The 4 position is fine. If it's not showing massive improvment fix it at trade deadline. Give D-mo and Tjones their chance.
I'd be willing to bet the teams have hockey assist data. And that might be something that 82games.com or some other stat web site has .... for a price. Canaan can create but he's another high-turnover guy that looks to score first. Of course he's young. He had to be the guy in college so obviously his A/TO rate would be out of whack there. Don't know what he'll turn in to in the NBA but I haven't seen anything to make me think he'll be great in this department. This is why I definitely see the reasoning behind adding a guy like Dragic to this team if we can get him.
Finsraider, I think Harden is a good distributor....but hasn't played that role as well last year, instead focusing more on scoring. I seem to remember Harden being a good distributor in OKC when other scorers were on the floor.
Yep. Kobe got away with having a low A/TO ratio along with not getting very many steals on several of those championship teams...00,01,02,09, and 10. However his teams never led the league in turnovers. They were actually very turnover efficient in spite of his high turnover rate. And he was playing with Shaq, who was a much more dominant player than Dwight is today. And there you have the exception. But even then...you gotta get low turnover guys around Harden to even come close to duplicating Kobe. And Harden still has to improve his A/TO ratio to come up to how low Kobe's was.
Harden's turnover rate his first 2 years was 13.4 and 11.3 respectively. But his last season in OKC his TO% increased up to 14.8 and his last 2 seasons in HOU have been 14.9 and 15.0 respectively. Of course, his usage increased almost 50% in HOU but it was constant in OKC when he ballooned up to 14.8% in his 3rd season. So you are right, he was a more efficient distributor on OKC playing alongside Durant and Westbrook, at least until his 3rd season when they started iso'ing him a whole lot more and he was creating from the top. In his first 2 seasons he did very little of that. Imagine that. Perhaps this is why Morey is still trying to get the 3rd guy here.
How is it a waste of our resources to improve the ball movement and quality of shots on our team? That's a natural PGs job.....to set others up. Not everyone can or should finish, just as not everyone can or should distribute. Just because Rondo or Rubio didn't put the ball in the basket doesn't mean that their contribution didn't help improve the odds of the ball going in. Moving Harden from "do everything on offense" to "score/finish at an elite level" helps everyone. It doesn't impede Harden's abilities.....it maximizes them. I bet you would even see Harden's defense improve due to his more natural role on offense. If you were watching carefully, our offense was broke last year. It was not near as fluid or robust as our 2012-2013 season. Some of that was due to adjusting to Howard, but some of it was a lack of offensive talent and skill. I'm not going to argue that PF is not a problem. It obviously is. But the bigger issue is that we need more talent, regardless of where it is. Our best course forward is simple: Get Rondo, Rubio, Dragic or Bledsoe as your long term solution at PG Get PFs with different strengths and weaknesses to compliment your stars (McRoberts and Shawn Marion).
Assist to TO ratio is not a very useful concept when comparing players unless one accounts for the specific way a player plays. MThis is because TOs don't just come from passing. They often come from attempts to score baskets yourself (driving, posting up, basically anytime you work in a crowd). So much of it is a function of a player's role. A guy like Jose Calderon can have a sky high assist to TO ratio because he rarely does anything that risks turnovers outside of passing the ball. He doesn't drive into the paint to score, try to draw fouls, or work a back to the basket post-up game or fight for rebounds in a crowd. His function in the half-court offense besides passing is pretty much that of a spot-up shooter, which is the job carrying the least turnover risk. Harden, on the other hand, does drive into the paint and try to finish or draw fouls. Those exposes him to getting the ball swiped or getting contact that don't get called as defensive fouls (some legitimately so, others the refs miss). He is unlikely to have a high assist to TO ratio just because he gets a good chunk of TOs from the other stuff that he does-- i.e., working with the ball to generate high % scoring opportunities.
The reason why A/TO ratio is important is because TURNOVERS are very, very important to the success or lack of success of a team. So if a team is a high turnover team but the primary playmaker has an A/TO rato of over 2:1 or he has a S/TO ratio pushing close to 1 then he's not really the problem. Because even if he leads the league in turnovers if he has over twice as many assists and/or close to just as many steals...then he offsets his turnovers with turnovers the other way and by creating more buckets. But.....if a player is the primary ball handler and his A/TO ratio is way less than 2:1 and his team leads the league in turnovers..then something has to give. Either he needs to move off the ball at least some and/or he needs to improve his ballhandling/passing/overplay and play more within himself.
This is what I expect. Make Harden a 2nd or even 3rd distributor and he will improve. As you said, we need to surround Harden and Howard with guys who do not turnover the ball, in addition to adding a 3rd peice. Beverley, Daniels, and Ariza are low usuage guys that just need to shoot when they're open (or if Daniels......sorta open). Anyone we expect to handle the rock needs to be trustworthy. That's one of the reasons I like Rondo, Rubio and McRoberts....they don't turn the ball over, but they aren't conservative either. They "see" the whole court.
It's a waste of resources b/c it's not addressing our greatest weakness....our PF position. Additionally, not only are you assuming that Harden can learn to move off the ball, but you're also assuming that he would be willing to defer to a ball-dominant pg. Do you remember Harden's body language at the beginning of Game 2 vs the Blazers when the offense was being run through Dwight? I don't think I've ever seen him more disengaged. Basketball has evolved. You have to forget traditional roles. And if you watched even more carefully, you'd see that our defense was a bigger problem than our offense. If you agree that PF is an obvious problem, why do none of your solutions address it? Marion isn't even a true pf. He's a tweener, and I don't trust him to guard guys like Randolph, Aldridge, Dirk, Ibaka, Anthony Davis, or Duncan. Finding a solution to slow down opposing PF's should be our top priority.
That's fair, and i'm not selling A/T as the best way to judge this. We just need to be aware that we're dealing with 2 very high turnover players and we need to find ways to help them. One way is to eliminate turnovers that are caused by a lack of skill....using someone like Rondo or Rubio to takeover those duties. Another is to surround them with players that take care of the ball. We aren't going to change who Harden and Howard are. We want them to be aggressive, even at the expense of some turnovers. What we don't want is them overextending, which is almost certainly what we did to Harden last year.
TOs of course matter. I am just saying that A/TO ratio and the TOV% used in Basketball-Reference.com are fairly poor measurements of how turnover prone a player is. While A/TO ratio only considers turnovers in comparison with assists and not the non-passing activities that makes one risk turnovers (driving, drawing fouls, etc.), the TOV% has the opposite problem. TOV% divides the total number of turnovers by the number of "possessions used" by a player-- that is, the number of possessions that ended up as a shot attempt, a couple of FT attempts or a turnover by a player. One thing that it does not account for is how many times a player passed the ball in order to get a teammate a shot. The TOV% concept also does not differentiate between instances where a player generates his own shot by driving past one defender and challenging another in the paint and instances where a player receives a pass for a spot-up J. There are better stats out there-- for example, one comparing the number of a team's turnovers per possession with a player on or off the court, or one comparing a player's turnovers to the number of instances where he generates a shot for himself or a teammate-- but they are just not on the popular stats webpages yet.
Assist to turnover ratio is such a dumb stat to use when talking about a player being a distributor. The majority of Hardens turnovers come when he is attacking the rim and going up for a shot not when he is passing the ball. He averaged 5.8 assist last year and 6.1 this year. That's pretty ****ing good for a guy who's primary job is to score and isn't a PG. Like a previous poster said I wish there was a way you could keep track of the "hockey" assists. Many people on this site always seem to have to have something negative to say about our players.
