Titbit I notice just today, Devin Booker has a 6.4 WS to Greens 5.7 WS. But Booker has a 6.1 OWS and only a 0.3 DWS. On the other hand Green has a 3.4 DWS and a 2.3 OWS. Devin Booker is all offense, negligible defense…. Uhmm… I wonder which Ime would prefer? Not really, Ime wants a player in the mold of Green. Green is maleable, and wants to be the best! Of course natural talent and drive separates the best from the rest… that is still to be determined for Green, but he looking good….
Jalen Green should make a all underrated team by the end of the season. Some guys are perplexed how Green is so under the radar. So much negative **** talking coming from within the Rockets own fanbase when it came to Green and a near universal praise of Amen and Sengun meant that many neutral nba fans have very outdated views of Green. Some nba media is noticing and is finding it odd how a 22-23 year old leading scorer of a 54 win pace team is **** on so frequently and is questioned so much and is barely mentioned. I'd say it's because people spam on/off stats with Green. But you don't see this negative reaction with guys like Paolo or JDub who have atrocious on/off numbers also and are universally praised.
Paolo is not universally praised. Not sure what the discourse is around JDub but the Paolo discourse is very similar to the Jalen discourse. Orlando fans are EXTREMELY split on him, dude is obviously incredibly talented but it is a bit odd that they are a 25 win team with him and a 50 win team when he's injured. And it's also odd that they always lose when he's on the court and they always win when he sits. There's a huge negative reaction around Paolo.
I feel like with neutral NBA analysts they feel a lot more comfortable saying Paolo is a future elite scoring star as a matter of fact given but are significantly more hesitant to say that about Green and are more frequent in concocting trade requests to get a real 1A star like... Mikal Bridges. How many times do you hear the Rockets issue is not finding a 1A yet? How often do you hear that same complaint about the Magic from neutral NBA analysts?
Hmmm I dunno. I don't really watch espn or anything like that, so this is hard for me to say. Paolo is a year younger and has a higher scoring average than Jalen, and better advanced stuff. So I think it's reasonable he gets more acceptance as a 1A than Jalen. I just wanted to push back on the universal praise part, I think the NBA community (online at least) is very skeptical of guys with really bad on-off stuff. It's really hard for me personally to convince myself someone is "good" when their team always loses while that guy is on the court, and the team always wins when the guy is off the court. And Paolo is a really good example of this.
on-off doesn't say if a team is winning or losing if a player is on/off the court. Green has a negative on/off but the team is still winning when Green is on the court with his +3. On/off has too much noise. For example if a a team has a deep bench, starters on/off will suffer. Opposing teams might rest their best defensive perimeter players when someone like Green is on the bench so the "off" numbers for Green are when the opposing team doesn't have their optimal defensive line up possibly. There are so many noise factors. Green also not missing a single game and being second in mpg is going to effect on/off numbers/
I guess I should've been more specific but when I say on/off I'm talking about looking at all the on/off numbers in general, not just the one stat you're talking about. So like with Paolo, the team has a negative net rating with him on the court and a positive net rating with him off the court. The numbers get even worse when you add Franz into the equation, like "Paolo without Franz" vs "Franz without Paolo" numbers. I'm talking about all this stuff when I say on/off. And on top of that, winning ~60% of their games when he's injured, but only ~40% when he plays. Like how can a player be good when all that is true? That's what I struggle with. I think that's what fans in general struggle with. It's hard to make sense of this, outside of the obvious conclusion of "this player is simply not very good."
Jalen is properly rated and judged by neutral fans and Rockets fans and probably most GM's. I don't know why @fchowd0311 get so sensitive about people's high praise of Amen this year and Sengun last year. Amen is part of our identity on defense, and when you consistently shutdown all NBA level players on a team built on defense while being an athletic freak you get noticed around the league. Sengun's hype last year was also because he was dropping 20-9-6 on crazy efficiency going into the all-star game and we were winning. He was also making Jokic like passes that were going viral. Jalen is just seen as unreliable for the most part of his career because of his month long slumps where he can't get out of his own head. How can you get mad at fans for showing doubt when a player is just so up and down as a pure scorer. There were a lot of optimism after each season that he will make some kinda leap, but so far it's been just baby steps, and for neutral fans that doesn't watch the Rockets every night, it's hard to notice the difference. I think most young players are fairly judged, people give them props when they do good things and have doubts when they don't. I mean people shat on Cade 3 years before finally giving his props this season. The Scottie Barnes hype has but all died at this point, I don't hear anyone talk about him anymore. People were pretty low on Giddey last year, but he seems to have a resurgence and people recognizes it.
The Ringer last week rated Devin Vassel as the 83rd best player and Jalen Green as the 88th. Jalen Green is the opposite of a advanced stat darling and still blows Vessal out in advanced metrics like BPM, EPM etc let alone beating him in basic box score stats and being the leading scorer of a 2nd seed nba team. Sengun is hyped THIS year and has a worse scoring efficiency than Green seeing on the same list his rank is like 40th. So I disagree and I think him being underrated is due to the Rocket fanbase not used to seeing 19-22 year old guards dominating the ball and making mistakes and being inconsistent because the Rockets franchise before this never had high usage 20 year old guards resulting in many fans spamming hate of him in neutral sites.
Even when we disagreed about Harden I’ve always respected your basketball opinion (and hopefully have been respectful in our interactions) so I definitely do not want to come across as an *******, but in my opinion you kind of started the whole personal attack thing by calling Houston77’s posts “insane sounding” and possibly “unhinged” when the post itself was actually pretty mild, especially when it was far more complimentary towards Jalen than some of the stuff you’ve reacted less viscerally to. I don’t think many people would react well to that, to be honest—even if it’s just as a criticism of their basketball take. Personal attacks of ANY kind are pretty unnecessary on a forum where nobody knows anybody, of that I am 100% in agreement with you. But I do think sometimes you’re in attack mode (or defense mode?) and make things a lot more confrontational than you maybe intend to. Anyway that’s enough from me on this topic, let’s get back to enjoying Jalen playing really well!
I get you. I guess I'm enforcing my set of morals on to the board where I believe insults when it comes to a hobby like analyzing a sport is fine but it mucks up the basketball conversation and suddenly its just people hurling insults. So my bad. I think Amen and Jalen complement each other well. Cover for each other's current deficiencies.
Regardless of Jalen, there is no chance players are fairly rated by neutral fans and GM’s alike. Most fans don’t know anything about reading stats and understanding contracts. The majority of fans have never heard of win shares and EPM and stuff like that. The majority of fans only watch their own team and its opponents. Most don’t watch any defense. Most don’t know that defense is half of all of stats, possessions and minutes. Most know nothing about the CBA. You’ll often hear basketball fans describe Jalen like he’s still the same player we drafted. You’ll also hear them describe Amen as though he’s just a better Michael Kidd Gilchrist. Most neutral fans still see Sengun as an Enes Kanter. Large portions will shift their opinion when ESPN positions those players in a certain way. You probably frequent places/spaces with the most intelligent fans and kind of lost perspective about what the average neutral fan actually is. The idea that the neutral fan knows what each advanced stat does and applies it accurately is soooooooo far from reality. Most people who post advanced stats themselves don’t know what the F they’re doing, they think on/off means a player is good or not and subsequently must assume the coaches and GM’s read things the same way. Coaches and GM’s have tracked every potential outcome and their long term results - like what percentage of players see their ratings change dramatically upon being traded from a good to a bad situation or vice versa. They know X player missed a difficult stretch of 15 games, causing player Y to absorb losses into their stats. The coaches obviously know things like that on a macro level which you don’t get out of online amateur analysts. The problem is actually the fear of admitting that these advanced stats/metrics are in their infancy (I.e. full of errors) and that we don’t have the knowledge that coaches and GM’s have about the nuanced way to pair them with other data. If you listen to the average stat head’s take on Jalen Green’s advanced numbers, you would think Ime Udoka is an idiot for sticking with him so consistently or you would then have to make up a conspiracy theory about how Stone is forcing the situation and thus won’t acquire a replacement. The reality is more complex than that. I wish the average neutral fan was reasonable but this is sports fandom, it’s nothing like that.
@Easy , @Houston77 , @harold bingo I was wrong on the primary defender. Here is the description from bball index below. There is no indication of average distances of defenders etc. I don't know where @fchowd0311 got that from, unless he can show a source, I'll assume it is not correct because it doesn't really align with the description below and they don't tell how the stat is calculated. The description suggests that it is a measure of how much the player utilizes screens and how much the defenses try to defend that. That actually would explain well why Jokic or shai are not on the list. On-Ball Gravity This metric aims to measure how much attention and resources a team uses trying to defend a player while on-ball. Players with high On-Ball Gravity are ones we’d expect to see double teamed more often than others and see more aggressive screen coverages to get the ball out of their hands. Off-Ball Gravity This metric aims to measure how much attention and resources a team uses trying to defend a player when they don’t have the ball. Players that are stronger 3-point shooters will do better in this metric, and if players are able to shoot off movement and utilize off-ball screens to generate 3-point attempts they’ll tend to grade out higher in this metric.
The other thing is money, Jalen makes 40% less than Booker and will def make much less than that when Booker is due to make 70M after his current deal expires.
They use tracking data for this and all their tracking data comes from Synergy. Synergy data “is calculated by tracking player coordinates and basketball coordinates during games using advanced camera technology, then categorizing and analyzing various game actions and player performances.” I remember reading it on their Twitter feed and website. I don’t know why you guys are so deep in trying to debunk this metric, but this is the top organization in the world for calculating gravity, probably every time you’ve ever heard gravity discussed it comes from this same source. Can you share another place gravity is more reliably calculated? Anywhere.
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/35818363/nba-use-hawk-eye-tracking-system-follow-players-ball Ya it's a optical tracking camera. I think they want to dismiss the gravity data because it doesn't have Alpi on it which makes sense if you understand that gravity here measured the average distance of defenders to the offensive player being analyzed and therefore Alpi or a center like Jokic will have more selective gravity typically when they are posting up while guards who bring the ball up who are outside threats are going to more often have things done to them like being face guarded even when walking up the court without the ball which defenses don't rally don't do to big men.
This is a lot of bullshit excusing of a guy that just hasn't taken the next step and likely never will.
