you guys are still questioning if Lin can play the POINT GUARD position? lol Like Maury said, point guard play is more than just scoring. Lin is assisting(cough minus this awful clunker against minny), lin rebounds, lin puts effort on the defensive side. what more can he do right now? he does need to improve his shot but that will come. It's like you guys want him to fail. Reminds me of another sub forum for another sport.
Without attempting to insert myself into the arguments here, I did want to point out a positive for Lin at the end of the last game, one I'm sure someone has mentioned somewhere, so I'm probably mentioning it again. The Delfino strip that led to Harden's game ending drive to the basket for 2, which should have been an "and 1" as Barrea was clearly fouling him? Well, Delfino was able to get that turnover from the hapless Barrea because of Jeremy's really excellent defense. Lin was all over him like a blanket and forced Barrea towards Delfino. Watch the play. Carlos doesn't get that strip unless Jeremy forces Barrea right into him. Just thought that was very good defense by both Rockets players, and that Jeremy's contribution to that crucial turnover should be pointed out. Yes, he had a lousy game earlier, but in crunch time the guy not only hit a big basket, but played some really nice D. Carry on. ;-)-
No hate. It's jut that after a 5 game win streak where Lin was integral, (Along with Asik and Mook. I'm not trying to pick out only Lin) the attempt to discredit Lin for whatever agenda irks me. I sometimes see that even the bet posters kuat cant stand some of the snooty Lin fans and cant help themselves but still its irksome. And I know this is nothing. I'm on the boards of every opponent we play and there you could do a case study and write a 100 page thesis on hate or confirmation bias. It's ridiculous. During Lins 38 pt game, or recent decemt games, there were no positive mentions at all of Lin in the blogs nor game threads. Every comment even resembling a semi-compliment was of course shot down by a billion replys on how he is a fluke and how he shouldnt be starting and got lucky because somehow their pg was feeling slow that day and it was an aberration. It was almost comical. The Memphis game thread, the SAS game thread, the Bulls game thread. It was literally: "How can we let someone so slow drive like that. The one night he doesn't play poorly, our guards look strangely slow and unable to react." "I see that he still can't go left or dribble up the court with full court pressure. And how do we let him pass the outlet like that. Ill bet he's never completed that pass in his life." "We all know he has the worst d in the league, but I didn't know it was this bad." and so on. It's tiring hearing ignorance. Anyways
It's because Patterson is often being taken out of the game with Lin (earlier in the season especially). Even Clutch mentioned that Patterson was killing Lin's +/-.
Thanks for a good response. So, I think you're saying that instead of focusing on what the tendency was when Lin was off the floor in general each game, we should examine specifically those moments where we had a lead at a crucial period of the game and then Lin goes out. The point I'd make, again, is that even for that there is information out there ("stats") which could be helpful. Define what you mean by "crucial moments" and then we can look at those stints with Lin off the floor and see whether the margin shift towards or against the Rockets favor. If they shifted against the Rockets favor, we can then examine whether Lin was having a good game or a poor game up to that point. If in the end it turns out that we're talking about only a small handful of "crucial moments" of interest for the entire season, then it could still be interesting to check out but of course any "tendency" we try to glean from that should be taken with a grain of salt due to small sample size. I just want to say that contrary to what the poster originally said, stats can indeed help us with this. It requires a little more work to find the data in this case, but its not necessary to make a completely unsubstantiated claim here. Why should any of us just assume what he said was correct, when in general we see that more often than not the Rockets margin shifted in their favor when Lin was not on the floor? In light of that, in addition to the coaching staff having all the situational data at their disposal and a lot more knowledge about their team's tendencies and a lot more at stake as far as winning the games, with whom does the burden of proof lie?
No doubt that McHale being away from the team hurt Lin's progress and confidence. How much blame should be placed on Sampson? I not sure, but it's probably not as much as LOF's think. Benching Lin in OT or at crunch time didn't help Lin's confidence either, but I understand why Sampson thought he needed to do it. He wanted to shake things up and change the trend of losing close games and since Lin seemed to not have confidence in his shot it was better to have TD or Defino on the floor at crunch time. I'm glad McHale kept Lin in at the end of the MIN game even thought he had 7 turnovers in the game. If you listen to those Sampson interviews he seems to think TD is a better ball handler than Lin. I'm not sure why. TD is averaging 2.0 asts to 1.4 tov pg this season. His career numbers aren't much better. Like most people on here have said he's more of a SG than a PG, but the coaches still have TD bringing up the ball when Lin is on the floor. I don't get it. Also I think Lin was benched in the Portland game because it seemed like he couldn't stop Lillard, but even Parsons couldn't stop him. We've been burned by a few hot outside shooters this year. Lin usually gets a lot of the blame on here. Sometimes justified, but most of the time the blame needs to be spread around.
This is consistent with Lin's history of performing in the 4th quarter all last season with the Knicks no matter how well (or poorly) the first half or first 3 quarters had gone. And with his clutch performance history back to the D League and before the pros.
His offense seems pretty underwhelming in the beginning of the season due to his inability to hit his shot. I don't think any logical person will deny that. If he's responding to glacier921, fine, the guy is a Lin-homer. He can call him out on that. But he posted "the +/- stats tell a different story." Sure, +/- did stated when Lin is in, in the majority of the season, the team was outscored. What +/- doesn't say is whether if Lin is responsible/sorely responsible (for the LOH) for the team underperforming when he's on the floor. There's also a possibility that Lin is even worse than those numbers, I'm not denying that also. If I'm gonna use some type of on floor/off floor performance, I would use something like APM (not available), RAPM (not available) or the newer xRAPM with better predictive value. Each of them have their flaws, but they are all much, much better than using raw +/-. What I can't stand people doing is using misleading stats and then preach to their own choir about so and so is right.
Fine. But the issue isn't why leads are being gained/lost, but rather if leads are being gained/lost. That's the "context", which ironically was lost on IronicMan )). First we have to establish whether or not it is happening (since the person I was responding to claimed one thing and the stats said another), and then we can talk about why. At that stage, who's playing with whom and against whom and all the other variables come into play. But there's no point delving into an analysis like APM or xRAPM if the basic facts of what happened are still under dispute.
I didn't see that you were replying to glacier921, so that was my bad. Got your post from howo quoted you. However, I do feel the need to post what I post so other people won't try to misinterpret it to mean something entirely different.
The sad part is he is not doing it on purpose. He just doesn't have a proper understanding of what he is trying to evaluate. The comparison is not valid by default because the conditions are not ideal: 1. When TD was on the floor, Harden did more of the playmaking and TD got to play to his strong points like shooting. 2. Lin spent a good percentage of those minutes as a spot up shooter which is not his strength. 3. What about the times they TD and Lin were on the floor at the same time? 4. The data doesn't include which teammates they were on the floor with either. For example, defensive lapses by another player can affect everyone badly. 5. The data doesn't include the management of the pace or the quality of the shots(points) acquired when they were on the floor separately. He probably wouldn't understand the importance of this as proved by his "playmaking" thread. 6. The data doesn't show decision making abilities either. For example, it is hard to compare some of TOs by Lin (fumbled pass or ref mistakes) from the Minnesota game to TD's "I dribble the ball until 5 secs left on the shot clock and then pass it to a teammate" TOs. Of course, this is not to say that Lin doesn't make silly TOs at all. I am actually warming up to TD as a good sub SG and I don't mind seeing him play. However, saying that TD is overall better than Lin based on some incomplete data is... Well, I will let you judge that one.
Thanks, I was scratching my head trying to figure out why JR Smith was near the top of the list. Talk about a useless stat.
Ok, when I say that +/- is a useless stat, I'm not saying durvasa is a useless poster. Afterall, durvasa did not invent the stat, so please don't anyone take this personally - by anyone I mean durvasa and those that defend him/her as well as anyone that loves to quote this stat. I don't post much, but a good percentage of my posts have been about trying to explain why +/- is really an awful stat that measures nothing at all and is incredibly misleading. The goal of +/- is to attempt to show how much a player contributes to the winner or losing of a game. The problem is that it measures it on a 5v5 level and then tries to split that into an individual stat. Whenever there is a change in scoring, all 5 players on offense gets plus points and all 5 defense gets minus points. This strips out all context. We have no idea if Team A is doing well because one player is dominating or a combination of players are dominating or that Team B is just bad or that one player on Team B is really bad. Then remember that there's 13 players on each team and a dozen 5v5 combinations per game and you get even more context stripped out. (If I knew how to search my own posts, I would link you to my more detailed explanation why +/- is fundamentally flawed.) Let's take the most recent game against the T'Woles for example. http://scores.espn.go.com/nba/scoreboard?date=20121226 Morris -11 Parsons +3 Asik -5 Lin -1 Harden -9 Smith +17 Delfino +14 TD +7 If you never saw the game, then you'll think the bench were the stars of the game and that Harden was the goat. Even though Delfino was 3/11 from downtown, TF was 2/9 overall shooting, and Harden had 17 pts in the 4th to win us the game. With +/-, you get none of that and no way to figure out any of that. You can argue that the bench kept us in the game in the 3rd and that's why their +/- is so high. But that logic doesn't hold as Harden had a massive 4th quarter and was still -9. +/- strips out ALL context. Another major problem with +/- is the lack of perspective or scale. Greg Smith is 26 points better than Harden in his +/- stats. Is he 26 times better than Harden in that game? Was Smith's contributions 26 times more important? The answer is obviously a no. If you can't use +/- to compare player performance within games, then you definitely can't use +/- to compare players from different games on the same night or games in past seasons. So what then is the purpose of +/-? Raw or unadjusted +/- is by itself not useful. Regularized (RAPM) or adjusted +/- is extremely useful. That is, +/- stats that is run through an algorithms to add context back into the stat. When you do that, not only do you get back context, but also scale and perspective. For example, here are the best players in the game so far this year according to RAPM (http://stats-for-the-nba.appspot.com/ratings/2013.html). For those too lazy to click on that link, here are the top 5 players so far this year (min 2000 possesions): LeBron James Chris Paul Kevin Garnett Manu Ginobili Tim Duncan So to sum it up for people who don't want to read my whole post. +/- is a very bad stat because: A. It strips out all context (how good/bad was your shooting, how many pts/ast/to/stl, who you played against, etc) B. It lacks perspective and scale which means you can't compare +/- scores even among players from the same game C. It has no means of comparison to other players in the league D. Raw +/- is bad, but it can be made useful with regression
Has durvasa said he never watches the games? Did I miss that? I keep reading posts suggesting that all he looks at are the stats, in all their myriad permutations, but unless I'm mistaken, he also watches the games.
Roxs, all well and good, but you do realize this is a strawman? How many times have you seen anyone here use raw +/- as an all-encompassing player evaluation metric? I certainly never have. And the point I was making with those stats earlier in the thread has nothing to do with whether Lin is better or worse than his backup. That said, its cool to have a guy here who does stats for a living (I'm correct on that?). I hope you keep chiming in with the analysis or feedback. The rest of us amateurs can probably learn a thing or two from you.
There is no comparison between Lin and TD. Lin is a PG and TD is a SG. Lin will do well when he is directing the offense. If you put him in SG position, he will do crappy. Same with TD, if you put TD in the PG position, expect a lot of TO. You can see the problem with Lin in Q4 at TWolves's game. When coach want Harden has control of the offense, Lin didn't do anything. The coach stripped the PG role from Lin, and he didn't know what to do.
