Rocket player STATs Review upto 1.1.2014

So in line with looking for the offensive opportunity distribution in the team, I added some calculation here. Basically I consider offensive play have two kinds of involvement: 1) scoring (FGA, FTA, TO, I put TO here though that should be split with pass/creating, but just for the simplicity's sake, as TO still takes one possession.) 2) creating for teammates (assist opportunities, secondary assists, FT assists).

For assist, I have already introduced assist efficiency and assist opportunity, which was discussed before. And I'd like to add the scoring efficiency and scoring opportunity to match up with it.

So scoring efficiency = PTS per game/offensive possession used (scoring opportunity) = PTS/(FGA+0.44 FTA+TOV)

I think this parameter reflect how good a player is in terms of scoring. It is a little bit different from eFG%. More like PPP.



So here is the scoring efficiency of our team and how they ranked in the league. Obviously we could see our first 5 efficient scorer in the team are all above league average (they better be, haha...), and why we are good offensively as a team.

Uh, don't you love Parsons?

I have emphasis before, and I'd like to say it again, for production (scoring), there are two aspect of it, a) efficiency, b) volume. Both components impact the final production. Thus there are some one who are very efficient, but don't have enough opportunities to do that, then the production would not shine; on the other hand, if you got enough volume, you should shine a lot even the efficiency is there. Obviously, if one have good efficiency, and also got a big volume, then that is a super star.

So now let's look at our player's efficiency and opportunity.



Please note that here on X-axis is number of possessions used per game, thus it contains the playing time components in it. It is pretty much reflected how much offense is involved for each player in the team. Obviously James demand the biggest chunk of the scoring opportunity in the team as the first option. Following is Dwight as the second, then Chandler and then Jeremy. Though Parsons took only 20% of the shots on the floor, he does accumulate that by playing longer time.

Does James need to carry that much load in scoring? As there are other efficient scorer in the team. But, again, that's team's decision, and he himself is an efficient scorer, so why not. Plus, this is a super star driven league, we do need some super stars on the team. There is not much loss in James as the focus of scoring option.

Just for fun, whom in the league are having that much scoring opportunity comparable with James Harden.



Okay, all super stars and super stars to be or super star pretenders.

 

Like I said, offensive play have two aspects, scoring and create for other people to score, which include handling the ball, generate assist to teammates. I already talked about assists in terms of assist efficiency and opportunity here:

http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showpost.php?p=8578844&postcount=37

So then I look into the overall offensive play whereas the scoring and assist are considered together, which I hope will give an overall indication of a player's impact in offense.

And I need to introduce a new calculation, success rate. Success rate is defined as possessions that was successful either through scoring or assist over possessions one is involved in offense. So I calculated it as following:

Success rate = (FGM+0.44 FTM+ ast+secondary assist+FT assist)/(FGA+0.44 FTA+TOV+assist opportunity+secondary assist + FT assist)

Note that here I did not use efficiency which could use PTS player earned + PTS team get from assists/possessions player used. Maybe I should do that, but I'm lazy to redo the graphing and stuff. And this is more direct in terms of percentage chance that one player start a play that is successful either through themselves or through their teammates. However, usually a player who do not do ball handling, only score close to rim (with high efficiency) should stands out.



Hmmm, we love Parsons!!!! :grin:

Usually player who play close to the rim, do not handle the ball, have high FG% and gets lots of FTs would be pretty high success rate, and player who are really good in both scoring and create for others would have high success rate. I'd say TJ is good to score for himself, Jeremy and Parsons are more of good efficiency in both score for themselves and smart team players. We know Jeremy is pretty good in assist efficiency.

James fall to the league average here despite his great scoring ability for himself, which is a drag due to his below league average assist efficiency there. And there is a reason why Patrick involved less in offense, and we are good if we stay that way.

Just curious on whom are the ones have high success rate in offense.



Impressive for heat, with their three bigs all being super efficient there. I think people are underrated how they were able to keep efficient when they are playing together.

Okay, now look at the other side of the offense, here is the scatter plot of the success rate over offensive possession a player involved per game.



uh, I would just say, Rockets give James Harden ultimately the best opportunity to become a super star. Jeremy, Dwight, and Chandler are the next tier in the team that plays an important role in offense.

 

Ooops, missed one graph. Who are the others on the map.



LeBron, KD, CP3 are all very high volume and very high efficiency, that's why they are super stars. There are other guys who are high volume but not high efficiency, like John Wall, Kyrie, I'd say they are in great position to have that opportunity, but they are not super star yet. I will put James Harden in this group.

Jeremy and Beverley were just put in as a reference. There are plenty of people who have the talent but don't have the opportunity, and there are plenty of people who just don't have both.

 

Spotfire. Pretty powerful to organize and visualize large data set.

I see people use tableau to share views of the data, which I assume pretty much work in similar way, but had the advantage for other user to explore by themselves, I have yet have time to look into that.

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/

 

Fair.

 

We could see James is heavily involved in our teams' offense, and just for the sake of it, I'd like to see what % of offensive play he is involved when he is on the floor. Thus I convert the offensive possessions a player take per game into % offensive involved on the floor.

Basically I take pace as the team average possession per game, and use the player play time vs team time to normalized the % possession a player is involved.

So % possessions involved on the floor = (score possession + assist possession)/ (team pace*(play time/team play time))

Here the team play time is 48.05 for the first 34 games.



Okay, we can see that when James on the floor, he is pretty much involved in ~ >45% of possessions in offense. What does that mean? That means, when he is on the floor, he is either the finisher or the assist/second assist person in pretty much every other play. And consider he is playing almost 40 min in a 48min game, imagine the offensive load he is carrying for the team.

Dwight and Chandler are involved in ~33% of the offenses, that's pretty much one in every three plays. Parsons do not involve in more plays per minutes, but he is rewarded to get involve more by playing longer time.

As PGs, Jeremy and A.Brooks are involved in a little over 35% of the plays. And Patrick is at 25% range. So he do other things when he is not involved in offense. (Well, his defenders could do other things too than defending him.)

Oh, Jeremy got his share of offensive touch when he is on the court. And for the whole game, that is also affected by his play time, and so far, so good.

And I'd also like to see the split of the offensive involved in terms of scoring vs. ball handling and set up others. So I graph the scatter plot of offensive play involved when they are on the floor in creating vs. in scoring.



So we could see that when James on the floor, he is the lead in the team of taking the shots, and also lead in the team in handling the ball and creating for others. So we have close to half of the team's offense go through James when he is playing, and he is playing majority of the game with close to 40 min per game, thus his performance directly impact the team performance offensively. And we have seen how the team looks like when he is playing hurt, and when his shot is not falling.

Dwight at this stage do quite a bit of scoring, but not really involved or used too much in setting other people up, so we are not really going inside out yet, we are struggling to send the ball inside, and obviously we don't have too much coming out from Dwight yet. I did mentioned before he has pretty good assist efficiency, and that's an advantage of him that we could explore a bit more.

Jeremy is an important part in the team offense, he is a scoring force, and also a major ball handler. And again, when he is playing, he is actively involved in offense, and he got his touch there.

I said it before and I will say it again, A. Brooks took the same percentage shot offensively, and take the same percentage of ball handling job as Jeremy, just he is doing both in a lower efficiency than Jeremy, and he is defensively less capable than Jeremy, thus unless McHale really hate Jeremy, there is no way for A. Brook start over Jeremy. Brooks is a good back up though.



Again, just for the curiosity, who are in the map on the upper right corner, who are heavily involved in both scoring and ball handling to create for others.

Usually lower right are scorers, that score a lot, but don't set up for others like Melo. Upper left are players that set up for others but don't really look for his own shots like Rubio. And upper right corners are those people who do both, and heavily used like Chris Paul, LBJ etc.

 

Finally let's take a look of the offensive balance of the team.



Simply look at this distribution of the offensive load, and we are not considering their efficiency on those yet. The highlighted are the starters. We could see how much James is asked (or he preferred) to do in both scoring and creating for others.

We could see there are three ball handlers, James, Parsons and Beverley, and scorers are James, Dwight, Parsons and TJ.

Jeremy is both active in scoring and creating for others. By replace Jeremy with Beverley, we leave the shooting opportunity to James from the difference of Jeremy and Beverley, but that also leave the ball handling and creating for other people duty to James too, as Beverley is not doing that either.

I've shown before, James is an elite and efficient scorer, you want to put the ball in his hand for him to shoot. However, he is only league average in creating for his teammates. Unfortunately, Beverley is even worse than james, thus James have to carry not only scoring but also ball handling work load in that starting line up. (Does he really have to?)

Then by focusing the offense through James that much, that makes the offense that much predictable. I think ideally, you want Dwight doing a little bit more creating for others, but that's not there yet. Thus I'd say Beverley is also not an ideal starting PG in this team. It kind of solved one problem, but created another. I would think it would work much better if some kind of traditional defensive PG rather than scoring PG might works better. Beverley, to be honest, I'd think he is not really a PG, not really a SG either, more of an off guard (not sure there is such a term or position, it is so unique to Rox though).

On the other hand, both Jeremy and Parsons have great impact on both scoring and ball handling. If we miss one, the other one pretty much need to step up, but if we miss both of them, I don't see anybody in the team could fill in that space, especially the organize the offense part. I guess quite some people could help in scoring part, maybe playing a heavier minutes with Brooks?

If it is for me to chose, I'd rather James adjust a little bit, and release part of the ball handling and creating duty to Jeremy, and maybe a little bit to Dwight too. That way the team increased a little bit more variation, and James could spend less energy in offense without impact on his points, so that he would have more energy to spend in the defensive end.

Anyway, if we are going to trade for another player, according to Morey, they are looking for game changers, James has to adjust, so that the offense from the team could be more balanced.

This whole section has a lot of my own speculation, thus you are welcome to ignore it.