Let me tell you what I think is the main reason why we suck. There's this thing called Win Shares (WS). It's an advanced stat that tells you approximately how many wins a given player contributed to his team's total wins in a season. Calculating this is a bit complicated, but that's basically what it means, and if you add up all the win shares of players of a certain team, that number will roughly match up with the team's win totals. This is 2015-2016 Houston Rockets Win Shares Now, compare this with what elite team's WS distribution normally looks like : GSW SAS OKC CLE See the difference? All the top teams have relatively evenly distributed win shares among their players. As great as Curry has been this year, he is only responsible for 15.9 of GS's 65 wins (around 25%). That means approx. 49 other wins have come from Curry's teammates, esp Green and Klay. Harden's WS is 11.3 and we currently have 36 total wins as a team. That means Harden is responsible for 31% of our victories. That's really high. Those are the numbers you see from a typical one-man team. Look at the WS distribution of 2006-2007 Los Angeles Lakers : Kobe averaged 32 PPG and led the league in scoring, yet the Lakers only won 42 games in that season. MJ, Wade, Iverson and T-Mac all had to go through similar situations in their career. Simple math is telling us that we just don't have enough players contributing to our wins besides Harden. And obviously, this is the case. We only have one all-star caliber player on this team, and the second best guy is not even close to that level. You can't expect to win a championship when there is a glaring lack of talent issue compared to other elite teams. You just simply can't. Dallas, Portland, Utah, Bulls, Wizards all currently have similar wins as we do, and yet not a single player on those teams have 10+ WS. Harden is the only player who has respectable wins shares despite coming from a very mediocre team. Take Harden off this roster, and we're basically 76ers or Lakers. So, please Morey, for the love of god, don't ignore this issue next season. Bring in as many talented players as you can. It's doesn't have to be big names like Durant, but a player who can average at least 20+ points without Harden's help would be a good start.
I did, but I just wanted to expound upon this issue a little deeper, since many ppl here seem to not realize it.
You don't need to do win share comparisons to know how bad everyone outside of Harden has been relative to role players on actual contending teams.
The lack of talent on this team is pretty scary. How many players apart from Harden on this current roster would get good minutes on any of those teams? Dwight & Ariza definitely, Pat as a 3rd string/situational PG. After that....
I know, it should be a common sense. The thing is, that's doesn't seems to be the case here, well at least up until very recently. I think people are waking up as to what is the real issue with this team.
what are these? pictures for ants?! but seriously, Dwight should be getting paid half of what James is making based on these WS. So around 7.5mil/year which sounds right to me.
Ariza yes. Bev maybe. Dwight? the way he is playing now, his ass will surely be on the bench in the top contending team.
I think he'd probably be a starter on OKC and Cleveland. He'd be a horrendous fit on the Warriors and Spurs though.
Dwight Capela Dmo Pat Ariza Maybe even Beasley, the way he's been playing. It's not that our players suck overall, it's that too many of them can't score on their own OR shoot well consistently. It's like we sucked all the role energy guys from other teams and put them around Harden. Individually, they'd be fine playing next to multiple scorers.
But they are not all-star tier players. Far from it. And therein lies the issue, 'cause all elite teams have at least Big 2 or Big 3. We def need 2nd and 3rd option who can score 18~20 points besides Harden. Before Beasley joined this team, our 2nd offensive go-to-guy was Dwight Howard who has a horrendous post-up game, and that explains why our team offense struggled when Howard was on the floor. Howard shouldn't be even 3rd or 4th offensive option at this stage, IMO.
Win Shares is not the be all and all stat. Does not really capture the impact of defense and the intangibles. How u laid it iut tho shows how this team relies too heavily on one player dor there offense rather than as a team as a whole. And thats on the coaches
This season didn't even finish yet, and that means Harden will probably be responsible for 4-5 less wins this year compared to 2014-2015 season. We won 56 last year, and we sure are not going to win 50 wins this season, so do the math. Also, Dwight's WS is a career low, except for last year where he missed half the season. #DOFperspective
exactly. Why do we have so many "i know stats" idiots on here that fail to understand the whole picture? Its like the analytics quest took a stupid turn.
