I am not denigrating their system, in fact it's quite amazing that their offense is so good given their personnel which is definitely not elite. Although I suspect that it is misleading somewhat since they have played one of the easiest schedule's in the NBA so far, I expect them to be good but not elite at the end of the day.
Nice job. I liked the animated gif. This reminds me that I should update that motion chart I did sometime back.
really outstanding post/thread. please keep updating it. After the tough stretch upcoming, i'll be interested to see the effect on OE and DE. thanks
Morey, sign him up! Blow away analysis and a good testament to U of I's engineering program. No question we've improved. Main thing is we have an offensive and defensive identity. We know what we do well and we stick with it.
wouldn't a great offensive system be efficient as well? The whole point of a run and gun offense (The Knicks) is to get open lay-ups and mismatches on the break. Amare vs a small guy when the match-ups got lost in transition, or a wide open 3 or lay-up on the break. Most efficient shots in basketball right?
Nice one. The difference is Rockets really improved on defensive rating. Hayes and Lowry comes into starting lineup, Hill also gets more minutes on certain matchups.
You might be spot on on offense, but in my estimation, defensive efficiency as a team becomes maxed out when roster cohesiveness is achieved. Boston and San Antonio, two of the perennial best, have had amazing stability in their lineups over the past 3-4 years. For the Rockets, guys that you would consider "plus" defenders in Lowry, Lee, and Battier have had their numbers dragged down by the fact that their man can find ways to score in the scheme of the offense, through switchs and screens and plays that put the onus of defending the ballhandler on other, less defensively savvy players. Go check out defensive ratings of those players in their career versus their ratings this year if you want statistics (it's on basketball-reference). As Lowry has solidified his spot as the starter and others have grown more comfortable in their rotation spot, I've seen better rotations, better switches off the screen to defend the outside shot, and better communication overall. I think we all can agree the defense these past two weeks has been much better than it was the rest of the season. I just hope that our chemistry can hold up through the reintroduction of Brooks to the team, the Budinger/Terrence question, and the impending trade deadline with all these Rockets rumors on the horizon. If it does, I think we'll continue to improve on defense despite not having great individual defenders (Martin, Scola, Brad Miller, etc). The real test, like everyone's said, will be if we can sustain that level of play against better teams. So far in Adelman's time, I haven't really noticed our level of play affected by the quality of our opponents so much as how we as a team are doing at that time. That is to say, we can be our own worst enemies. But when we're on (like the 22-game win streak) there's not going to be any team in the league that will stop us. I sometimes wonder what would have changed had we taken that first game in LA. It would have been worth at least 3 more wins just for momentum's sake; we took a tailspin confidence-wise after that, but hopefully we're all the better for it now. We already had our road-bump; teams like Dallas and San Antonio have not had theirs yet. Well that's the fun thing about winning. It's time to wait and see, how good we really can be, since we haven't hit our ceiling yet.
JK: I finished at Illinois about a year and a half ago. Great place. I am on my way to visit family in Indiana. Just passes Illinois about 15 minutes ago. Anyhow, you hit the main point of the post. We are starting to define the team that we are going to be with this crew...
It is the schedule, but man, I love those graphs, did you go to the JC Denton school of graphing? Great job + rep. DD
Not necessarily. Read my first post in the original thread (whi h is linked to at the beggining of this thread). Basically, the team that averages the most points is not the best offense.
Rockets did not improve much basketball wise but improved a lot in ranking. For a rebuilding team, this is like a disaster.
I don't have too much time. I am an Assistanb Professor in the Electrical Engineering department at Bradley University. I wrote a script that extracts the data into a spreadsheet and the I load onto MATLAB for processing and display. In fact, I use this power ranking as a course assignment where students learn to extract excel data and plot.
