I know that controlled variables are used in controlled experiments, formal (e.g. science experiments) or informal (e.g. computer trouble shooting). The NBA is not a controlled experiment done in a controlled environment. That's why looking for controlled variables here is futile. You are demanding the type of criteria that is not suitable for the environment in which you are studying. The study of real life environments (of which the NBA is one) requires statistical analysis of dependent variables and independent variables. And in statistical studies, the larger the sample size, the more reliable the conclusion is because there are noises in real life environments. You increase the sample size to reduce the effect of noises. In our case, the independent variable is the coach, and the dependent variable is offensive efficiency. The noises include roster changes, injuries, style and chemistry adjustments, opponent strengths, rules changes, etc. The kind of players a coach prefers is part of his "system." This is just speculation, but I can totally imagine that JVG would have preferred Lowry over Brooks (which I do not object, BTW), a Battier-Lee combo over an Ariza-Martin combo, etc. What about trades? I don't have the time to look it up. You might be able to convince me by comparing the players acquired during the Rudy T era and the JVG era. They both had the same GM. But I doubt that it would be very fruitful because again, it is not a controlled environment. Draft picks, available FAs, and available trades are not constant. I do not argue that JVG had "full liberty" in shaping rosters. (This is another misrepresentation of my points by exaggeration.) I do believe that most coaches have a significant influence on how a roster shapes up, directly or indirectly. Even if I conceded, for the sake of argument, that the coach did not have input in personnel decisions, do you believe that the GM makes no consideration of what players would thrive in the coach's system? Well, some bad GMs might do that. From what we can observe, if the GM keeps giving the coach players he doesn't like, one of them is going to be fired soon. While you still have not come out and say directly, your answer to my question about luck is affirmative. JVG's offensive track record of ranging from #15 to #29 in 9 seasons is just luck, in the sense that it is the result of factors completely out of his control. And by extension, so is Adelman's track record of ranging from #2 to #17 over 18 seasons. No he does not. This is the crux of our dispute. While he had better role players, he had less healthy stars. It is inconclusive at best. You keep ignoring my claim that the two main cogs were healthier under JVG (which is unfavorable to your argument) and keep repeating the improvement of role players (which is favorable to you). That's why I accused you of intentionally leaving out some facts I presented. I already explained above why limiting the comparison to their Houston tenured is flawed. One, it reduces the sample size, thereby increases the problem of noise. Two, the rosters they coached in Houston respectively were very different, thereby defeating your so-called controlled variable requirement. Why are their past coaching records irrelevant? Do coaches decline with age like players? Yes they started bad. I already pointed out that players need time to adjust. In fact, I would even argue that a defense-oriented coach like JVG would make a faster impact to a new team than a coach with a more sophisticated offense. JVG had simple offensive system. It is not hard to let his super playmaker to create offense and the rest of the team just space out. It takes more time to install a movement oriented offense. If you look at Adelman's trend, you'll notice that every time he started out with a new team, the offense was average. The second year was always better than the first. That's not what I am arguing. I am only arguing that it is false to claim that Adelman is no better than JVG as an offensive coach. Some short-sighted people may expect a coach to just come in and instantly transform a group of players who are used to playing passive offense. I do expect that Adelman will improve the offense given time and a healthy roster. But then I also expect you to say, "Well, it's all because he is lucky to have a better GM."
You are absolutely right that there is a difference between a coach and a system. Specifically, the same coach can run very different "systems" and I believe Adelman's "system" with the Kings are very different than his "system" with any of the 3 Rockets teams. Van Gundy changed his system of offense when Patrick Ewing went down. The OP's question talks about Adelman "system" vs. Van Gundy "system." One issue, as I mentioned, is what exactly the "Adelman System" is since his offense looked very different with different teams. To the extent that people are talking about the "Princeton/modified-Princeton/motion" offense he ran in SAC as the "Adelman System." Did it make the Rockets "better"? Not really. Adelman tried it at the beginning of 07/08 and 08/09 but as far as I can tell, they reverted back to playing more like they did before: Yao in the low post, McGrady initiating the offense on the ball, Rafer/Battier spotting up for 3, etc. The Rockets sure didn't look anything like the old Kings. Yao got a few high post-possessions, but none of the bigs were racking up the kind of assist numbers racked up by Webber, Vlade, Brad Miller (and even by Kenny Thomas) with the Kings. McGrady worked mostly on-the ball. Now, if someone wants to talk about whether coaches can make an offense significantly better without upgrading players, the answer is also likely "no." At least not in the case of the transition between Van Gundy and Adelman. Also, as far as I can tell, no team has hired a new coach, retained largely the same cast, and gotten a big jump in offensive efficiency. Basketball-reference.com has all the data available in case anyone wants to find an exampel. I looked around and didn't find any.
Luck plays a substantial factor yup. It's why Alvin Gentry has the best offense in the league currently. It has been presented to you multiple times that Yao and Tracy played more games in 2008 than they did in 2007. I'm at a loss as to why you keep saying they were healthier. Right, so coaching loaded teams with HOF players and coaching castoffs 20 years later is just "noise" which we can disregard when making direct 1-1 comparisons. Mike D'Antoni with the Knicks -> is a sucky offensive coach. Mike D'Antoni with Phoenix -> is a good offensive coach. Tune out the noise brah. For the reasons that you are afraid to admint. They've made almost no improvement from year 1 to year 3 or from Year JVG to year RA. This is the question I am asking you and you can't answer. In the context of their tenure with the Rockets, I can't see an appreciable difference at all. Again, the question I am asking you and you can't answer.
Predictably that you again use small sample sizes (Gentry's 1 and D'Antoni's 2) to make your argument. Should I just assume that you are incapable of understanding statistics? Do you understand the differences between the probabilities of being lucky for 3 times and being lucky for 9 times, and being lucky for 18 times? Or are you just pretending that the evidence doesn't exist or "irrelevant" when it is not favorable to you? It has also been presented to you multiple times that a new offense needs time to establish. And right, Yao and McGrady played a grand total of 6 more games combined in 08 than in 07. What was Adelman doing not taking advantage of those 6 games to shore up his offensive efficiency! Oh, and the sharp decline of games played by McGrady through the 3 Adelman years shouldn't have any effect on the offense, right? After all, Adelman had three talented role players to hold the fort. He should just shrug, "Tracy who?" Here is the data I presented about the games and minutes they played, and you conveniently ignored. I already answered multiple times. You just don't like my answer. I think we are going in circle here. I am beginning to suspect that you are in fact DD's alter ego. :grin: I am out.
Re: time to adjust. How long should it take? If Adelman's offense is so hard to learn and takes years to "adjust" by a player, given the speed at which the Rockets seems to move players (and the speed at which players seem to move in this league in general), what good does such a "system" do?
Why don't we use large sample sizes then. Is Bill Fitch a better offensive coach than Adelman or D'Antoni? His celtics teams were far better on offense than most of Adelman's, same with KC Jones. What about Pat Riley? - he had the number 1 offense in the league for something like 6 out of 10 seasons. Not top 10, I'm talking number 1. Adelman didn't accomplish anything remotely close to that. In fact, he has never finished top of the league, ever. Riley simply blows him away due to his obviously superior offensive coaching acumen. Now....are you going to yell at me cause the sample size is too big? It's established 3 years later with all new players and it's still no better. Do you want to bet it's going to be a top 10 in the league next year? I highly doubt it.
I think one year is a fair amount of time. In a way, Adelman did improve the offense in the sense that he made the offense more in tuned with his "system" over the 3 years. It just happened that his 3-year tenure so far also coincided with the sharp decline of McGrady, not to mention Yao's absence last season. Like I have said many times now. His role players are getting better. His stars are getting worse, much worse. Overall, I think the talent level has been lowered since his first year. Of course, this is an opinion because it is hard to objectively quantify overall talent level of a team. As I said earlier, it is at best inconclusive. I don't think you can say that we clearly have better overall talent than we had in his first year here. According to his past records, Adelman usually was able to improve the offense after the first year, if the core was intact. BTW, I don't think guys like Martin and Miller ending up on this team is just coincidence. Of course, they have to be available. So it's luck to a certain extent. But I believe that the fact that they possess skills and mentality that are conducive to Adelman's system is a significant factor why Morey would target them. Same thing with the spending of relatively big money in signing Scola and Lowry.
Is this a joke post? Because otherwise you are claiming that Maurice Taylor, Kelvin Cato & Steve Francis = Scola/Landry, & Kevin Martin on offense.
I am sorry Sam. I still don't think you get it. You are still just picking one chunk of a coach's career and ignore the rest of what he did. I have shown that Adelman is consistently in the upper half and JVG is consistently in the lower half over their entire respective careers. I think Riley is more balanced than JVG, with an inclination toward favoring defense. But of course, when you have Magic, Kareem, and Worthy as your core for about a decade, you just let them play. Jones is a good offensive coach. I don't know if he is better than Adelman. I used to be amazed with the beauty of the Celtics offense, even though I really hated them. Fitch is an average coach in every aspect. He's had some good years and some bad years. You know what, let me give you this. I'd concede that JVG's career is still too short to be decisively conclusive. He only worked with two teams each no more than 5 years. I'd give you that he somehow did not have enough time to get out of the crappy rosters he inherited. I'd give you the benefit of the doubt that we do not have enough data to be sure that he could not have been able to coach a top 10 offense had he not been fired and had Yao and Tracy been healthy and had he got Morey's acquisitions in the past 3 years. But I don't think you can argue that Adelman's 18 years with 4 teams records are just a fluke. I am not a betting person. (I think you can find someone here to bet with you if you are so sure that we won't be a top 10 team next year.) But yes, I would be very surprised if we could not achieve top 10 next year given a healthy core. You can quote me for this next year.
"His first year": his = Adelman's. Damn that dangling pronoun. I was responding to CH's question about adjustment, i.e. from Adelman's first year.
Tell me something, where do you think the Rockets offense would have been ranked over the last 3 seasons had Van Gundy stayed on for these seasons? My guess is pretty much exactly where they were in 07/08 and 08/0. Frankly the "Adelman system" looked a lot like the "Van Gundy system" during these years. Last year, maybe a bit different in that Van Gundy might have tried preserve the defense at the cost of some offense (by, for example, having players stay home for defensive rebounds rather than running out for fast brakes, run back on D rather than go for offensive boards-- you know, slider adjustments you can make on NBA2K) but will likely end up with a similar W/L record given the same talent.
This is a hard question. One thing we know is that JVG could not generate any thing resembled an offense without McGrady. He could kind of manage without Yao, but not without TMac. From that observation, one might say that he would havestruggled big time the past two seasons. However, the emergence of Brooks is the X-factor that is hard to gauge. Since TMac became a non-factor half way into the 08/09 season, Brooks was the only guy who could create offense. How much would JVG trust Brooks? He's a below average defender. He's not good at setting up his teammates. He'd been very inconsistent as a shooter before he became a starter. I supposed JVG would have to be forced to use Brooks because there was just no one else. After getting Lowry, I imagine that he would give Lowry the job over Brooks. Of course, there is also the possibility that he would give the rein to Artest. That would have been disastrous. So I agree that 07/08 would have been pretty much the same. But 08/09 would be worse, depending on how he would use Brooks. As for 09/10, that would be an interesting season. Let me digress and point out something I have not done so far. The overall offensive efficiency under Adelman was about at the middle of the pack, which is very Van Gundy-ish. But don't forget about the Ariza experiment in the first half of the season. I highly suspect that Adelman intentionally gave Ariza the green light to be "Da Man" and it resulted in very inefficient offense for a large part of the season. I believe it was an experiment to assess Ariza's potential. They were willing to do that because we could "afford" to throw away a season that had been lost before it even started. If Adelman had put Ariza in his proper place right from the beginning, I think we could have ended up a little better in overall offensive efficiency. So it looks like that Adelman's offensive track record took a hit because of Ariza. Back to topic, I think you are right that JVG probably would have put all his focus on defense and ended up with similar result as 05/06 offensively. But we would probably win about the same amount of games because of better defense.
With exception to your theory on Adelman and Ariza, I agree with your assessment that JVG would probably have had similar albeit slightly less production offensively the last three season. While I personally am a much bigger fan of JVG than Adelman, I do agree with you that Adelman is the better offensive coach. (note: I kinda still hate him for his GSW years where he benched Tim Hardaway for BJ armstorng and traded him for bimbo fricken coles! :grin But like Dean Oliver - via Carl Herrara, I question the significance a new "coach - system" can have on an existing offense. IMO unlike defense, while still dependent on talent can be significantly improved through effort and focus, offense is primarily if not entirely reflective of the talents of the players. However if you disagree with this view or Oliver's theory AND if you believe (which Im not sure you do) that Adelman is a significantly better offensive coach than JVG... shouldnt your estimation of offensive production performance the past 3 years IF coached by JVG be significantly less, instead of essentially the same? While the questioned post by Carl Herrara is interesting, the reason i asked you this is also due to the 2 page discussion you've been having with SamFisher... I'm slightly confused as to what point it is exactly that you two are debating. I tend to lose track :grin: Seems to me Fisher is arguing that Adelman despite his rep as the better offensive coach (MO also) has not really resulted in improve offensive production (which i also agree). Meanwhile, you're contention seems to be that Adelman is a better offensive coach, evident by his career in Portland, GSW & Sac which compared to JVG's carreer crushes him in terms of offensive efficiency (I agree with this as well). Perhaps its just me, (i probably read it wrong) but I dont seem to find the points to be conflicting.
I guess I stated my view too modestly and it confused you. In brief, if it was JVG instead of Adelman as the Rockets coach with the exact same circumstances in the past 3 years, I believe that the offense: 07/08 would have been about the same 08/09 would have been worse, how much worse depends on how JVG would use Brooks 09/10 would have been worse. I agree with CH that having a worse offense does not necessarily mean that we would win fewer games because JVG would probably have had better defense, especially in 09/10. I don't blame you for the confusion. :grin: In a nutshell, Sam claims that Adelman is not a better offensive coach than JVG. He argues it from comparing the two coaches' offensive efficiency while they were in Houston. In fact, he might have implied that Adelman was worse because Adelman did not achieve better results with better players. My contention is this: 1. Adelman did not have better players because while it is true that Adelman had superior role players, both Yao and McGrady missed more time under Adelman than under JVG. 2. Comparing Adelman's first season with JVG's last season is unfair because of the adjustment factor. 3. Ignoring career accomplishment and focusing on just one segment of a coach's career is not a good way to evaluate a coach's abilities. In general, I agree with CH's basic premise that players have far more impact on a team's performance than coaches. I have been countering people who claim that Phil Jackson is the greatest coach ever because "you just can't argue against the 11 rings." Ring counting is obviously a flawed way of measuring a coach's greatness. But it is also wrong to say that Jackson is nothing but a lucky dude riding the coattails of some of the best players in history.
And this is why 1 and 2 effectively say "It's unfair to compare the two, I mean ADJUSTMENTS! They were too busy studying playbooks to win games! Yao and Tracy were slightly older! The rosters were 40% different! Unfair unfair unfair! So what if it was the exact same players and same results," 3 says "well since the Rockets are a wash, let's just aggregate the Blazers Warriors, Sacto Kings in the 80's and 90's due to the law of averages- AND COMPARE THEM TO JVG'S 90's/00's KNICKS....ergo, the ADelman system has triumphed. If 1 and 2 are true, and it's invalid to compare the same players playing in the same time periods due to other influences - then 3 is exponentially more tainted, by reason of the same principle you just laid down. If 3 is untrue, then the crux of your argument evaporates.
Re: 08/09. Don't you think JVG might have motivated McGrady better-- which might mean better rehab and not deciding to go around the country until a doctor would microfracture his ass? I always had the impression that McGrady was not exactly happy about the "playing off the ball" "motion offense" thing because he was more comfortable playing point forward. Also, I don't think 08/09 was so much of "Adelman system" making up for McGrady's absence. It was Yao being healthy for 77 games and serving as the primary low-post presence whileposting the highest TS% for his career, and it was Artest (and Wafer) picking up much of the McGrady perimeter slack. It's not like Yao was whipping Brad Miller passes or anyting-- he was playing the same low post role he played in all of his other years. Also, the Rockets were a very good 112 pts per 100 possession with Yao on the floor and much worse offensively that year when Yao sat, so it was, again, more a matter of talent than "system."
Fair enough. But I don't know about you. I find the relationship between JVG and McGrady hard to fathom. On the one hand, JVG is a more disciplinary coach than Adelman. So you would think that JVG would be even less tolerant of McGrady's antics. However, it seems that JVG had decided very early on he would give McGrady free rein both on and off the court. I have always felt that JVG gave Tracy so much freedom because he knew he could not afford losing him. I kind of agree that McGrady didn't like Adelman's system. That's why early on in 07/08, it didn't work well and Adelman pretty much was forced to revert back to the old system. (BTW, that was a very significant part of what I called "adjustment" period.) But then TMac got injured. I think that's the first time we could win without McGrady since the TMac-Francis trade. After a couple of weeks or so watching the team played fine without him, he seemed to have changed his attitude. That's when the 22-game streak happened. That's how I remember it anyway. Maybe I was biased against Artest. I didn't think Artest helped that much offensively. He was about as inefficient as Ariza during the "Ariza experiment" period. Yao's presence did seem important. But again, during JVG's years, he had not proven that he could utilize Yao effectively without McGrady. So I tend to think that Adelman did have something to do with it. Let me put it this way. The so-called "Adelman's system" is not about a set of Xs and Os, complicated playbook. It is about being flexible, moving without the ball, read and react, share the ball, spread the offense, etc. That "system" makes it easier to get Yao into good scoring position without having to rely on a super playmaker to create for everybody. I remember when Adelman first came, he repeatedly said that what he planned to do was "make life easier for Yao and TMac." I am not sure if JVG's offense could have done that.
This is not how the law of average works. It works like this. There can be positive (acquiring good players, etc.) and negative influences (adjustments, injuries, etc.) at a given time period. These influences do not spread evenly in the short run but they tend to do so in the long run. This is why large sample size is so important. Think of coin flip. Let's say head represents negative influences and tail represents positive influences. If you flip a coin 5 times. You may get head all 5 times. But if you conclude that coin flipping always gives you head (no pun intended -- I am pointing at you Carl Hererra ), then you are wrong. If you flip 50 times, it is far less likely (not more likely, as your logic above suggests) that you will get head all 50 times. If you get all head after 50 times, you can pretty much conclude that the coin is loaded, something in the coin that causes the "coincidence." That's my argument all along. If Adelman never had a bad offense in all his 18 seasons, maybe there's something about him, not just luck, that caused it.
The Rockets were a better with Artest on the floor than without. They were lot better with when Yao and Artestwere on the floor together than when Yao played but Artest sat. http://www.82games.com/0809/0809HOUP.HTM Artest did not shoot effciently overall, but his TS% was no worse than McGrady's during the 06/07 season, and only slightly worse than McGrady's highest ever TS% as a Rocket (set during the 04/05 season). He was significantly more effcient than Ariza (and significantly more effcient than McGrady during the 07/08 season). As for "unable to utilize Yao without McGrady. The Rockets did do a lot better with McGrady+Yao than with Yao without McGrady back in these days. In 06/07, they were about a .500 team (i.e. breaking even in terms of pts scored and pts allowed) with Yao but without McGrady. That McGrady had a positive impact is not suprising-- he was getting paid the max! Also, one must consider that (1) Yao became more skilled as the years went on. He used to live off of McGrady's feeds for easy layups/dunks a lot more early in the career. (2) During the JVG days, when McGrady sat, the team had no capable perimeter creator/scorer on the floor. In 06/07 for example, McGrady's sub was Luther Head and Rafer Alston most likely took over the playmaking duty (assuming he was not also sitting... than God help us, cuz Luther was probably trying to play PG), and the PF spot was occuied by Juwan Howard and Chuck Hayes. This is a far cry from Artest/Scola/Landry/Wafer (and yes, there was still Rafer in 08/09), etc.
