[CBS] Stretch 4's in the NBA: The balance between stretching and defense

STEVE NOVAK IS A BEAST

 

Not sure he had Patterson's numbers, particularly for his SAC period, correct.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/p/pattepa01.html

His eFG was 54% as a King and not 45%. And I am pretty sure he played almost exclusively as a PF.

 

busty morris in houston vs phoenix...

 

The magic of data. Steve Novak is so highly rated because he was playing alongside a stud 5 in Tyson Chandler that could gobble up all his blow bys. So Novak looks like a stud plus. On the other hand guys like the Morris twins and Derrick WIlliams look like sieves defensively mainly due to the fact that they played on teams with poor team defense. There's no way any of those guys are worse defenders than Novak. No way. They're not as good shooters as Novak. But if you flipped Novak to Phoenix or Minny and put any of those guys on the Knicks last year.....they would flip quadrants.

Stretch 4's look really, really good next to stud defensive 5's. They look pretty crappy on poor defensive teams with no significant defensive paint presence.

That is all you should take out of this data and graph.

 

Man if only we had LeBron... Would solve ALL our problems.

 

One note: 82games.com, which Harper uses, had Parsons as the PF whenever he and Delfino shared the forward duties together. Delfino should really be the 4. It really should be Delfino on the graph instead of Parsons and he's probably at roughly the same neighborshood as Parsons.

It's just one of those flaws-- there's judgment involved in deciding who to list as the "PF" and sometimes it's hard to know unless you watch the actual game tape of every single minute of every single game, an impossible task for folks running 82games.com.