Early statistical comparison between last season and this one

no its not because im 5 foot 5 and consistantly rebound better than people i play with at the rec center i go to. In the NBA, there are 7 foot athletic freaks who are paid millions of dollars to grab a rebound. If you dont have someone to fight with him for those boards, youre in trouble. Thats why morey pursued gortat so hard. He had to settle for anderson who is pretty weak on the boards. I guarantee you Morey is exploring every avenue right now for a center. His latest twitter was about how our rebounding is a huge problem.

 

i'm simply saying gang rebounding right now would be our best bet until that trade finally happens.

 

Its always a team effort but alot goes into that. If your guards are helping trying to get position for rebounding then theyre not available for outlet passes to run the floor. Also they're probably not paying too much attention to their man if theyre tracking the ball for a rebound. Most rebounding guards are good because they don't even bother defending. Remember bonzi wells? I love tmac but he's guilty of this too at times. It pays off if you're guarding a scrub, but when youre facing a good team there are no scrubs.

 

you are arguing against a strawman, look at what i said and what jVgOwnsYou recapped on my argument.

 

i agree with all that. but rebounding is a HUGE problem right now and we've got to find out some type of short-term solutions until we get somebody.

 

Teams are not going to give up quality big men for the unappealing bargaining chips we have unfortunately.

Defensive rebounding will be the biggest issue for us this season. As a Rockets fan I can only wish our players play hard every night to compensate for their height disadvantages.

 

Thats true, it can't keep happening. We just have to scrap harder and IMO the rockets are as scrappy as they come. Im just sceptical. Oden had 12 rebounds in the opener, bynum grabbed 17, dampier had 20 against us. I mean those are average to slightly above average centers. Thats the competition we're going to face in the playoffs. I just dont see how we're going to match that.

 

It's not like Morey hasn't tried to find a 7 footer. They're just that rare and hard to come by. Especially a 7 footer with skills =(.

 

Where did any of his statements talk about Yao being an average rebounder?

 

Don't forget about Deke. If he was here we wouldn't be missing Yao's defense. Looking at the offense numbers, we're not exactly missing Yao on offense either.

 

I love Deke but let's be serious at his age, he could give us 10-15 minutes. That ain't enough. Let alone Deke offensively is worse than Chuck due to his age.

 

Does it? That stat makes it appear as though Ron Artest was a significantly better defender than Shane Battier. I thought Artest was much better defensively than many here...but better than Battier?

 

It's just an estimate. It says Artest and Battier are likely both good defenders. The results from last year (as well as the two seasons before that), show that Artest's teams played much better defensively with him than would have otherwise been expected given the other 9 players on the court. Same thing with Battier, but to a lesser degree. I don't interpret that to mean Artest is therefore a better defensive player than Battier. If there was a wider difference (e.g. Artest was -2, Battier was +2), then I would feel more confident saying something like that. You could say that based on this model there's a greater chance Artest has more impact on defense than Battier.

At any rate, I think it does a better job of picking out who the really good defenders are than some other defensive stats out there. And I think its cool how its able to do it without relying on the conventional boxscore statistics. The ratings are generated via what, ultimately, matters -- how much each team scored, and who was on the floor.

 

Yeh exactly. Its a nice resource to check if what you see is backed up by the numbers. Its not the be all and end all, but it can help you come to conclusions about a certain player. It does use the only only numbers that really matter: the numbers on the score board.

 

Lorezan wright should have been kept after the training camp workouts he had here. he is a big body who can score and rebound. i guess with signing andersen, he was let go

 

Hmm, well, I can't say I agree with hardly any of that...but thank you for helping me better understand the insignificance of the small differences in this stat.

One thing I will say is that it seems to take away much of the bias in defensive analysis. You notice that it doesn't rely on box score stats but I see that it doesn't give "extra" credit for players who do the right things defensively. Avid basketball fans, atleast the ones that spend too much time on a basketball forum ( ) tend to admire when a player is doing what he is supposed to do regardless of their actual impact. Shane Battier is an obvious example but there are others (I know, he's a good defender but he is praised even when he is scored on). Andrew Bynum and Greg Oden are players that seem to have a big impact on the defensive end but not because they're doing everything they're supposed to do but because they just have great size, instincts, and athleticism. They get effortless stops.

It still seems like some players' defensive impact is very wrong with this stat. I would imagine that Morey uses something better because many of the players that Morey says are good defenders on our team, have a more visible impact defensively.

 

The goal isn't to quantify how much we should admire the players. Its to quantify their impact.

Artest isn't as fundamentally sound as Battier. He probably makes more mistakes, and is more likely to steer away from the game plan. He's also very disruptive and he plays defense with a ton of energy. Maybe his presence is more intimidating to opposing players. Maybe his teammates, for whatever reason, want to defend harder with him on the court. Maybe the results are just a fluke.

Whatever it is, the data shows that his teams defend better with him on the floor. Its useful to know. And, yes, not all players will be rated accurately. These are probabilistic measures. There will be some misses. Just like PPG isn't necessarily a 100% reliable indicator of how much you help your team on offense, or steals isn't necessarily a fool-proof indicator of defensive prowess. Morey's team may come up with something more reliable, but it will never be perfect. If it was, we could just do away with the scouts and make all decisions purely by the numbers.

 

This, I agree with. People should take what they see in games and stats to formulate their own opinion, that's what GM's and scouts do. PPG is an indicator of how many points you score in a game, SPG is an indicator of how many steals you get in a game, +/- is simply what happens when you are on/off the court...what you draw from those things is merely an educated guess at a player's value.

I understand what adjusted +/- tries to accomplish and how the model is built on some sound principles. I just do not feel it gets close enough to accomplishing that goal for me to place a high value in it. But, then again, I do not look to individual stats as a way of determining a player's overall value on offense or defense, just different ways in which they can contribute.

 

gang rebounding, which was what i suggested earlier. we dominated the boards tonight v. the bigger lakers.

ariza had 8, brooks/bud/lowry had 6. if our guards contribute on the boards, we'll be much better off until morey pulls a trade.

 

I thought this was very interesting. Something I never considered before.

Great thread, Carl, though I do disagree with your contention with verse's point about being "eraser-less." I don't think the raw bpg data is completely indicative of the big picture, e.g. there is no intimidation factor at play. We tend to forget that Yao was a very big man.