Rocketscast/Kevin Pelton on why the Rockets are beating expectations

The end of season collapse was terrible, but all things considered I thought he did OK last year. In terms of wins, the team exceed mostly people's expectations.

 

It depends on who you're comparing them. It's not like they're gonna win 11 games for you, but if you MM or Smith out there over a rookie maybe they won't lose 11 games like a rookie would do.

 

I still think Asik has contributed the most of these "10 games." Parsons improved shooting and Lin improved defense are also a surprise for me.

 

LOL maybe you should read the OP again. Seems like you didn't get it.

 

For me it was a simpler equation.

McHale ran a PG centric system last year between Dragic and Lowry. I looked at the pre-season with the assumption that McHale would allow Lin to play to his strengths, ie, the Pick and Roll.

Jeremy Lin thrives in systems where he's the primary decision maker. Also, one skill he showed last year was his ability to elevate the players around him, especially the middling/lower tier players.

Asik statistically showed flashes of dominance on the defensive glass. His rebounding per minute was off the charts in the limited minutes he had in Chicago. I believed he would be a solid center, with a possibility of being a real defensive stopper given his length and agility.

Harden was a 6th man, but averaging close to starter minutes. His sublime performance during the play offs, especially during the Spurs series showed that his ability to score extended beyond 2nd units. If he had the endurance, I expected him to be a very successful scorer if moved to a starting role.

With Lin and Asik, I expected 35-40 wins, and if some of the younger players developed well, I saw Houston as a potential bubble team in the 40-45 win range. If his knee injury was nagging, I felt it could go as low as 30-35 wins. I had real concerns about the back up PG position between Tony Douglas and Machado.

When they signed Harden, I upgraded my assessment to a solid 7-8 seed contender, however I saw a 5th or 6th seed as unlikely mainly due to how stacked the West was looking at the upper seeds between OKC, SAS, Clippers, Memphis, Denver and the Lakers, and the log jam with Dallas and Minnesota in the bubble teams.

Nash being out a month had a huge impact, creating some breathing room in the upper seeds.

Love, Rubio and Dirk being out created room in the lower seeds.

I also felt that Harden and Lin could fit together well. Both players are good passers, decent court vision, and unselfish players. If Harden can perform with Westbrook, then I saw no reason why he couldn't perform with Lin.

One thing that people forget is how heavily a few good to very good players can distort game results. A single "superstar" can carry a team to a lot of wins. Even "good" players can carry the team through wins against weak and middling teams.

Even with just K-mart, Lin and Asik, I felt those 3 were enough to carry the team through weaker opposition and a decent split on middle teams, though would get hammered by the stronger teams. This would be enough for a middle of the road record.

I did expect better than average performance against the East (though not dominance), since the East is not only the weaker conference historically, but tends to be older, slower, and not extremely effective at defending the Pick and Roll (Lin's bread and butter).

What I found very surprising is how quickly Harden and Lin demonstrated their ability to synergize their skills in the first 2 games. And that was just playing street ball. It boded extremely well.

While the time it took the coaches to find something closer to an appropriate balance was longer than I would have liked, they have found it. Interestingly, I'm finding that the team performance has elevated to the most optimistic end of my curve of expectations.

Lin and Harden have been integrating more quickly than expected. I didn't expect really spectacular results until the All Star Game prior to watching them play, and even after Detroit and Atlanta, I still didn't expect serious chemistry until January given the time it would take to integrate the play book since Harden missed training camp.

That they started really clicking a few weeks ahead of that optimistic scenario is amazing.

While I doubt Houston will be a legitimate contender in the play offs, it appears they have a very good chance of becoming a legitimate contender for a play off spot.

4 games above .500 would mean that even if they split the rest of the season at .500, it would still put them at 45 wins. Almost enough for an 8th seed most years.

Assuming no major regressions in play, and given that the remainder of the schedule is actually somewhat easier than the schedule so far, the odds are definitely in Houston's favor to make the play offs, with a decent shot at the 5th or even 6th seed.

It's remarkable.

Morey is looking as good as his reputation when it comes to the analytics. :grin:

 

Team ball = (Iso Harden 5 games + 2 ppat 1 game + morris 1 games) X 2 (team factor) = 12 games. Oh! Underarchieve.

 

Hollinger also used dleague stats to project NBA performance quite well. Kevin was very high on Lin in his book, but he obviously underestimated the post injury transition period.

 

All I'm hearing are excuses. They got it wrong, end of story.

 

Good post, even if it's very Lin-centric.

The coaching adjustments came after Lin's explosion against San Antonio and the circulation of a few articles talking about the Lin & Harden duo. Hopefully someone will get them to take note that Douglas should be playing as the off-guard and Lin as the point when Harden is resting, there's been too many games that I've seen and cringed at how Douglas can't penetrate or create off of the screen and Lin just isn't very good playing at the off-guard, notably because his 3-point shot is broken. Simply putting them into their appropriate positions in the half-court will improve our team that much more in those minutes that Harden gets rest and put less pressure on him if we find ourselves disoriented, which looked to be the case last game against New Orleans.

A couple of things to look forward to this season are whether Patrick Patterson can keep up his aggressive play since coming back from his foot injury. In the last two games he's been very active around the court and on the glass and he's got the size, length and ability to be a suitable PF for the team moving forward. I can see why the Spurs expressed interest in him, he's got a very good skill-set, but he needs to start setting better screens for our guards as well and continue to play aggressive.

Marcus Morris' ceiling to me is a serviceable bench swingman, but if it takes Patterson having a fire lit under his ass to get his game going than I'm happy that Morris is starting at the moment, though he's too undersized at the position, has an inconsistent jump-shot and is prone to making some bad plays.

I don't expect Omer Asik to ever have a serviceable post-game, you can see he's just got limited offensive aptitude. But he is a beast on the defensive boards and a great defensive anchor. The problem is that our team defense gets into mix-ups at times, Harden takes a lackadaisical approach, Lin can be prone to over-help at times, and his PF partners this season has been mediocre for the most part. What I'm happy about is that he's recently been taking that rare but appropriate 7-foot jumper and landing it. If he can sprinkle that into his game, forget about the post-ups unless it's an obvious mismatch and learn to be more aggressive in the deep-post instead of making ballerina lay-ups.

Also looking forward to what the new signings of Anderson and Beverley will add to the team dynamic. If they can be solid rotational guards to bolster our depth that's great, I was apprehensive about Delfino but he's been a valuable contributor, hopefully at least one of these two guys become very useful rotational guards.

If we can see some of these improvements, I'd expect our team to maintain the sixth seed going into the play-offs or maybe even 'steal' the fifth.

 

Can this Pelton guy just admit that he's wrong? It's like saying "well, I thought the team was going to tank games on purpose, so I pegged them at 30 wins. But they are actually trying, so I peg them now at 40 (which is what they are paced at)."

He should admit that he doesn't know what he's talking about.

 

Better yet, he should be specific and admit which of his assumptions about the team this season were wrong. (Which is exactly what he did.)

Pelton is one of the sharpest analysts/writers out there. Morey even wrote the forward to his Prospectus book a couple years back, saying its a must read. He definitely knows what he's talking about.

 

#LOGIC isn't a strong suit of some on CF.

 

He needs to come clean about being wrong!

 

When analysts like Pelton makes forecasts, they're using objective models they've designed, not their gut. So when they get it wrong, they're actually in a position to go back and dissect what their model got wrong in detail. That's actually really useful and helpful to everyone who's really interested in what goes into their forecasts.

Guys who instead make forecasts based on their gut can't really do that in a totally objective way, so when they try to explain things after the fact criticisms like "you're backtracking now. just admit you're wrong, end of story" might actually be valid. So I get why people in this thread are reflexively criticizing in this manner, but the criticism really doesn't make sense considering how Pelton actually does his forecasts.

 

People misunderstand the limitation about his system. Here's quote from his book:

"How has SCHOENE performed? Honestly, not great. Of the six pure statistical projection systems tracked last year on the APBRmetrics message board, SCHOENE had the largest mean error, pegging teams wrong by an average of 5.0 wins over the 66-game schedule. However, when I studied possible adjustments over the summer, I found nothing that would have improved SCHOENE’s results over multiple previous years. So the system remains unchanged from last season, which is essentially the third incarnation of SCHOENE. (The first was used only in 2008-09. The second, rolled out for the first edition of Pro Basketball Prospectus in 2009-10, began incorporating multiple years of past player performance.) Historically, SCHOENE has proven more effective at pegging the direction teams are heading than their specific win total. So a different measure--which system was closest to each team’s final record--showed SCHOENE performing as effectively as any of the other systems. SCHOENE was closest to the pin on six teams; only a set of projections using regularized adjusted plus-minus as tracked by poster EvanZ did better, with seven. The moral of the story is to temper the most extreme projections. When SCHOENE projects that the Minnesota Timberwolves will be an elite team this year, the appropriate conclusion is that the Timberwolves are closer to contending than conventional wisdom would indicate, not that they are as good as anyone in the Western Conference"

 

Harden adds 5 wins to total projection and the completely surprising increase of minutes for Greg Smith and Marcus Morris nets you 11 more wins...

...seems legit...

 

I get the fact that he admitted he didn't account for that. But it seems to me that he is alluding to the idea if he would have correctly accounted for those increased minutes of Smith and Morris that his projections would have been much more accurate. And I personally find it hard to believe that increasing Smith and Morris' minutes in his analysis would make up 11 total wins...when they addition of Harden only netted 5. If so, that statistical system is based on some incredible arbitrary factors...

 

Calm down dude, you don't have some deep connection with this man just cause he answered your specific question. It's just a discussion...not an attack on your favorite uncle...