now we have three solutions: a) massaive change (on the core): "a TMAC (or Yao) leading team will not win" b) role player adjustment (on PG): "a team with Rafer at PG will not win" c) stay put hoping our superstars step up: "they almost beat Utah with Yao playing at 60% ..." Logically, I'd choose c) as what our management, Adelman and JVG did. I dont see any reason why our two superstars (both are young, humble, unselfish, talented, working hard and everything good) should not step up to lead this team. "Rafer should be enough". Well, in reality, ... ..., I choose a). The core is not a winning core. b) and c are just wasting time.
Well, I believe it is Alston hate when people disregard Yao(or lack thereof) , Tmac, and the rest of the team's play and put all the blame on Alston. Yes, he is extremely inconsistent the past couple of games especially, but most of the season. I however do not think that Alston going 5-17(which happens a lot) means it is an automatic loss for the team. Of course it doesn't help but we have seen several horrible games by Alston but the team is still able to have a winning streak or say win 9 out of 12. The more important stat for Alston is his assists to TO's. When he has a high assist count and keeps his TO's low we have a much better chance of winning no matter how poorly he shoots. However, when he shoots poorly and has 1 assist like against Utah we will lose. Alston has definitely been shooting way too much and too poorly lately but it alone has not cost us wins recently(that could change of course if he continues to have low assists and high TO's). Not having Yao against Utah really hurt because somebody besides Tmac has to try and score. Unfortunately, Alston still feels like it needs to be him to pick up the slack because everyone looks afraid to shoot. You have guys like Bonzi Wells who are supposed to be solid scorers in this league and he comes in and does nothing on either side of the floor. There are games in the past where Rafer will shoot awful, like 5-14 and have 8 assists, 1 TO, 2 steals and we will win the game. The next day there will be threads about how bad Alston sucks and this team is going nowhere with him at the point. I believe that is a very solid game even though he shot unbelievably bad and makes me rip my hair out. I will look at the box score and say I am glad the rest of his game showed up at least. Rafer frustrates me a lot too but I look at what he brings to the team rather than what he doesn't. Hopefully he will turn it around and play like he did a couple of weeks ago. If he continues to play like this then flame away but hopefully Brooks or someone will step up to spell Alston if he continues to struggle and we start losing games. Some of you need to relax when it looks like someone is defending Rafer. I am not necessarily defending him but I am defending the fact that the team has won games even though Rafer is shooting badly. Also, there are about 4 or 5 players that have played way below their career averages on this team and nobody complains about them. Personally, Bonzi is absolutely awful out there on both ends of the floor which is hopefully attributed to his shoulder. All players need to step up if we want to get a higher seed in the playoffs(it's possible).
Alston's shooting has been scary erratic, no doubt about it. But then, I ask myself how much is he really hurting the team with that shooting? Missed shots stick in our memory more than which team outscores the other over a stretch of minutes, even though the latter is clearly what ultimately matters. Morey has referred to this concept of a point-differential over a stretch of minutes when one unit is matched up against another as "ground truth". It's the type of stuff coaches naturally care about (which lineups work the best against a given opponent). In that spirit, I think a nice way to judge Alston's value to the team is look at how the team performs with and without him while taking into account the presence of our two best players (Yao and T-Mac). It's important to make that adjustment since Alston plays a lot of his minutes with them also on the court -- so raw +/- could give him an unfair edge. Code: [B]Both McGrady and Yao on the floor[/B] [I]Alston? Min Off Def Net[/I] Yes 581 107.0 99.0 +8.0 No 232 96.3 114.0 -17.7 [B]Only McGrady on the floor[/B] [I]Alston? Min Off Def Net[/I] Yes 120 108.2 103.3 +4.9 No 114 107.7 108.6 -0.8 [B]Only Yao on the floor[/B] [I]Alston? Min Off Def Net[/I] Yes 558 103.2 99.2 +4.0 No 227 105.8 102.2 +3.6 [B]Neither McGrady or Yao on the floor[/B] [I]Alston? Min Off Def Net[/I] Yes 116 101.7 94.4 +7.3 No 174 103.3 100.6 +2.7 The most interesting thing here is the first category -- how units with T-Mac and Yao together perform with and without Alston. It's a staggering difference, particularly when you consider that when Alston is playing with them they are typically also playing with the "offensive liabilities" (Shane and Chuck) as well as facing the opposing starters. For those wondering why the Rockets coaches has so much trust in Alston and play him so much, if its not clear just from watching the games I think that helps explain it.
It's not Alston it's the rest of the team's chuckage from all angles that is frustrating to watch. We are clanking the rim so hard it's gonna fall off the backboard. The rookies are the only ones able to hit a shot but even then, the free throw shooting is just atrocious. We would have been in that Utah game if Scola hits his free throws.
when make a record.... in having only four players score in a playoff game... you have no depth... what we have is a buch of third tier players... who when (and thats a big when) they are playing well... they become the second tier performing players we need...
You're making an elementary statistics mistake. You're comparing one individual's numbers to an aggregate composed of many other individuals. It makes more sense to break it out by point guard: for instance, T-Mac/Yao/Rafer vs T-Mac/Yao/Brooks vs T-Mac/Yao/Francis, etc. At that point you can correctly inspect the results to see if the sample size for specific individuals is too small, overlap (what if Brooks and Alston are on the floor at the same time, etc.).
Actually what makes the most sense is to analyze all of the five man combos that include T-Mac, Yao and at least one point guard candidate.
It's not a mistake if my purpose is to compare Alston to the play we've gotten without him on average. But since you asked, here's how each PG on the team did when playing with Yao and T-Mac and none of the other PGs were also on the floor: Code: Min Off Def Net Alston 555 107.7 97.6 +10.1 James 92 101.1 120.9 -19.8 Francis 68 89.8 112.4 -22.6 Brooks 18 94.6 105.7 -11.1 Brooks has rarely played with the two stars by himself at point, so you can't put much into that line (Rockets just outscored 35-37 in those 18 minutes of play). With James or Francis, it was ugly overall.
Nope, you're still wrong. To do a real statistical analysis the sample size for your test group (Alston) has to be comparable to the sample size for your control group (everybody else). Here the problem is that not only is there only one individual in your test group, compared to three in your control group, but also the minutes played for each individual in your control group is much smaller than those of the individual in your test group. Even the total number of minutes for every individual summed up in your control group is much smaller than the number of minutes for the single individual in your test group. That is bad mojo, stats wise. I suggest picking up a college level primer on statistics if you're curious as to why.
This statement is just flat out wrong. The Rockets are still the 2nd best defensive team in the league. They have been playing good defense consistently for the past few weeks. The fact is that their offense has been worse than it was under Van Gundy, but that defies popular opinion, and ultimately exposes the sheer ignorance of the so-called analyst. And, this is still much ado about nothing. The Rockets have been on a good winning streak and hit a snag having to play a tough WC opponent without their best player. Big deal. You write articles like this after a nasty 3 or 4 game losing streak, not because the Rockets had one poor shooting day and their usual rock of consistency was ailing in his sickbed.
because yao doesnt control the ball, the guards do, which is why they will control the majority of the shots.
this is a good article NWO. it shows that the one of the most important parts of being a elite point guard is being able to hit open shots. if they respect your shot, then you are able to get more assists, get less turnovers etc. if they don't respect your shots, they can concentrate on defending the other players cause they know you'll brick the ball and they'll concentrate more on the passing lanes cause you to turn the ball over.
It's sort of like how inconsistent the team was back with Sleepy Floyd starting at point......you never knew what you were going to get night in and night out. You can't run a team like that and expect any real success. The team didn't start taking shape and winning playoff series until Kenny Smith's 52% FG sharpshooting opened things up for The Dream inside. Right now no team keeps a man on Alston. They double up Yao non-stop. Like I said before......you can't run a team like this and expect real success. Management's gone with this guy in the starting lineup for 3 seasons now. They need to wake the f--- up.
I'm happy to learn something new here. I need to understand what you're saying though. Is the problem that the sample size for the control group, the aggregate of all the PGs other than Rafer, is smaller than it is for Rafer? Alright, but I still that it's illustrative of why the coaches have liked Rafer the most at PG. If after 3 games the team plays much better with one PG than another, that may not be enough to constitute a mathematically rigorous "statistical analysis". But you can still base your decisions off it, and coaches routinely do so. If the real issue you have isn't so much the minutes of the aggregate but rather that the minutes for each individual PG other than Rafer has been too small, then this is something I don't follow. Maybe (or maybe not) another example will make this issue clearer: Suppose we had 4 PGs represented by 4 coins -- a penny, a nickel, a dime, and a quarter. When you flip one of the coins and get heads, that represents an instance of "positive performance", and if you get tails that's an instance of "negative performance". I'll assume that each coin is weighted by different unknown factors, so some coins tend to flip heads more than tails and vice versa. We want to find the coin that can be relied on to flip to heads the most frequently (i.e the PG who gives us the best performance). Hope this isn't too convoluted yet. Suppose we flip the penny, nickel, and dime 5 times each, and we flip the quarter 30 times. What I'm saying (maybe I'm wrong) is that we can make a pretty good educated guess from these tosses whether the quarter is weighted more heavily to heads than the penny+nickel+dime on average (even though if you break it down each of those coins only got 5 tosses each). And I don't believe it would be any easier to determine if the quarter is weighted more to heads compared to just the nickel if it was tossed 15 times (instead of 5). I'm going off intuition here, so maybe that's not really the case. Fortunately, this is something that's easy to test with a computer. I'll try it out when I get some more free time. That'll be quicker for me than trying to reason it out using formulas in a stats book. I took a stats course in college a while back. Maybe my memory is hazy,but I don't think that it matters if one group is much smaller than the other (e.g. if one group is 5000 minutes and the other is 20000 minutes, that's a pretty good sample for comparison regardless of the relative difference in size). What matters is that both are sufficient on their own. In this case, the total minutes for the control group isn't huge (232 compared to 581 for Rafer). So even though the point differentials for the other PGs stink, can I say that I'm therefore 90% certain that Rafer is better than them? No, I don't believe I can. But let's be clear on something. There's a difference between being conclusive using statistics (e.g. saying I'm 90% certain) and making an educated guess based on the albeit limit information available. Presumably, the Rockets have even more information to work with then you or I have. And I think we can better understand why they make the decisions they do with their rotations by looking at the information we have and making "educated guesses"; even if on their own they are not highly conclusive.
Right on the money. Kenny Smith played the same type of game with not much penetration but just sometimes, taking a lot of threes, pretty good defence and setting up the offence. Kenny could make the open shots but Rafer can't.
Excellent Veteran analysis. consistent outside shooting is a need for the rockets for the guard positions.
