fantastic point. and i would agree that the reg season isn't the yao show. but the playoffs will expose weakness in youth....brooks....wafer...and in inexperience...battier...hayes...landry. also playoff defenses will focus on yao with strong dbl teams. paired with inability to knock down shots because of nerves or whatever...big trouble. they have to find a way to get the ball to yao more in playoffs because all the good teams are doing the same thing to ming even now...boubling him...counting on the fact shooters will have off night. but you are right. pretty darn good considering their biggest player and largest scoring role is out. this won't be the season for champ. but you have to like what you see.
Continuing from my previous post, here's how Yao's %shot has gone over the course of the season. I added lines below the plot to show the games that McGrady and Ron were playing. I also plotted team offensive efficiency over these games.
I think Yao showed today that he can make winning plays when he doesn't get the ball in the post. More high pick and roll please!!!
I'd like to see Yao shoot more 15-17ft shots (if he can't get easier buckets). It will extend the defense and force them to guard him out top, opening the lane for passes into Scola/Landry, or drives. Yao is a good shooter too....I'm thinking Rik Smits(sp?). Today against the Spurs was a prime example. Spurs fronted Yao in the 4th and took him out of the game. Late in the 4th, Yao faked a shot from the key and passed it down to Scola for the game winning layup.
Actually I'd say that the biggest factor you left out is 4) The Rockets are playing a motion offense and balanced scoring is a plus. Counterbalancing that would be 1) It doesn't matter if Yao's not Shaq, or Duncan, or Hakeem. He's the best the Rockets have and the goal is maximizing this team with the pieces that it has. I'm not arguing that Yao should be taking as many shots as Shaq or Hakeem. We're largely talking about tweaks and adjustments as the Rockets get into the playoffs. And in terms of tweaks I don't think there's any question that Yao should be touching the ball more and taking more shots.
Yao did it twice, actually. Yao may not be a Shaq, but he's an unusually good passer for a guy his size and his height lets him see the entire court. He's also a legitimate threat from 15' so other teams will have to respect his shot. That's just another reason to get him the ball more often and involve him in the motion offense.
It does matter, because it's much easier to get those guys the ball. If you want Yao to take more shots, that means we'll have to force things inside more (more turnovers), and Yao would have to take more shots outside his comfort zone. I'm not saying the shots he's getting right now is ideal, but we should keep in mind that he's a very different player compared to all those other guys mentioned. By virtue of that, it's just harder to get him quality shots.
I'll take Yao with a couple fewer shots if the overall quality is good. Better than forcing it to him getting more turnovers and bad shots that take away quality shots from other Rockets...
Hakeem actually averaged way more TO's than Yao does, especially in the championship years. Second, Yao's comfort zone actually extends out to 15'-17' as long as he's facing up and can shoot immediately. Watching the Spurs game today, or at least the highlight footage that Clutch just posted up should tell how valuable it is to have a 7'6" guy who a) can hit the outside jumper and b) can see everybody on the court. Third, Yao's TO's are overrated as problems go. He averaged around 3 a game but in terms of what he provides scoring wise it's an easy trade off. Not to mention that the Rockets can do a much better job of getting Yao the ball with a little more practice.
That's because he played more minutes, the Rockets had more possessions per minute, and he got more touches. Haven't we gone through this before? To suggest that Yao is less turnover-prone than Hakeem is just silly. I'll call that his "comfort zone" when he starts being consistently effective from that area. Right now, Yao's comfort zone is on the low blocks with his back to the basket, preferably with a foot in the paint. I'm all for more ball movement and trying to get Yao the ball when he's open around the basket. This we agree on. But I don't expect them to do a much better job just with a little more practice. If it was so easy to solve that it requires just a little more practice, it would have been solved long ago. To me, there's nothing worse that can come out of an offensive possession than a turnover. Not only do you not get any points out of the possession, you also give your opponent a better opportunity to score. It hurts you twice. So to me, getting Yao more shots at the expense of increased team turnovers is not an easy trade off. And particularly so if the touches Yao get are increasingly outside his comfort zone and the extra shots he's getting are not good quality. Did you not see how our offense stalled (again) in the fourth quarter when the Spurs were fronting Yao? Our offense only got back on track when we stopped trying to find Yao in the post and we went elsewhere. The Rockets have been trying to deal with this fronting issue for years, and they still get flustered by it. It will always be a challenge, because their target has mobility and balance issues, poor hands, does not spin and seal quickly, does not move from one block to the other quickly, and he has a hard time getting wide and keeping his defender from getting around him. It's just a reality we have to accept.
Yao's played less minutes this season. I wouldn't say that Yao is less turnover-prone than Hakeem but statistically they're a closer match then you think when you factor in minutes played. He hasn't been utilized outside of the low post that much, so I'm not sure how you can qualify it as outside his comfort zone since I don't think the Rockets have done enough work with it to tell one way or the other. What a lot of people are forgetting is that JvG is basically the guy who turned Yao into a low post player instead of a guy who liked to play facing up to the basket. The point you're missing is that by and large it has been solved. Yao's the leading scorer on the team, he's averaging a shade less than 20 ppg which on this team with this offense is actually very respectable. What I (and a lot of other people) would like to see is not an end to the balanced scoring and the motion offense. It's a small tweak to get Yao the ball more often. Yao gets plenty of good quality shots. He's averaging 19.8 ppg on 0.547 shooting, meaning that he leads the team in ppg and is probably right up there in fg%. Yao is not a problem offensively which is why he should get the ball more.
Purely based on the stats, and not taking into account what each player is asked to do with the ball, Hakeem's TOV% in his prime was always between 11.5 and 12.5 (Rudy T years, pre-Barkley). In his Hakeem's first 12 years, it was over 14.0 only once. Yao's TOV% has been at least 14 every year except in 05/06 when it was 12.0. This year, Yao's is at a career high 16.6. To me, that's a significant difference, and its misleading to say that Hakeem's had way more turnovers than Yao does. But let's also step away from the stats and recognize that how turnover-prone a player is should be understood based on what the player is asked to do. If you want to get Yao more touches, and consequentially he has to do things with the ball with increased ball pressure and make more decisions, then that will increase his likelihood of turning it over. Compared to Hakeem, Yao gets the ball in very specific positions. Olajuwon would face up, take guys off the dribble, and kick it out off the drive. The Rockets would never (and should never) ask Yao to do stuff like that. I'd like Yao to get more touches, but only if he's getting it in spots where he and the team can be successful. I don't want Yao to have to make a lot of quick decisions, or to be in a lot of situations where he needs to put the ball on the floor. I do not think that will help us. He himself has said he's not comfortable taking outside shots or playing in the high post. It's one of the things he complained about last season in a Chinese interview when the Rockets got off to a rough start. Maybe he's changed his mind. But to me he often looks hesitant out there, and he's shot enough bricks and air balls from 16 feet out for me to guess he's not comfortable with it. If its merely a small tweak, and Yao will get the ball more often and we're better off for it, then great. I'd love that. Outside some obvious stuff like getting Ron to stop going solo when Yao is wide open, I don't know what that small tweak might be. And what is the ideal number of shots Yao should be getting? The more you go to a player, the greater the proportion of non-quality shots/touches he'll get, generally speaking.
That's completely misleading if you're calculating TOV% as 100 * TOV / (FGA + 0.44 * FTA + TOV). Yao is much more willing to kick the ball back outside than Hakeem was so his FGA/FTA numbers are going to be artificially deflated compared to Hakeem who was much more of a shoot first type of guy. If you just do a straight comparison of TO's per game broken down by minutes played than Hakeem and Yao are actually pretty close. Quick decisions like those two assists to Scola tonight? What you seem to be ignoring is that the current Rockets offense is based on getting the ball to Yao, letting him draw the double and then kicking it back outside to the perimeter guys for an open shot. We're not talking about retooling the Rockets' offense--Yao is clearly the centerpiece and the offense is clearly built around him. The argument is not to change the status quo. Rather you would hope the Rockets could be a little more consistent in playing their game. Again, way back when he was uncomfortable playing with his back to the basket. The Yao we see now is largely a JvG creation. There's no real reason why he can't hit the 15' shot, he's made it any number of games and to me he looked comfortable enough then. The point you're missing is that the Rockets would be a much, much more difficult team to beat if Yao is a consistent threat from outside. I think we saw in the Spurs game tonight how big of a threat a big man is from the high post if he can shoot. Athletes are asked to do a lot of things that are uncomfortable. That doesn't mean that they don't do them, it just means they work on them until they get it down. This isn't a video game. Professional basketball playerslearn new tricks all the time--they're expected to. Getting the ball to Yao in the high post isn't a small tweak at this point. Again, what you need to realize is that this Rockets offense is built around Yao. They just need to be more consistent about getting him the ball--that's why it's a small tweak. Uh, why? I think you mean that the number of non-quality shots/touches he'll get will go up but why would the proportion of those shots in his overall shots per game go up?
What I think you're saying is that more of Yao's touches result in pass outs than Hakeem's. But assists and pass outs should be roughly proportional to each other. That would mean, according to your argument, that the ratio of assists to FGA+.44*FTA should be much more for Yao than it was for Hakeem. If you take a look, its typically been the opposite. And particularly for Hakeem's championship years, which you stressed earlier. So, I'd disagree that Yao passes the ball out more often on his touches. In fact, the TOV% might be misleading, but its in the opposite direction. Hakeem was more a facilitator in terms of creating open shots for his teammates from his touches, and that's not taken into account in the TOV% formula. I'm all for consistency. I want the Rockets to consistently move the ball to open man when Yao is getting fronted and doubled, and find the hole in that defense. As long as the offense isn't stagnating and we're able to keep the ball moving and get a good shot, I'm happy. If that means the ball gets to Yao underneath, perfect. If it's something else and we get a quality shot, that's great also. For the entire season, Yao is 10-31 on 2-point jump shots according to NBA Hot Spots. Yao has played over 2200 minutes, which means he attempts a shot from out there about once every couple games on average and hits about 30% on it. What about last year? He shot it more frequently, certainly (92 times in around 2000 minutes). And he 29-92, or 31%. Hey, that's pretty consistent! Consistently bad. You've been arguing for small tweaks in the offense. If that shot is something you want to feature more often, to me that's more than a mere tweak. You want to take something which he has not used to our advantage at all this season and turn him into a consistent threat from there. I don't think that's going to happen this season. What made you think I didn't realize that? It's sort of an intuitive point, though there is some pretty solid analysis that has been done to back it up. Usually, the usage-efficiency relationship for a player is such that if the offense changes so that his usage (how often he uses a possession) must go up, his efficiency will tend to go down. Dr. of Dunk mentioned a very good book called Basketball on Paper a week or so ago. In there, it describes this idea and visually represents the relationship with player "skill curves". Here's a simplistic way to illustrate it: If Yao only has to take 5 shots a game, then maybe he only gets the ball when he's wide open, and he only shoots it when there's minimal pressure. In that case, his efficiency will be very high. If you want him to take 10 shots a game, you get him the ball in more situations which are slightly less advantageous, and maybe he shoots it with a little more pressure. His efficiency goes down a bit. And so forth. Depending on who else is on the floor, there comes a point where it doesn't make sense to try to get the player more shots. You seem to be assuming that there is no usage-efficiency tradeoff. If that was so, then a team would naturally just keep going to their most efficient player on the floor over and over again. Obviously, that's ridiculous. That's why I asked you what you think is an ideal number of shots/touches for him.
No, and this is the point I made over and over again a few months back--namely, that Yao does not have to get an immediate assist when he passes the ball back out for the strategy of get-it-to-Yao-in-the-post to be effective. In fact what usually happens is that the ball goes around the perimeter before it finds the open Rocket, so no assist for Yao even though the Rockets get a basket which he essentially created. In fact I think there was an article a while back about the new stats that Morey tracks that might have used this exact same example So again, Yao handles the ball, he passes it back out when the double team comes. Or he simply plays the motion offense and keeps the ball moving. Either way even though he's handling the ball and is the target of the defense that's not going to show up in his TOV% because it only tracks FGA/FTA. Again, the stat is misleading because it's not really measuring what's actually happening in the game. Again, the point you're missing is that a) there is no open man when Yao is simply fronted (single coverage) and b) Yao doesn't get the double until he gets the ball. That's why Yao needs to get the ball, to create the opportunities that the other Rockets can exploit. And recently when that hasn't happened the Rockets' offense has stagnated. You're actually just echoing what I've been preaching for months now. The point is that for Yao to create opportunities the ball needs to get to him. 31 shots is an extremely small sample size. 92 shots isn't that much better. Those small numbers should tell you something else: when he does send those shots up it's usually because the shot clock is winding down off a broken play rather than him being set up in the offense to shoot from there. Again, small sample sizes cannot be used to generate meaningful statistics. That's exactly what I said in my last post, we're just going over old ground here. If you go back and re-read my post you'll find that I wrote that using Yao in the high post is not a small tweak. Again, we're going over old ground here. It's a change I do advocate for in the future, although it's probably going to see only incremental use for the rest of the season. Do you understand then that when Yao doesn't get the ball, when he doesn't get the opportunity to create shots for his teammates by drawing the double, that that is essentially the offense breaking down? That's actually mathematically illiterate. It violates the law of large numbers. Basically for a statistically valid sample size you don't expect the proportion of bad shots to good shots to change outside of meaningless local deviations. The absolute numbers of bad shots will go up obviously as the total numbers go up but their proportion of the total doesn't change. Actually Yao's the perfect example here: there are already plenty of games where he gets eight shots and where he get 20. Can you demonstrate that when he takes more shots his shooting fg% goes down compared to when he takes fewer? Not in any statistically valid sense. As to how many shots Yao should take in a game, my answer is simply "More". The Rockets obviously have a much better record when he scores 25 or more points in a game, maybe even with a threshold as low as 20. When he gets rolling it opens up everything and the Rockets a much, much tougher team to beat.
I didn't say pass outs = assists. I said they should be roughly proportional to assists. Bob Chaikin tracked this stuff in a lot of detail way back (see the touches section here, for instance). He concluded you can estimate pass outs as assists times a constant. That means they're proportional. You said I'm missing some point, and then you said I'm just echoing what you've been preaching. Were you also missing that point or what? All I'm saying is that if Yao is getting fronted, move the ball. Don't just hold on to it and waste seconds off the shot clock. No, because I have eyes and I've watched the games. Yao shoots very inconsistently from that area regardless of the shot clock. If you have evidence that shows differently, I'd like to see it. Yao rarely has to take contested outside shots at the buzzer. They typically come in rhythm at the end of the play, and he just doesn't shoot them well. Apparently your observation and my observation differs. If Yao was as effective as you say, I think Adelman would have used him more there in his second season, instead of less. Adelman loves centers who can hit that shot and stretch the defense. He'd love to run more high post offense through Yao, if he could do so effectively. Agreed. Of course not. You can build your offense around a player, but that doesn't mean he has to touch the ball every possession. Players can create open shots without even receiving the ball. Yao will often do this. That doesn't mean the offense broke down. And you don't have to run a play for Yao every time down either. The Lakers didn't do that with Shaq, and the Rockets didn't do it with Hakeem. That doesn't mean the offense has "broken" on those possessions. So we can go to Battier every time down the floor and ask him to shoot the ball, and he'll continue to shoot 38% from the field according to the law of large numbers? Sorry, no. I think you're ignoring that there's another team on the floor (called the "defense") that is trying to take away your looks. You're right, if there is no defense, and the Rockets are free to take any open look they choose, it won't matter. That's not basketball, unfortunately. It can't be demonstrated in that way. Follow the link I provided for more discussion on methods for demonstrating it. You don't see a problem with your answer -- "More"? In other words, you'll always think that Yao should get more shots than he's getting. Unless the Rockets are getting him to shoot 100% of the time, the offense is somehow "broken". And I guess by extension that since Scola is shooting 53% from the field, if we go to him every time then we'd shoot 53% as a team and have the best offense in the league? Clearly I'm misunderstanding your point, because you can't seriously think this stuff.
I hate to enter the party late , but there is always a faction on this board that thinks yao doesn't get used enough. Durvasa and badgerfan were going back and forth and as usual, durvasa can back up common sense with stats. Can yao do more? Probably so, but some people have this dream that you can use him like dream or shaq and you can't. It has nothing to do with the zones and more to do with the fact he's not as good as those guys. Yao is good, but he's a limited player in terms of stamina,location, and mentality. That doesn't mean he's a poor player, but he is what he is. Dream could do things yao could only dream of. The deal with going against Dream and all great post players, the defense has to be perfect to stop them. If you doubled dream small, he could get a high quality shot off. If you doubled late, he would already be in his move. If you fronted, he could move to the high post. He basically had a answer for just about everything. Shaq was such a brute that at age 37 he's still the 3rd best center today. That's why im not buying the zone stopping big men. Duncan is still playing well and shaq is still playing very well. Yao can give you high production for 25 mins while dream and shaq could do it for 32. In the 4th, they were just as relentless as the 1st. Shot attempts don't equal touches in the post. Yao can shoot more, but he needs to realize every shot isn't going to be perfect. To be a great scorer, you're going to have to force a couple of shots. Hopefully this summer with no summer ball he can actually get confortable shooting the mid range jimmy. He's the best offensive player the rockets have, but he has to be a little more selfish about shooting.
LOL, that's mathematically meaningless since I can take any two numbers and say that one is proportional to the other given some constant C. It's not a constant if it varies from team to team, player to player, system to system. Moving the ball is how you beat the fronting defense on Yao. Yao moves, the ball moves, get the ball to Yao deep in the paint, easy two points. That's kind of the nature of anecdotal evidence--it's so subjective that it's useless. If you look back at my post I didn't come to any conclusion. Why? The sample size is too small. What I will say is that the Spurs game tonight shows you why a big guy who can shoot and pass in the high post is so valuable and that that's why it's worth it to experiment. Also, don't forget that the more the Rockets practice those sets the better they'll get with them, including Yao. It's broken because the Rockets still go through long offensive droughts, and those droughts appear to me to be directly related to Yao not getting any touches. What's more it's usually not over the course of an entire game. Instead it's usually the Rockets bog down for one quarter and then re-involve Yao after a time out. If you're suggesting that the other team might figure out that the strategy is "feed Battier" and cover him with all five guys, well that's pretty obvious. What I would say is that games are not uniform experiments. Way too many variables. The personnel on the other team, i.e. match ups, travel, the home crowd, altitude, etc. My guess is that those are genuinely important factors. What I don't buy into is that there's some mysterious invisible force that makes players shoot worse as they take more shots. I did, and it reminded me of something an old professor of mine said about not getting mixed up about which you're supposed to do first--do the experiment or devise the hypothesis. Like I said, mathematically illiterate. When Yao shoots 4 for 8 one night and 13 for 15 the next that's just meaningless random deviation. The law of large numbers dictates that those 13 for 15 nights will be balanced out by 1 for 8 nights until he reaches his average--0.540 for this season. There's no correlation between a player taking a higher percentage of "bad" shots as his total fga's go up. You'd have to provide a rigorous and meaningful definition of "bad" in the first place. Nope. The reason I said "More" is because I can't quantify how much more. Too many variables. For that reason my approach is to ramp it up and see what the results are. Eventually you'd find that sweet spot. See above. Scola's underutilized as well, btw.
