Someone in this thread surely eats Cocoa Puffs cereal. Any ideas? aelliott, it is really good to see you posting more. Always solid analysis and cogent defense of your position. Thanks.
That's a new one. Most spelling mistakes involving the "Corps" are when the "s" is left out (quite a few friends of mine had joined the "United States Marine Corp" facebook group without realizing the mistake). Also, fun fact, my DI pronounced it "Marine CORPS" (like corpse). This has probably already been brought up by others here, but how does this compare to the baseline (around the league?). What is the percentage of ISO for teams like Spurs for example
That's a little disturbing. I suppose in boot it might be an interesting psychological way of conditioning. Or maybe he was just silly. Semper Fi and thanks for the service.
No.. I think he actually thought that was the correct way to pronounce it. Because it made him look kinda foolish, and some recruits were trying really hard not to laugh at him
Excellent post. Thank you for blowing up these widely held perceptions about the Rockets offense. Our eyes are biased by what looks like good basketball. Harden ISOs and Howard postups aren't pretty to watch. Even when they're effective, it feels like a bad possession that luckily ended well. At the same time, whenever an offensive possession is marked by player movement and quick passing, it feels like it was a good possession, even if we ended up with a long 2 with someone running out on them. It's hard to only trust half of what you see.
-What you're saying is still off the head conjecture. The empirical approach would be: (premise) there exists historically better ppp Harden and team options. (test) The team should favor them and see where equilibrium ends up. It may end up being the case that Harden eventually takes the majority of his shots off screens, hand offs, cuts, -defenses then adjust to it-, yet he still scores a higher ppp than his ISO ppp. The problem is that the Rockets have regular season historical stats to support a test yet have not bothered executing a firm test of it sometime in the year. -There is also one important statistic to consider when looking at Rockets ISO. That is the poorly executed PnR where the ball handler takes the shot. The reason for this is that this is a close equivalent to ISO and is also a large reason why watchers at home see more than 10% ISO by the "eye test". In the synergy stats videos, you can see Harden run PnRs as the ball-handler that could easily be mistaken as ISO plays because of the time lapse between pick and action. PnR accounted for 19% of the total shots in the playoffs at a 0.74ppp. Harden took almost 40% of those shots, at a dreadful 0.53ppp. So a good follow-up question is, why does Harden fail more on PnR but perform well on a set ISO? (true in the regular season as well) Is it determination? Maybe he gets confused of what to do on PnR? Maybe the screens are set poorly? Maybe it's not his practiced offense plays? It's strange because for the common player and person, a PnR play as the ball-handler represents an ISO with an early advantage.
No where are there any numbers that show Howard postups are effective from an opportunity cost perspective. It was a below average ppp shot for the Rockets in the playoffs and historically a very low ppp shot for him.
Thank you. I love debates like this. Posters that know the difference between a true ISO, a PnR, a hand off, et al. and have numbers to back up arguments are waaaaaaaaay more pleasant to debate with than folks who pick up a term and apply it to every time a player takes a shot. It can be maddening. As for the PnR in the playoffs, IMO it was a case of going to the well one too many times. We appeared to have success with it early in the series, then went away from it a bit. I felt like we were treating it like our trump card, and Portland knew damn well we were going to run PnR when we needed a bucket. I saw PnRs plays get setup as a first option in half court and the Blazers knew exactly what was coming. They're not a great defensive team but they sniffed out some stuff and countered well *cough coaching cough*. Keep in mind I'm not a stat head, but I do remember moments during almost every game where I knew what the Rockets were going to run, they ran it, and got stuffed defensively. Too predictable. I had the same problem with Kubiak last year.
Because PnR is the type of play where when you're doing it with Dwight, will lead to pass off on the opportunities where it breaks the defense down. Ergo, when you break the defense down on an iso, you shoot, when you break the defense down on a p&r, you pass it to Dwight for the jam, so you end up shooting only the harder ones on one type of play. This is why last year, our ball handlers had better p&r stats, because those easier attempts, you were required to take the shot yourself because Asik has rock hands.
Basically, yea. The term has become a catch all, almost insulting phrase that some posters use to describe any time a player scores off the dribble.
Blown away by the post. My question to aelliott is...what do you think we need? Everyone thinks that we can fix what's wrong with an additional player, or coach, etc. you seem to imply that we have what we need, and we're just not getting our shots and executing our pick n' rolls. Do you have a prescription for success? Coach or personnel? Where should we apply our scrutiny? Again, great post!
I wonder what the ISO stats would look like for the remaining 4 teams. All 4 teams have players who can effectively "ISO" but how much of their play do they actually go ISO? I guess what I'm wondering is how does our profile compare to the best in the league. Specifically ISOs, transitions, and PickNRoll.
Offense was never really the issue in my opinion. It all came down to how bad our defense was. We had double digit leads in all the games if I remember correctly. We just couldn't hold the lead. We think everything was ISO because that's how we played during crunch time and we didn't have good plays drawn up. I don't think anyone in the league questions how good our offense is during the main parts of the game, the end and our defense are our achilles heal.
lol. 1 vs 5 is more effective than 5 vs 5? I believe this stats is based on Rocket's plays only, correct? I see this as another testimony of how bad our coaching staff is. Iso all day, heck, I can be the coach.
Do you really think that it's that simple? Do you think anything fan site posters like us think up hasn't been covered by those guys and sliced and diced 10 different ways? Good question. My response would be that it was due to the type of defense Portland was playing. Portland used the same defensive tactic that OKC used last playoffs. They have Harden's defender play up tight on him to prevent the easy 3pt shot. They keep a big in/near the paint and as soon as Harden puts the ball on the floor to drive a second big drops into the paint. Harden's defender isn't really that worried about getting beat off the dribble because of the two bigs behind them. That defender overplays Harden to the outside (typically Harden's left since he usually tries to drive from the left side of the key) and tries to funnel Harden to the middle where help is waiting. The difference in the PnR and ISO is that in the PnR if the team takes away Dwight's roll then that usually means Harden is going all the way to the hole. With the defense that Portland/OKC played, Harden would get free of his man but there is always that 2nd big man waiting for him. When he was shooting out of the PnR he was usually driving and trying to shoot over Aldrid0ge and Lopez. In the ISO, Harden was using his step back (from between the FT line and top of key) to create space from his defender and shoot a mid range shot before he got to the bigs in the paint. That same shot isn't there on the PnR because that area is too congested with Harden's man, the screener and his defender. The ISO takes two of those people away and leaves Harden 1 on 1 with his man and he can use his step back to create space for a shot. If you look at Harden's FG%s from different areas you'll see that he only shot 45% from within 5 feet which is way off from the 58% that he normally shoots there. That's because he was challenged by Lopez and Aldridge on most every non-transition shot that he took near the rim. During the regular season Harden took 11% of his shots from that 15-19ft area but during the playoffs he shot 17% of his shots from that range and he had his best percentage (43.5%) of any area more than 5 ft from the hoop. If you're going to try and take away Harden that's absolutely the right defense to play. Of course any time you sell out on defense like that and dedicate that many resources to stopping one guy you are giving up something somewhere else. Dwight took advantage of 1-on-1 coverage and performed much better in the post than he did in the regular season. It also caused our perimeter players to get quite a few open looks from behind the arc but all in all we didn't take advantage of it enough to make them stop doing it or to cost them the game for playing that type of defense.
