Return of Nuggets 1: Forum #2 Comments From July 2008, Part 4

Forum commentary I did from March 2008 through July 2008, when I didn't have time to do the detailed and extensive reports that I like to do, is being posted in early October, 2008. The primary themes are how the Nuggets are blowing a great (and expensive!) opportunity to play the game of basketball in such a way that respects the sport and that takes as much advantage as possible of who they have on the roster. The 2006-09 Nuggets have turned out to be an excellent case study of how not to run a basketball team; many things you should not do if you are a basketball manager or coach can be identified from what the Nuggets actually did during these years.

In these comments, do not look for the usual huge amount of detail and proof that you see in the ordinary releases here at Nuggets 1. Some of this is more like everyday conversation than like top quality sports writing. On the other hand, some of the comments do include some detailed reasoning and proof that I pride myself on in the full reports.
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JULY 2008 FORUM COMMENTARY ON THE NUGGETS, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THEIR MISTAKES

Forum participants were shocked that Leon Powe had a higher Real Player Rating than did Paul Pierce for the Celtics:

How about this for a shock: as long as Powe and Pierce are about equal in being where they need to be to try to force missed shots, and in actually forcing missed shots, and assuming that Powe has the stamina and energy needed, than the Celtics would have been about as good had the playing times been reversed.

I know that is shocking and unbelievable to many. But this is one of the main reasons I do the Real Player Ratings: to uncover surprising but true things about the players and the teams, such as this. And the shock factor is precisely why ESPN itself would never do a statistic such as this, because zillions of people would be claiming that the statistic was wack, either because they didn't really understand the per time concept, or because they did understand it and refused to believe it has any merit.
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Someone asked me this good question:

Ah yes, the ever important truth. So do you think the Celtics would be just as good if they only played Paul Pierce 14 minutes? What if they then gave Leon Powe 36?

If Powe had the stamina to play 36 instead of 14 and be just as good, which is probably true, and if Powe is just as good or better than Pierce as a made them miss defender, which I think is probably true also, and if they played the same position, than the Celtics would very likely be just as good with either of them playing 36 and the other 14.

However, although they are both forwards, Pierce is a 3 and Powe is a 4, which means if you switched the minutes, you would probably be screwing things up to some degree. Specifically, you might start to look more like the Nuggets, with very good interior defense, but very poor outside defense.

Powe turned out to be one hell of a backup for Garnett, and he was crucial for the Celtics during when Garnett was having injury problems, absolutely critical. since obviously Garnett was so important himself. Whoever would have thought that Kevin Garnett's backup would himself be one of the best PFs in the NBA?

What about Powe in the future? Powe comes from a very poor background, and players such as this have a steeper hill to climb if they are ever to be regarded as starters, a road which can on occasion be a very twisted one as well as being steep, such as Allen Iverson's road was, where he ended up having his position changed so that the coaches could be comfortable in their skin starting him. But that's another story.
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Someone attempted to trash the idea that Leon Powe was at least as good as Paul Pierce and my response was:

Yes sir, Leon Powe was just as good as Paul Pierce was, in the 2007-08 regular season, per any unit of time you want to pick, assuming Powe is at least as good as Pierce is at making shooters miss. Really and truly, regardless of how shocked you or I or Coach Rivers or anyone else is.

This statistic is in the ballpark of showing the real world in its entirety, my friend, so to claim that the real world is different is not on point. But you are correct for about 99.99 % or more of statistics, which do not reflect the complexity of the real world. Aside from single measurements like ppg and rpg, which obviously are very limited, most combination or "advanced" statistics are only partial glimpses of the real world, because they don't give the result on a per unit of time basis. Whereas, my measure takes a solid combination statistic and adjusts for time, which is as close as you are going to get to seeing the real basketball world, in full and all at once.

Since there is stuff in the real world that no one knows about, it is natural when being shocked by something like the Leon Powe performance, to assume that the measurement in question is just like the rest: a faulty, or at least insufficient view of reality. But this measure is like the real wolf at the door my friend, its not part of another boy who cried wolf story.

But if you want to just go with the actual production, then go ahead and do it. The per time views of players and teams are extremely useful for people who are looking for flaws in coaches, teams, and the entire League, not as useful for the average fan who wants to focus mostly on the specific pros and cons of players, while assuming that it is impossible to add the pros and cons of a player together to come up with the net. I think you can add the pros and cons together and come up with the ultimate net. Leon Powe is glad I did so. lol.

If all you want to do is look for bad things and good things about individual players, than do so, just don't ever click on the per 48 mins. link at ESPN lol. I don't think that even existed last year, by the way, so ESPN is moving in my direction.

As for watching games, another reason I did the Real Player Rating was precisely so I could cut way, way back on looking at statistics, which would free up a lot of game watching time. Since the Real Player Rating summarizes almost everything in one measure, it often saves me a lot of time hunting around for evidence regarding who is more productive/talented, which team is more productive/talented, and so forth.
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Pace is an important concept, and the Real Player Rating only partially adjusts for pace, by penalizing missed shots. (Fast pace teams miss more shots, by definition.) I say partially, because I think the missed shot weights should be higher, at least 1.0. But consider that most "advanced" statistics do not have any penalty at all for missed shots, and thus no adjustment whatsoever for pace. So if there is no adjustment for pace at all, they are not very "advanced" at all, are they?

The pace adjustment here is relatively crude and not in my opinion enough, but at least there is a pace adjustment, whereas it is no where to be found in the vast majority of other comparable measures. So once again, the root of the Real Player Rating is shown to be surprisingly effective and, well, real.

ESPN may possibly not even have realized that they were actually adjusting for pace when they included the missed shot items!
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Someone noticed:

TJ Ford > Vince Carter, Paul Pierce, Tmac

I responded:

Yes, and this shows you that Indiana made a good trade with Toronto recently. How do you think small market teams like Indiana maneuver to become contenders, despite being a place few top players really want to play? One way they do it is by making trades that the average person thinks is a bad trade, but is actually a good trade.

Whereas Indiana made this shrewd trade for a very talented PG with a long career ahead, the Nuggets made a trade for a very talented PG/SG with a not so long career ahead, and made no changes from how the 76'ers ran things. This is just a little snapshot of how the tradition of Indiana having FO and coaching personnel who are more shrewd than the Denver FO and coaching personnel is continuing on.
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Someone was very upset that Chris Mihm was higher than Daniel Gibson, and this is what I said to him:

Daniel Gibson is only 22 years old, he is a PG, and to be on the list at all means you are an extremely good bball player. So give him a chance lol. Chris Mihm played 275 minutes in 23 games. So why worry that Mihm, who is 28 years old, was slightly better than the up and coming PG? It doesn't really mean squat that Mihm was a little better. Who cares, when the vast majority of players who are 22 years old are going to get better when they are 23, 24, 25, and so forth.

Usually but I guess not always, you should steer away from directly comparing players who are very different in age, or who play very different positions.
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You can't simply take the five players on your team with the highest Real Player Ratings and make them all starters! If you did that, you would be putting as much faith in how positions organize an offense and a defense as George Karl does, and I wouldn't want to see anyone go down that road, lol. No, the Real Player Ratings alone can not determine who should play more and who should play less between players who play different positions, assuming that the players in question can not play a different position as well as they are playing their current position. You can to a large extent use it to figure out about how many minutes different players who play the same position should be getting.

Lol at the use of the term "credit reports", which is telling in itself. When credit reports were first invented, which was not so long ago, the inventors promised that they could and would never be used as an overall evaluation of someone's economic and social stature. But to many actual users of reports, that is exactly what they have become. In other words, many credit report users use credit reports for a lot more than seeing whether someone pays his bills or not. And so here in 2008, on SportsTwo, someone has just used the credit report term as shorthand for someone's economic and social stature!

And just about everyone important on a basketball team knows who on the roster had a particularly rough childhood, high school career, and/or college career, with no "credit report" necessary. There is most likely not a GM in the League who doesn't know that Allen Iverson would be a felon were it not for a pardon by the Governor of Virginia. And there are some GMs, and some coaches also, who would not want Iverson on their teams for that reason alone.
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Someone was upset about T.J. Ford's surprisingly high rating, and he was a little confused about what I had said earlier about how to judge a player's rating in the context of his age. Here is how I responded:

Yes, TJ Ford was slightly better than them. So I say Indiana made a good trade with Toronto and you most likely are saying they made a bad trade. So let's see if Indiana becomes as good or better a team than is Toronto in the next few years.

No, the younger the player, the lower his rating is going to be, everything else held constant. So if a young player has a very high ranking, than he is likely to be one of the best players in the world, looking at the next five years or so. So Howard's advantage over O'Neal is all the more impressive when you look at the ages. If the ratings were reversed, O'Neal's lead over Howard would not be all that impressive.
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Laugh out loud, I think Hollinger may be a little off his rocker too because, for one thing, his player efficiency rating is almost insanely complicated and, for another thing, you can't even find out what his formulas are that make up the player efficiency rating on ESPN itself! Whereas, the Real Player Rating is hardly too complicated. It's at about the 11th or 12th grade level in terms of math.

In rating the players, I didn't make up a damn thing. The scorekeepers watch the games and keep track of who does what. They turn in their counts to the NBA, which makes them available to ESPN. ESPN has programmers, who are paid a whole lot of money, who construct and maintain their NBA statistics database, which is sitting on the internet for anyone to view. ESPN Sports personnel had a meetng and decided to use a summary or combination statistic called by them the "ESPN Player Rating."

I came along and said "Wait a minute, the ESPN statistic is surprisingly good, but what about Leon Powe, TJ Ford, JR Smith, and so forth? No one seems to know how good they are. What can I do to alert the public that these are great up and coming players who, some months or years from now, will almost certainly be starters, and who most everyone will agree are good players? Can I give my readers advance knowledge that they can not get elsewhere? Why yes, I can do that! So I took the ESPN summary measure and divided by minutes.

And then I am accused of making everything up, laugh out loud. No seriously, I hope you understand now, there is no conspiracy here. I had no idea until I did this how good Leon Powe and TJ Ford are, so it wasn't just me trying to prove something I had claimed in advance.

And isn't it true that TJ Ford is going to be a PG starter in the NBA this coming season? Aren't most starters considered better than most non-starters by most fans? It looks like the Real Player Rating accomplished its mission with respect to TJ Ford. Now if only I had done the 2007-08 before the Indiana trade, laugh out loud.
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Someone was still really, really upset about the surprisingly high T.J. Ford rating. I answered him:

Well obviously, you are in the majority that ESPN identified when they decided not to do this themselves, the majority that either doesn't understand or that refuses to put any stock in any per time measure. So be it. Do what you want and go about your business.

I'm not the kind of guy who writes for the average, run of the mill fan, in case you haven't noticed, although I will do so if the price is right, laugh out loud. I am most definitely not writing for the average Joe: I am discovering things and writing for people who want to see new and better ways of looking at basketball, who plays it, and how it could be played better.

I really like the fact that ESPN made a major nod in my direction by recently installing the per 48 minute stats in their huge and sophisticated database. But Brian, don't you ever click the "per 48 mins." link on any ESPN team stats page, I wouldn't want to see you get all upset and going on their forum and saying its BS and all.

If you don't like what's on TV, change the channel. If you don't like what's on the Nuggets 1 channel, click something else.