Agreed man. I made a point another day, if you go back to 2014 and say "A team with Curry, Thompson, Barbosa, Speights, Barnes, and Green going to beat the Bulls record after winning a championship." Every single person would have laughed in your face. Curry was the only all-star on that team. Thompson was a young up and comer. Green was a bench goon. Barbosa, Speights, and Livingston all journeymen, and Barnes was looking like a bust. They get a great coach and everyone looks better than they are. Same with the Spurs. They draft low nearly every year and every player they get...or close to it at least (HAHA Richard Jefferson) plays better than expected. Their franchise other than Duncan is built on dudes that have been overlooked in the draft basically.
"You're evidence is not perfect" is not a good counter-argument when you, yourself don't have ANY evidence to back up your claim. At least I'm presenting something. People keep saying we have talent, but based on what? Do people think Dwight at 30 years old is as good as Dwight at 24 years old? What other player besides Harden could be considered talented? This team is not that deep, esp compared to teams like GSW, SAS, OKC, CLE and LAC, it should be pretty obvious by now.
Please go back and read up on why GSW chose those specific players to build the team on. It wasn't an accident, nor did they go with an 'eye-test'. It was mostly based on analytics. In 2014, GSW almost traded Klay Thompson for Kevin Love, but at the last second they pulled out. Why? Because numbers told them Klay would be better fit for the system than Kevin Love, and it was the right decision. People think Morey is some kind of analytics genius, but personally I'm underwhelmed by the collection of players he has acquired so far. What kind of analytics suggests that shooting a lot of 3s with mediocre 3 point shooters is a good idea? This is the ultimate strategy for mediocrity. GSW front office certainly knows hell of a lot more about analytics than Morey does, IMO.
soooooo... theoretically... if a team had one player dominating the ball on the offensive end then the other players PER would suffer - since that 'other guy' is monopolizing the ball and opportunities for points and assists... and then, if a team had somebody who played subpar defense... that would hurt the rest of his teammates RPM - since they were giving up points so readily... and the more minutes that a player plays would directly correlate to bettering their WS/48...as long as the team is at least winning some games.... just sayin.... would you wanna join this team as a free agent?
Harden is dominating the ball offensively, because we effectively have no other scoring option. Dwight is not a good post player, he is below average in that regard. TIme after time we tried to feed the ball to Dwight and it just didn't work out, because it always ended up with him bricking the shot, turning the ball over, or being hacked and missing free throws. Arzia and Beverly, while above average 3 point shooters, are spot up types, so they cannot create any shot opportunity by themselves. Of course, if we actually had a legitimate offensive system in place then this should be less of an issue, but that's on the coaching staff. BTW, RPM has nothing to do with who you're playing with. Playing with Harden does not hurt your RPM, please google what RPM is and how it's calculated.
I'd love to see some consistent minutes for Beasley, DMo and Capella... not uncommon for any of them to do 0-6 minutes in a game... We have options but JBB is an idiot...
I agree with you that JBB is an idiot for not giving those players you mentioned more minutes. Especially Capela and D-Mo. Beasley is a little bit complicated, because while his offense is really good, he has no defensive awareness whatsoever. It's even worse than Harden, and that's probably the main reason why JBB has cut down on his minutes.
I think this is a fair question, but the stats provided are ludicrous. Dwight is certainly among the top 10 C's in the game, and that's in his worst ever season. We need an upgrade NOW obviously, but this team had the right talent and the right age group to challenge for a ring at the start of this season. What happened is the players tuned out the first coach, and the second coach did not have the experience to right the ship nor does he seem to be talented from an X's and O's perspective. It's a combination of some ****ty coaching and some players with a ****ty attitude. We're not going to rewrite history by claiming that we never had the talent to begin with. We certainly have as much polished talent as all but 2-3 teams in the league. You can't sit here at the end of the season and act like we lack talent just because we weren't able to translate it into wins. It can not be that all our defenders suddenly started losing their defensive talent, and all our offensive talent forgot how to score. It's obviously systemic i.e. has to do with coaching. Other than Brewer, all of these guys can find rotation spots on contenders and play better than they've played this season. Anyway, we're blowing the whole thing up this summer, so let's see how that goes.
As I said before, Dwight and Ariza is getting older by ever passing year, not younger. Especially for a player like Dwight who heavily relies on his physical ability to make good plays, the simple age factor could be the cause of his rapid decline. We already experienced this with Steve Francis, should not be all that surprising. Also, our bench this year has been horrible and one of the worst in the league, thanks to Brewer totally screwing us over. It's meaningless to compare our current season with the last season, because we overachieved last year by every metric available. You know how GSW is a really good team? It's not just because they have the most wins. It's because they are no.1 in point differential, net rating, offensive efficiency...etc. Their record is backed up by ample evidence. The problem is, our last season's record was not backed up by these numbers. Our expected win-loss record was merely 50-32 based on our offensive & defensive team stats. We were 7th in point differential and net rating. That means we probably won more games than we were supposed to thanks to Harden's clutch performance, but without that we would have not been 2nd in Western Conference, more likely would have been 6th. A really good team does not always have to rely on their best player's clutch performance to win games. The result of the game is usually determined by the 3Q because they are that dominant, as GSW is. We were not as good as we thought we were last year, but everyone, including Morey, deluded themselves into thinking that this was the beginning of something special, when in reality it was more of an absolute ceiling for our team.
RPM includes a box score prior, that's why Harden is still high. He's also dropped to like 17th overall when he was like 3rd last year. (SG is a rather weak position). By single year npi RAPM (no prior) Harden is like 55th. He was top ten in that stat at least the previous two years. Priors are used because single year can be noisy, but it will underrate or overrate players who change a lot. Judge for yourself whether Harden is as good as last year. Also you should use Capela instead of DMo
Ha, you almost had me OP, the mob mentality here has convinced me that James harden is the worst basketball player that's ever lived, and his game is so yucky to even watch.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Draymond Green almost 2 full points ahead of Curry (and everyone else) in single-year RAPM</p>— Jeremias Engelmann (@JerryEngelmann) <a href="https://twitter.com/JerryEngelmann/status/720654290839318528">April 14, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script> You can't possibly take a single-year RAPM seriously. Based on that, Draymond Greene should be the MVP, not Curry. There's a reason why ESPN came up with this new RPM model, because npi RAPM was notorious for being inaccurate and having wider range of standard error. The analytics community doesn't even talk about npi RAPM that much anymore, because there is so much noise in the data. IPV, xRAPM, or other metrics are much more preferred. One of the main deficiencies of npi RAPM is that it overestimates value of players on a good team, and significantly underestimates value of any player on a bad team, since it artificially spreads the value among all the players just to 'fit the conclusion', so to speak.
"Truth in between." I agree with that. Sure, single year is not perfect. But neither is using 3 year or a stat with a prior when a player starts playing significantly worse. What I think would be be better to look at would be which players have changed the most. Also, a lot of these stats are mostly offensive. And obviously Haren last year had an elite, MVP level year. He carried the offense. But we were also a Top 10- defense and we mostly hid Harden defensively. Your stats are undervaluing the defensive contributions.
This is not a 50:50 thing. It's almost universally accepted that pi RAPM is way more accurate than npi RAPM, whose standard error is so high, even for the players with massive minutes, that the results are nearly random. It has no applicable use that I can think of. Ariza was a decent defender last season, but he's been at best mediocre this season. The main reason why our team defense regressed is not Harden, since his D was not that great last year either tbh, it's mainly because Ariza and Beverly are not as good defenders as their name value would suggest. Same thing applies to Dwight. My point is besides Harden, we don't have a single player who is doing their job properly. Harden's job is to be an offensive threat and he is still doing that. On the other hand, Dwight, Ariza and Beverly's job is to be the defensive anchor of this team, which they have failed to do this season.
It's not a 50/50 but it's not a 100/0 thing. RPM has it's own problems. http://nyloncalculus.com/2016/02/19/freelance-friday-deconstructing-rpm-the-mighty-prior/ What stats are you seeing that makes you say Ariza and Beverley aren't as good as their names suggest? And I don't think Harden is doing his job properly. His job is more than "be a threat." He's supposed to be the offensive anchor, which he's failed to do. He's penetrating less, stagnating the offense, and turning it over more, putting the defense in terrible positions. And just because he was a bad defender last year doesn't mean he hasn't gotten worse. He barely moves at times.
I really appreciate the OP and the effort to establish measurables to what the eye test has been telling us all season... the roster is terribly flawed, and while a good coach might be able to play-design or scheme around some of the flaws, the Rockets don't have a good coach, and so the results are the results. So... looking at the starting five, which one other than Harden would start for any of the other playoff teams? Possibly Howard? Maybe Ariza? We definitely lose every matchup at PG and PF. And increasingly at SF and C too. When we play playoff caliber teams... when you look at their bench, do you ever wonder which of our bench players might have made the other team's rotation? Maybe Capela, Beasley. But any others? The only thing lacking in the OPs analysis is the full statistical analysis of the entire team. I would shudder to see the numbers on our bench.
You can go a long way with a "Big Two" superstars and good role players. The idea we have talent is predicated on the idea we still have a Big Two, which we did the last two years. Howard just isn't at that level anymore, unfortunately. Doesn't help that no one stepped up to ascend to even "good role player" level at our PF spot.
Don't get me wrong, Corey Brewer is amazing, but yes outside of Harden we don't have much talent. Bev, Beas, and Clint are solid bench players. Ariza is a starter on only a couple contending teams at best. Detroit is paying Smoove $6 million a year to NOT play for them. KJ only has athletic "talent" but otherwise no. DMo was a good starter for 40ish games last year, but has been just another guy since returning from injury. His lack of lateral quickness, stamina, and rebounding suggests her should be a bench player. Dwight can't move well due to his back problems (h/t to McHale for pointing that out), has stone hands, and obviously the FT thing. Terry and Goudelock... eh. Harrell is a couple years away from being a good bench player but it's possible. Dekker... who knows. Drafting a guy with back issues though... SMGDH. And again Corey Brewer is a rich man's Durant.
