Call your shot on the Rockets offensive rating in 2019-20

well, this was a weird season. how much can we read into bubble numbers ... ? legit question

I don't think 112.5 is a useful number (for historical comparisons), since they were 106 in the bubble. In fact, they were 114.0 just six games before the shut down, and fell to 113.4 but still #2 in the league at the shutdown.

Eric Gordon?

That difference of 113.4 versus a 114+ number can literally all be contributed to Gordon's worst year as a Rocket. On nearly identical 3FA numbers each year (8.8. 8.8. 8.8 and 8.4), he made .5 less. That's 1.5 points right there, on just EGo's normal allottment of threes. And that doesn't count his fewest games ever.

 

Interesting that the rating went down after the Capela trade, which was supposed to open up the offense.

 

I have a hard time seeing Morey, the analytics man, legitimately believing Westbrook would improve our team.

It seems what we ultimately sacrificed our future for was Harden's comfort, combined with Tilman's ignorance, and impatience.

 

I edited my post to include a reason being Eric Gordon's worst year shooting for MDA ever. Read my edit, please. Tell me what you think.

 

What was our offensive rating in the playoffs. Is it has to be like bottom of the barrel

 

107.7, which also equals the combined DRtg of LAL and OKC (in regular season), including a missing and rusty Westy in 1st round.

btw: we were 108.5 playoff ORtg in 2018, our best team in MDA era, facing two of the best defenses as well, and one horrible one. (We were 116 vs Minny, and 105.5 vs Utah/GSW)

 

did not age well**


**to be fair, i didn't look up last year's shooting, it's possible this was somehow better

 

which site are you using? bbref has 116.9 for minny, 111.6 for utah, and 104.9 for gsw.

also, you'd have to penalize this year by 2 points for the league-wide increase in efficiency.

 

He asked for total ORtg. I was just separating Minny from the final 12 games of that playoffs. So, 105.5 is combined UTA/GSW, to compare to 107.7 of combined OKC/LAL across 12 games, too.

And you really shouldn't be using BBRef anymore for ORtg and DRtg. No one uses those numbers for the years NBA.com went true. NBA.com actually counts possessions now, while BBRef still estimates them for historical consistency. NBA.com is a true ORtg now

 

hmm, good to know. although i hate the nba.com interface for some reason.

 

well, it's free. BBRef is now subscription-based for STATHead. ugh. but I'll probably pay for it when next season starts...maybe not.

 

What exactly is the purpose of Russell Westbrook if the Rockets defense is worse, the offense is at best similar and he cost them multiple draft picks... and the team had to scheme to hire him on defense and on offense his spacing issues require trading a draft pick for a specific type of player?

The Westbrook deal was made for pure ego. TF wanted his own guy and Paul wasn’t his guy and he resented paying him so he wanted a shiny trade for a big name at almost any cost... so we now have Westbrook and Covington to fit Westbrook on offense and lost Paul, 3 #1’s... 2 #1 flips and the value of Capela.

 

No.

this is ignoring the actual NBA and the level of offense and defense being played.

https://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/HOU/
Relative ORTG by year:

2017: +5.9
2018: +6.1
2019: +5.1
2020: +2.9

The Rockets took a step back offensively while the NBA is getting smaller and weaker on defense. A massive step back at that.



Eric Gordon isn’t close to that big of an impact player. The Rockets lost Chris Paul himself for over 20 games in 2018 and 2019 and still stayed steady.

Gordon is a highly replaceable 3pt chucker. Harden could literally decide to score 15 more PPG in the RS. But realistically other guys can do easily take up his possessions. Easily. He’s more important in the playoffs.

 

did you not see my comment about the 106 ORtg bubble numbers. Can you please show your relative ORTG for pre-bubble when we were still #2, .5 better than #3 team.

discounting the bubble, we truly can mathematically attribute the entire .7 drop to just Eric Gordon's missed 3s versus a very consistent first three years. And that doesn't even count his most missed games in MDA era.

No other year had a shutdown, and Rockets in previous years always went up in 2nd half of year. Rockets were trending up since the trade, even despite a horrible last 6 games, they likely snap out of that. And two of those games were LAC and BOS, top defenses.

 

yeah i'm gonna have to figure out how to live life in a world without the play index being free. might just have to pay the $8/mo around the playoffs each year. you can actually see results #11-20 when you do a query (they hide the top 10) so if you get specific enough to only have <20 results, you can search for something and then flip the ascending/descending thing and end up seeing all 20 results.

 

Ha! flip the ascend/descend!!! I was looking for a loop hole! I actually wonder if we can somehow control the # of returned results on any query.

 

The bubble? The best conditions ever for offense? Are you serious? Just stop it.

The bubble is some mega AAU basketball dream scenario. No home crowds, no traveling(HUGE, ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE), perfect communication conditions audibly.

This was literally perfect simulation basketball. Them stinking the entire time shows they’re frauds even more if anything

Remember this is an offensive era. Defense is always lagging behind. Holy god they did away with the center position. They went extreme in efforts on offense.

they have a supposed offensive guru. An MVP.

There was no excuse at all. Hell the offense is INSANELY simple.

There is nothing at all excusable about a bad bubble performance the more I think about it.

 

His 3pt shooting got worse, much worse. (It says a lot when you can get much worse from last year's 29% shooting.) But his overall TS% got better because he shot less 3s.

 

Our ORTG went to crap once D'Antoni inexplicably stopped playing Ben McLemore, who other than Harden had the best net rating on the team. I don't want to ever hear that MDA follows the analytics.