I thought this was an excellent article and really helps to explain why the Rockets are going so far above most people's expectations from the beginning of the year. This team really fits well together from role player to superstar to coaching staff to front office. Here is an excerpt (and the link). Lock or merge if it was already posted (I didn't see it). We're succeeding because we have two players who excel at scoring, passing and reading the game. It puts tremendous pressure on opposing defenses, and the long-winged defenders on the team and our roll man (Capela) just mean more in this system than they do in others. That's why people may legitimately ask if Capela will be as good elsewhere. The answer is probably no (although he'll still be really good), but we know for sure he's damn good here, and it would not be easy to replicate his skills. https://cleaningtheglass.com/the-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum/ In the summer of 2016, I regarded the Houston Rockets’ moves with some puzzlement. In the four years since acquiring James Harden, the Rockets had taken on the qualities of their star: on average they ranked 7th on offense but 16th on defense. They seemed to have scoring mostly figured out: they were all about free throws, layups and threes, played heavily in transition, and had relatively simple offensive sets that worked by relying on their stars and spacing. It seemed clear that defense was the place to look to improve the team, with a coaching vacancy providing the first opportunity. Instead, they hired Mike D’Antoni. D’Antoni is unfairly maligned for his defensive coaching: in his four full seasons as head coach of the Suns, D’Antoni’s teams ranked between 14th and 16th on defense. Not great, but not the disaster on that end that critics claimed. His reputation as a bad defensive coach seems mainly to come from pushing the pace to an extreme in an era where there was still not a widespread understanding of the value of per-possession stats. Still, it’s safe to say that defense is not his priority. In his eight full seasons as a head coach he has not once coached a team that was better on defense than they were on offense, and, until this 2017-18 season, he had never coached a team that rated significantly above average on defense. You don’t hire Mike D’Antoni to fix your defense. You don’t sign Ryan Anderson, a marksman with a consistent track record as one of the worst defensive big men in the NBA, to a hefty contract. Ditto for Eric Gordon, a talented scorer who had had his struggles defensively. No, the Rockets weren’t looking to shore up a leaky defense. They were betting it all on their offense. And I thought that was a mistake. I was wrong, of course. Very wrong. Those players ended up fitting perfectly on offense, with only Golden State’s historic offense eclipsing the Rockets’ last year. And utilizing a clever scheme designed by assistant coach Jeff Bzdelik, Houston’s defense wasn’t as bad as might be expected, finishing the year 16th. That turned the Rockets into a 55 win team — and one intriguing enough to be Chris Paul’s offseason destination of choice. Along with Paul, last summer the Rockets brought in PJ Tucker and Luc Mbah a Moute: two smart, switchable players who have helped catapult the team to its current lofty defensive mark without sacrificing much on the offensive end. And here we are, with Mike D’Antoni on pace to coach his first top 10 defense, and the Rockets posing a legitimate threat to the Golden State juggernaut. But the Rockets’ rise isn’t just about D’Antoni. Nor is it just about James Harden, or just about Chris Paul, or just about Ryan Anderson, Eric Gordon, Luc Mbah a Moute, or PJ Tucker. Take the 21 Nash play I dissected in last week’s Friday Film. As I detailed, it’s an elegant design. But it’s so deadly because of the combination of the Xs and Os and the players involved: James Harden or Chris Paul or Eric Gordon running a pick-and-roll with a spaced floor and a real threat as a roller doesn’t require any special set, but this set makes great use of those players. Mike D’Antoni didn’t look like an offensive genius when he was in New York with Chris Duhon running the point, or in LA with Dwight and Pau clogging up the interior. And while Steve Nash was very good in Dallas, he wasn’t an MVP until he got to Phoenix and played for D’Antoni. Amar’e Stoudemire, meanwhile, benefited from the presence of both of them — and by forcing defenses to adjust to his explosive rolls to the rim made both of them look better. Those Seven Seconds or Less Suns didn’t just combine in what mathematicians would call a linear fashion, where D’Antoni + Nash + Amar’e + Shawn Marion = the Suns. They represented the principle of gestalt: their whole was greater than the sum of their parts. This is the beauty of basketball: players and coaches aren’t just interchangeable pieces. Fit matters. When the pieces click, it can create something incredible and lasting — a team like the 1970s Knicks is still held up as an example of just this idea of gestalt on the court. In 2009 Dean Oliver and Mike Fienan published a paper in the Journal of Quantitative Analysis of Sport titled Importance of Teammate Fit: Frescoball Example. Their clever use of frescoball, a paddle game played on beaches worldwide, lays bare the concept of fit and the challenges we have analyzing any combinations of players — both quantitatively and qualitatively. Frescoball is a collaborative sport: two players stand with paddles 15-30 feet apart and try to bat a ball back and forth as many times as possible without it hitting the ground. Dean and Mike proposed a way to classify players that was simple and easily understood, but still managed to capture the idea of fit. They looked at two attributes: athleticism and consistency. Athletic players are good at returning a ball hit outside their sweet spot to the other player’s sweet spot. Consistent players are good at returning a ball hit in their sweet spot to the other player’s sweet spot. They then randomly assigned these abilities to players, randomly paired them up, and simulated seasons of frescoball play. What they found surprised them. A dominant team emerged, a team that put up incredible numbers, but didn’t have the prototypically athletic frescoball players. This team was so adept because it combined two unbelievably consistent players. They would just hit the ball back and forth from sweet spot to sweet spot, and their athletic limitations were never exposed. But think about that for a second: if these two players were separated, they would be fairly pedestrian. They wouldn’t be able to do much with balls hit outside their sweet spot, and their teams would not perform particularly well. It was only in the combination of the players that this greatness emerged. It was simulated gestalt.2 Were this a real sports league, other teams would look at this dominant team and try very hard, perhaps spending ungodly sums of money, to acquire one of the two parts of this great team. And they would be making a huge mistake, a mistake that occurs often in professional sports. They would be falling victim to a belief in simple causality: that when something happens, like a team winning a championship, a clear and replicable reason can be found for it. John Tooby, an anthropologist and one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology, notes that this is an understandable mistake — but a grave one. To truly understand the world, he says, we have to let go of our desire for simplicity, and instead embrace a concept he calls nexus causality: Causality itself is a conceptual tool that simplifies, schematizes, and focuses our representation of situations. This cognitive machinery guides us to think in terms of the cause — of an outcome’s having a single cause. Yet for enlarged understanding, it is more accurate to represent outcomes as caused by an intersection, or nexus, of factors. We are wired to believe B causes A. Our brains are not built to comprehend a world where B, C, D, E, and F all combine in some unique way to cause A. Nor are our statistical methods well designed to capture this sort of complexity. And basketball, like life, does not lend itself to easy explanations. Even when we know what happened, it’s very difficult to look back and disentangle all of the threads that led to the result. Yet our discourse and our analytical methods do not reflect that. We still search for one or two clear causes for success and failure. We still create statistical models that evaluate players as if they play in a vacuum and not in a team. We still react to results instead of attempting to understand the process that led to them.
