Hollinger Statistical Analysis Applied to Carl Landry

I used the Hollinger statistical analysis and applied it to Carl Landry! I copied the article in the NBA Dish forum and added commentary in bold.

My conclusion is that Carly Landry does not have a lot of statistical positives. Outside of steals, the rest of the indicatiors were neutral or negative!

But my analysis does not include offense or PER. Someone please add those numbers if you find them

Conclusion: Landry better be able to score, because he can't do much else!

Here is the link to the thread about the Hollinger method:
http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?p=2997340#post2997340

THE KEY FACTORS

I use PER (Player Efficiency Rating) as one of the factors in my rating formula, but it doesn't come close to telling the whole story.

The other six factors that are indicative of pro success are:

1. Age. Everything about the draft has to be seen through the prism of age. This is hugely important, yet teams underestimate it almost every year.

That's why "veteran" rookies like Ely, Dickau, Rafael Araujo and Francisco Garcia have underwhelmed at the NBA level, while the freshman stats of a player like Chris Bosh take on new meaning when you understand his youth..

Unfortunately, Carl Landry is 24 years old and definitely old for an NBA prospect. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that he had a very good season in 2004-05, averaging over 18 ppg and 7 rebounds per game.

[1 negative.]


2. Steals. Though perhaps the most worthless stat for NBA analysis, there's no denying that college players who get a ton of steals tend to fare much better in the NBA than their less sticky-fingered brethren. This is the one item that gets the most weight, actually -- it's even more important than PER!

For this year's draft, that's a big positive for Mike Conley, Jr., who picked off more than two balls a game, and a big negative for players like Arron Afflalo (22 all season), Nick Young (27) and Ramon Sessions (29).

40 steals for Carl Landry, for an average of 1.2 per game! That is more than a bunch of guards taken in the first round. But how does he compare to other power forwards?

2006-07 Steal averages of other power forwards drafted:
Horford- 0.7 stls
Wright- 1.0 stls
Noah- 1.1 stls
Smith- 0.5 stls
Davis- 1.1 stls
Fazekas- 0.8 stls.

Wow, he tops this list. Pretty interesting.

1 positive.

3. Blocks. This is the big man counterpart to steals, basically, although it's not quite as important.

32 total blocks for Landry for an average of 0.9 blocks. He's definitely not a shot blocker. Let's see how he compares to other PF's.

Horford- 1.8
Wright- 1.8
Noah- 1.8 (including 2.4 last year)
Smith- 1.6 (including 2.1 last year)
Davis- 1.0
Fazekas- 1.5

Ouch, Landry definitely falls short in this area.


2 negatives.

4. Rebounds. Boards, especially offensive boards, are a good indicator of future pro success as well.

Note that it isn't necessarily the absolute rebounds as much as the rebounds given a player's height. Wade, for instance, has the best rebound rate in the past five years of any player 6-4 or shorter -- a whopping 13.0 his sophomore year. Rajon Rondo was the best under 6-2 (11.5), and Nate Robinson was the best under six foot (8.6 his sophomore year).

The correlation isn't quite as strong with big men, oddly enough, because you get one-dimensional types muscling in on the action (a lot of marginal players like Reggie Evans). But big men who can rebound and show some skill in other areas tend to fare very well in the pros.

The most notable rebound rate in this year's draft belongs to an Ohio State player -- just not the one you think. Daequan Cook, a 6-5 freshman, put up a whopping 12.1 mark, which is pretty incredible for a player that size.

9.8 rebs for Landry per 40 minutes.

Here are the rebounding averages of other PFs in the draft:
Horford- 13.6 rebs
Wright- 8.2 rebs
Noah- 13.0 rebs
Smith- 13.0 rebs
Davis- 12.2 rebs
Fazekas- 14.5 rebs

Sorry to say it, but Landry is not a very good rebounder compared to the other draftees in his class. He only beat Brandan Wright, who played next to Hansbrough, who averaged over 10 rebs per 40 minutes. Horford and Noah also played next to each other, which may have decreased their rebounding averages somehwat.

Totals:
[1 positive]

[3 negatives.]

5. 3-pointers. Those previous three items are markers for athleticism, while these next two are markers of skill.

Gonna skip this one for PFS.

6. Pure point ratio. I thought this might just separate the wheat from the chaff among point guards, but it actually helps at every position.

Obviously, guards such as Deron Williams, Marcus Williams, T.J. Ford and Steve Blake differentiate themselves by having college pure point ratings well over 2.0, but wingmen like Andre Iguodala and Luke Walton also helped themselves with extremely strong ratings in this category.

On the other hand, Alexander Johnson and Rafael Araujo both put up -3.4 marks -- perhaps that should have been a warning sign.

In this year's draft, Conley's 2.45 mark stands out with an exclamation point -- it's the fourth-best of any college player in the past six years with at least 500 minutes played, and easily No. 1 among this year's players.

At the other end, Nick Young (-1.8) and Morris Almond (-2.9) have disastrously bad ratings for backcourt players.


Would appreciate if someone could find these numbers. I will post Assist- Turnover ratio in the meantime.

Landry- .41
Horford- 1.21
Wright- .63
Noah- .90 (1.05 last year)
Smith- .57
Davis - .63
Fazekas- .88 (1.15 last year)

He is dead LAST here. Do not expect Vlade Divac- type passing out of him.




THE RED FLAGS

I use the six factors above to produce a "rating" of a player's pro potential, but that's not the end of the story. It turns out just using the rating only gets you about halfway there, and still leads to a lot of mistakes.

The rest of it is taken care of by what I call the four "red flags":

Short guys. We're all familiar with the great hordes of 5-11 guards who have put up spectacular college hoops numbers only to implode upon reaching the pros. I had to put in a system of deductions to account for this.

Will Mike Conley's lack of height be an issue in the NBA?

At the guard spot, a player got a minor deduction for being "somewhat short" if he was a 6-3 or 6-4 shooting guard, or a 6-1 or 6-2 point guard. He got a much larger deduction for being "very short" if he was a 6-2 or smaller shooting guard, or a 6-0 or smaller point guard. This seemed to even out a lot of the small-guard issues, as the best small players were able to overcome their size, but the others weren't.

Yet another negative for Landry. I will give him a negative half a point for being somewhat short. At least he is not Chuck Hayes short.

Totals:
[1 positive]

[3.5 negatives.]

Perimeter players who don't make 3s. Making fewer than 25 3-pointers in the year before being drafted is a pretty strong negative indicator for outside players.

Some are good enough in other areas to overcome it -- most notably Wade. Many others fail because of it, however, as the athleticism they relied on to dominate in college isn't nearly as singular at the pro level.

Skip this one

Really bad rebounders. This is a huge red flag -- if a player has an extremely poor rebound rate for his size, it's a strong indication that his athleticism is taxed to the limit even at the college level and he's going to be completely overwhelmed in the pros.

This has several subsets by position, and as you can see it's kind of a gallery of busts:

Guards with a rate below 5.0: Stoudamire and Jannero Pargo overcame this enough to become quasi-useful; perhaps J.J. Redick will too. Others include Dickau, Daniel Ewing, Reece Gaines, Dajuan Wagner and Roger Mason. This year's draftees who get red-flagged on this metric are JamesOn Curry, Taurean Green and Gabe Pruitt.[/b]

It doesn't seem to me that Landry is a "really bad" rebounder, however he certainly isn't a very good one. I'll leave this as neutral.


THE ONE ANTI-RED FLAG

One positive, surprisingly, was if a player had a previous season that was better than the one just before the draft.

You might think that this meant a player was "on the downswing," but actually counting one-third the previous season and two-thirds the current one improved the quality of the draft ratings significantly. Interestingly enough, the opposite didn't work -- counting a previous season where a player was worse didn't help at all.

What this tells us, apparently, is that with players this young we should take most one-year improvements at face value.

Well, Landry had a pretty good first year.

He averaged 18.2 ppg, 7.1 rebs, 0.8 stls, .618 fg%
Not as good as his senior year though, when he averaged 18.9 ppg, 7.3 rebs, 1.2 stls, .597 fg%

Net neutral on this one.

SUMMING IT UP

After all that, we finally end up with a numerical rating for each player. While assigning each player a single number can't possibly address all the complexities involved in a draft (present versus future, team needs versus best player, etc.), it does allow us to do a few neat things.

For starters, we can compare drafts between years, which allows us to see almost immediately that this year's draft is, indeed, absolutely freaking loaded. It has the highest-rated player of the past six years, and seven of the top 23 collegians in that stretch.

Second, we can denote differences between players much more finely than we can by just using a ranking system. For example, the difference in the 2006 draft between the top-rated player, Tyrus Thomas, and the second-ranked collegian, Shelden Williams, was greater than that between Williams and the No. 35 player -- which would clue you in to just draft Thomas, regardless of need. On the other hand, the difference between Andrew Bogut and Channing Frye in the 2005 draft was only three hundredths of a point.

Best of all, the system works. Obviously, you want more than just my word, so below are charts showing the top 12 collegians in each draft using my formula, compared to where they actually were picked among collegians and what players went in their place.

Yes, there are a few stinking dogs thrown in -- Vincent Yarbrough didn't quite pan out, for instance, and the Paul Davis Era in Los Angeles is off to a slow start.

That's OK. As I said, this is just the initial version of the system, and for it to work, we just have to have fewer busts than in the real drafts. And as you'll see, there are substantial fewer in the lists below.

Totals:
[1 positive]

[3.5 negatives.]

Unfortunately, according to the Hollinger analysis, I found only 1 positive statistic- steals. The rest were neutral or negative, and he has red flags for being old and undersized.

But what my analysis does not include is offense. If someone could share his PER, that would be great.

Conclusion: Carl Landry better be able to score in the NBA, because he can't do much else!!

 

Thanks for posting that here.

It looks like we can add a 2nd positive for Landry, thanks to PER. It seems like Morey and the Rockets view Landry as a scorer in the post.

He also gets to the line a lot, 3rd most out of this PF crop.

Overall, the Rockets bias in this draft was definitely for offense. I don't think any of the guys we got (also including Newley) can play much defense. But they bring some interesting offensive skills.

 

You are right, you posted it. Sorry, for some reason I thought he posted it in the Brooks thread!