well a player will perform in the future, rather than what he did in the past. RPM’s emphasis on prediction explains why it uses some of the tricks it does. For instance, I mentioned earlier that RPM uses data from previous seasons in its priors. If my primary goal is to evaluate how well a player did this season, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense to use data from other seasons. However, if I want to predict what will happen in the future, the older numbers can help me differentiate between players who have been consistently good (and will likely keep being good) and players who are merely going through a hot streak (and will likely regress to their mean). This has a number of implications. One is that RPM tends to be skeptical of player improvements (or regressions) that exceed what is expected for a player that age. This season, Anthony Davis improved much faster than most 20-21 year old playes. People who watch basketball know that Davis is super talented and accelerated growth is expected from him. However, Real Plus-Minus doesn’t understand this and suspects that Davis’ numbers might be a random blip. As a result, Real Plus-Minus is liable to underestimate Davis’s impact this season9. On a less technical note, RPM’s focus on prediction makes it a poor way to determine who should get end-of-season awards. I think this is an important point to emphasize because ESPN does exactly this in its introduction to RPM, using it to argue that Taj Gibson is a better candidate than Jamal Crawford for 6th Man of the Year. RPM is optimized to predict the future, not evaluate the past.
Don't understand that breakdown. Not saying it's false, just I don't understand. Couldn't it be said PPG is predicting the next game's scoring total?
Wrong. That a particular advanced statistic is "optimized" to be predictive does not rob it of its explanatory power. Wrong. A prior is used because it improves the results to match reality by adding more data. Do you think 30 games is a big enough sample size to accurately explain what's going on? Is the East really better than the West? Prior information necessarily improves our understanding of the present, especially in cases where present data is lacking. Stop using bad articles from people who have no idea what they're talking about.
I disagree. I think they have good players... some of which who are playing much worse than they actually are.
Real Plus Minus uses prior seasons data, which is why Harden is still pretty high. But he's declining. Last year- 8.50 This year- 4.59 The post doesn't even address the question of how Harden is doing this year vs. last year, as real plus minus just combines the two into one statistic. And figuring out why we're so much worse this year is kinda the main question. In other words, OP can't read. Hence, the 1-star rating on this thread.
You have no idea how RPM is calculated. You don't even know what it measures. Stop posting; it's embarrassing.
to answer op's question, i believe rockets are playing these god forsaken abominations to keep some kinda trade value going. there was a time i thought jones and brewre can get us a good 3d wing to backup ariza or take over his starting role. i still think it can happen., but might need to take some of the other teams crap i dont think they should trade ty. he has slowly getting back to form and i think he'll become a solid rotation player. e ven if he doesnt, huge expiring contract. this roster isnt gonna get far in the playoffs. hopefully they dont cop out and do a big 3 in the offseason ty's expiring can help get the rockets what they need
