ORTG is the amount of points the team scores when the player is on the floor - it is an indirect measure of a player's performance in that it specifically measures the team's performance. same with plus/minus. 1% change? You would have been better off sticking with the stats I had. That in an of itself isn't a change in efficacy - what if he made 100% of his non rim shots?
obviously he's a ball dominate player. So couple him with another ball dominate player and thats a good formula right? yeah not really. You know what's also a trainwreck is dribble for 21 seconds and pass to another player for a shot or dribble up the court and hoist up a contested 3. Look JH is a really good player, can be even great at times but if he can't atleast be willing to adjust his game to allow himself play at a higher level he won't be anything more than what were seeing now with the same results. If people are happy with that then so be it.
You know what what be a good formula? Learning to use adjectives. Dominate is a verb. Dominant is an adjective.
It's not ideal, doesn't mean it won't work, provided there are good synergies. Thats a far cry from "demanding a trade" Yea not really. We have consistently had good/great offenses with Harden. You don't take one of the greatest offensive SGs of all time and make him change his game, based on the basketball rhetoric of some "higher level". You change the players / system around him to make it work.
ORtg definiton- Offensive Rating (available since the 1977-78 season in the NBA); for players it is points produced per 100 posessions, while for teams it is points scored per 100 possessions. This rating was developed by Dean Oliver, author of Basketball on Paper. Please see the article Calculating Individual Offensive and Defensive Ratings for more information. It's the same thing you posted earlier defending Harden except adjusted for possessions. Plus minus-What is Basketball Plus-Minus? A metric that looks at how teams perform with a certain player on the court, how they perform with a certain player off the court, and calculates the overall impact that player has on team success. That's not the same as a "team stat." The point is to measure a players individual impact. That's why they are, you know, listed by player There are team ortgs and team point differentials, those are team stats. But like I said earlier, its interesting that people want to disregard these stats and focus on traditional stats all of a sudden. Harden dominated these stats last year
This is where we disagree. JH just cannot stand pat and expect different results in this system. I'm not saying he should completely change his style of play but adjusting here and there especially when you're supposed to be the best player couldn't hurt. It's just as much his job to integrate others around him as it is with the players themselves. It works both ways.
regardless, I'm not looking at the offense this year so much as to what we've seen defensively from this team. This defense has been the #1 problem from the beginning and just plain atrocious. As long as this doesn't improve significantly, I'm not expecting much more than hovering around being a .500 team.
A mean can have a high quantity of outliers if there is also a volume of data points. James Harden touches the ball a lot.
1. I did look at the article - individual ORTG's formula seems like it heavily incorporates team-related variables, please see the description of how Scorign possession is calculated. Regardless - let's assume that's a wholly individual metric. Harden's has declined about 4% from last year. You deem this "significant" - let's look at other YoY changes: Brewer down 4% Jones down 20% Howard up 7% Ariza down 6% Beverley up 2% Terry down <1% Lawson (obviously, different team) down 10% I would not deem it a signficant change, (Jones would be a signficant change, Lawson as well) but whatever. 2. Plus minus is not a direct individual metric, it is an indirect attempt to measure player's impact by measuring team performance. No more needs to be said.
13th in touches per game at 83.6. Wall leads the league with 99 per game 86th in dribbles per touch at 3.8. Jackson leads the league at 6.24 dribbles per touch. 49th in seconds per touch at 4.47. Jackson leads the league at 5.99 Yet people continue to perpetuate the myth that James is in another world as a ball dominant, ball stopping over dribbler.
How many of those guys are actually PG's. JH is not a PG. If you actually don't think JH possesses any of those qualities even at times then you just aren't watching enough games.
As much as I can't stand and thinks it's so ****ing stupid when someone posts on here "do you even watch games?" I have to ask... Do you watch enough games? Harden is our PG. Does he flirt with an 8 second violation from time to time? Yes Does he hold the ball for too long and fire a late second pass from time to time? Yes Does it happen that often? No All the stats available shoot down that perpetuated myth. We shoot very few late seconds 3s per game. Even fewer are contested. The stats for all of that are available. Yet people continue to go on and on about how he always holds the ball so long, always dribbles forever and then kicks it for heavily contested 3. All false and simple enough to look up to confirm.
why is it stupid? there's plenty of posters around here who actually want to criticize all day long and don't even watch half the games so they have no clue what they're talking about and expect numbers to tell the entire story when it reality they don't.
I disagree, there's plenty of possessions to go around. Harden's usage rate is 32.7. That means that he uses 32.7% of the possessions when he's on the floor. Westbrook usage rate is 32.2 and he's able to play with Durant who also has a high usage rate (29.5). In my opinion, the issue isn't when the ball is in Harden's hands, it's the possessions when it's not. Lots of other successful teams have high usage players (in the 30 range) and they also have other players with usages above 20.The thing that stands out to me is when you start looking at the 2nd to 4th highest usage players on other teams and compare them to their counterparts on the Rockets. It's a pretty big difference. To give you an idea, here's the usage of every player on these teams that averages more than 15 minutes per game. HOU - 1) Harden - 32.7 2)J.Smith 24.2 (that's LAC/HOU combined) 3)Thorton 24.0 4) T.Jones 19.6 5)D. Howard 19.1 6)Brewer 18.0 7) Ariza 16.2 8)Beverley 15.8 9)Capela 15.7 10)Terry 15.6 11)Lawson 14.7 CLE - 1) L. James 31.5 2) K.Irving 27.0 3) K. Love 23.0 4) M. Williams 22.1 5) JR Smith 18.6 6)Mozgov 17.5 7) Dellavedova 15.6 8) I. Shumpert 14.1 9) R. Jefferson 13.4 10) T. Thompson 11.5 LAC - 1) B. Giffin 29.6 2) C. Paul 27.0 3) J. Crawford 24.1 4)JJ Redick 22.1 5) A. Rivers 18.6 6) P.Pierce 17.5 7) W. Johnson 15.8 8) D. Jordan 14.4 9) L. Mbah a Moute 9.9 GSW - 1) S. Curry 31.7 2) K. Thompson 25.6 3)L. Barbosa 20.1 4) D. Green 19.1 5) F. Ezeli 18.1 6) H. Barnes 17.2 7) Livingston 14.6 8)B. Rush 13.3 9) A. Iguodala 11.9 10)A. Bogut 11.8 OKC - 1) R. Westbrook 32.3 2) K. Durant 29.5 3) E. Kanter 23.0 4) D. Waiters 17.5 5) S. Ibaka 17.4 6) DJ Augustine 14.1 7) S. Adams 12.0 8) A. Roberson 10.2 SAS - 1) L. Aldridge 25.6 2)K. Leonard 24.7 3) M. Ginobli 23.7 4) T. Parker 21.7 5)P. Mills 18.6 6) D. West 17.5 7) T. Duncan 17.2 8) B. Diaw 16.2 9) D. Green 14.9 Compare us to the other teams and who's handling the ball for them. When the ball isn't in Harden's hands then we're generally at a disadvantage. All of these teams have much better 2nd, 3rd and 4th options than we do. In the Rockets case the ball is in the hands of weaker offensive players too much of the time. Much of the time we have the ball in the hands of players who aren't great offensive players. This is an even bigger problem because so many of our rotational players can't create shots for themselves. They are dependent on other players to draw their man away from them and then deliver the ball to them. The problem is when the ball is in the hands of weaker offensive players so much they are unable to create those shots for their teammates.
And this is why the Lawson acquisition was such a let down. He was supposed to be that guy, but just has been terrible all year long. And heaven help me if someone tries to say its Harden's fault that Lawson hasn't been good.
It's not a matter of position, it's a matter of role. Harden is the primary ball handler on this team, that's not really debatable. On most other teams that role falls to the PG. Harden handles the ball as much as most every PG so comparing those numbers is perfectly valid. Statistics certainly won't tell you everything but when you're trying to determine if something happens frequently or infrequently then they are pretty definitive. It's a fact that we just don't shoot that many 3's late in the shotclock each game. That's a fact that stats can definitely prove. Likewise, Harden doesn't possess the ball more than most primary ball handlers. Again it's a fact. On average, Harden holds the ball less than most other team's primary ball handlers. Those are tangible things that are measured.
QFT. Harden sees this, tries to do too much, gets tried and turns it over and conserves his energy on defense. Vicious cycle. The question we have to ask its, if Harden gets a legit sidekick, that is aggressive (unlike Lawson) and a good shot maker (not Dwight in the post), will Harden share the ball and can they co-exist? I say yes.
