RIP MJ.
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WNBA Commentary, NBA Fan, Basketball Obsession
So today is the NBA draft...and I've done a terrible job keeping up on the prospects, so I'm taking time to do that today...and of course watch "Who Wants to be a Basketball Millionaire" with some other basketball minded folks...
Unfortunately, I didn't get to write any draft analysis this year as I would have wanted. But fortunately, I did find a pretty good analysis for the only NBA team that really matters in my universe:
The Golden State Warriors.
Tim Kawakami has a pretty good breakdown of what the Warriors are thinking of doing with their annual lottery pick (which always seems to be just low enough to avoid getting any top tier talent. Wouldn't want any of that. Might interfere with the losing.).
But a few weeks ago, I did start writing my feelings about the draft... it's not even complete... but if I don't post it now it will just waste away on the hard drive...
So here that is...
(Good luck to your favorite NBA team or NCAA player tonight...)
I happen to hold this irrational belief that everyone values the draft as much as I do.
And if they don’t value it, they certainly respect it.
Sort of like a national holiday – it’s observed widely, respected as sacred, and even if you don’t believe in it, you know it would politically incorrect to ridicule it.
That is, until I bring it up with friends that I assume would want to watch it.
A few years back, a sociologist friend told me, “I’m not going to watch a multi-million dollar slave trade.” (Point taken)
Just a few days ago, when I mentioned it to two friends while shooting pool, one friend responded that he’s not that much of a die-hard fan and the other snickered with a faux- perplexed look and said, “Wait that’s an actual event? Like something people watch?”
OK, so perhaps I’m a draft junkie.
As a Bay Area native and long-time Warriors fan, the draft seems to provide a glimmer of false hope. There is this completely absurd assumption stuck in my mind that the Warriors can’t help but acquire some kind of talent with a top 10 lottery pick. If insanity is doing the same thing over again and expecting different results, this draft day love affair might be more of a serious impairment than I thought.
But aside from the fact that the Warriors are spiraling downward with no end to their lottery misery in sight, the allure of the draft extends well beyond the Warriors in my mind.
I remember the player that made me a draft junkie much more clearly than I remember the particular draft.
The player was Nick Van Exel, by far one of my favorite college players ever.
How a high school kid from the Bay Area keeps their passion for Nick Van Exel when all about him others are losing their minds over Jason Kidd is beyond me. Maybe it was that silly adolescent quest to be different. Maybe it was Van Exel’s flair that caught my eye. Really, I have absolutely no idea. And it doesn’t matter.
What mattered is that I was sure Van Exel would be a lottery pick.
The only thing conceivably more satisfying than seeing Van Exel in the lottery would have been Van Exel on my beloved Warriors, who needed a point guard (this of course has been the standard narrative in Warriors-land since Tim Hardaway went down to injury in 1993).
It was not that I had done a thorough assessment of team needs or gone through any kind of scientific process to determine that Van Exel was destined for greatness. It was just that Van Exel had to be good. He was Nick Van Exel…in my naïve mind the best point guard ever to play for Cincinnati (sooo not true). How on earth could anyone pass on my favorite college player?
Draft night came and Van Exel went in the second round. He didn’t cry like Rashard Lewis did, but if he had, I would have cried right along with him… it was tragic.
Of course, he got drafted by the Lakers, which was good because it revived my interest in a team that I followed closely in the 80’s. I didn’t think he would be the next Magic Johnson – that would be absurd – but I was quite sure that he’d end up single-handedly rescuing the franchise.
His first game in his rookie year only confirmed my naïve belief that Nick “The Quick” would quickly become a household name. Though I can’t find the numbers to confirm it, I remember him dropping something like 28 points in his first game in the Forum. Of course, aside from a nice playoff run with the Mavs and being cited in a Jay-Z line, his career ended up being something of a disappointment for me… but that’s what happens when unreasonable expectations are set.
And that only made my hunger to follow the draft grow. If those idiot GMs missed on Van Exel, certainly they must be missing others. It was sort of like a fun game to look at the stats, watch the players in college and figure out if they’d be good.
Of course, the idiot GMs aren’t the only ones who were blatantly wrong – I’ve been wrong quite often: Brevin Knight? Mateen Cleaves? Ha. Or for that matter, anyone from the 2000 draft? I’ve been wrong often… but each year I go back for more punishment. I say punishment mostly because the Warriors are just destined to be bad except for one year every decade. I need to just accept that.
So this year, I am refusing to get my hopes up. The Warriors will pick someone, he will likely get screwed around by those running the organization, and we’ll be right back in the lottery five years from now looking for another savior.
And I’ll still be watching.
Update: In case you're interested, Van Exel dropped 23 in his first game in a win against the Suns (h/t Kevin Pelton).
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Where should I even start with the Chicago Sky’s 99-98 victory over the Dream?
If you have any sort of affection for the Sky, yesterday’s win against the Dream was actually painful.
It was one of those exceptions to the cliche “a win is a win” -- sometimes even a win is best construed as a learning opportunity.
You may know that the Sky are my favorite WNBA team. So I was particularly excited to watch Kristi Toliver’s progress on the court after having stared at her statistics over the last few days.
However, as I watched the Sky yesterday morning while trying to focus on Toliver, I couldn’t keep from getting extremely frustrated about the same question I wondered last year abut the Sky: what exactly are they doing?
Hmm…that might sound harsh. So let me clarify….
It’s not so much that I expect a team to justify what they’re doing to me, a random WNBA blogger. Nor should I really expect to understand a professional basketball offense will be totally transparent to fans who haven’t spent time watching practice or reading at playbooks. But panic is one of those feelings that comes through pretty clearly even through a webcast, both in watching the coach patrol the sidelines and watching the players trying to create seemingly arbitrary answers to a worsening problem.
Just before the start of overtime, WNBA LiveAccess commentator Art Eckman said the following about the game just before the start of overtime.
…the kids’ day has been delighted with a surprise. The surprise is a team could be down 18 points and come back and take a two point lead and then take the game into overtime.LaChina Robinson may call it a valiant effort on the part of the Dream and, yeah, it was. But I call it a massive collapse on the part of the Sky.
“He’s a really nice guy, first and foremost, and he’s really fun to be around,” said Toliver. “He lets players play and that’s one of the things I like a lot. He’s not going to do a lot of X and O type of stuff because he wants to get up and down the floor and let you use your strengths. He knows that this team is balanced inside and out and he knows where to get people into the right spots to be successful. He knows how to get the best out of his players.”Fun, loose, fluid, and player autonomy are nice when you have a veteran team that has experienced success in the past and knows exactly how to bring it about. Or for a team that has Kobe Bryant (+ all-star cast) or Michael Jordan. But at the end of a game when the momentum is swinging in the opponent’s direction, a young team that has yet to play in even one playoff game together needs a little structure. They don’t have that implicit sense of how to win games together yet, by no fault of their own. They just haven’t been together long enough.
So is KT stuck with the Sky? I don’t think so. I could definitely see a trade with L.A., swapping the Kristis: Harrower and Toliver. I think then you put two talented guards on teams that are better suited to their sensibilities. Harrower could certainly take over the PG duties in Chicago without missing a beat, and matching Toliver with Parker could be a formula for a decade’s worth of very interesting basketball (KT’s four years partnered with Marissa Coleman being ideal training for a combo with Parker).On the surface, this makes a lot of sense for the Sky: Harrower has been one of the most efficient facilitators in the league thus far this season, keeping turnovers low while having a high assist ratio and pure point rating. However, given the Sky’s other personnel, I’m not sure it’s a “traditional” facilitator that the Sky need -- if they want to play an inside-out game, Toliver is a much better outside shooter, and if they want to play a dribble drive system, Harrower is not necessarily more effective at that than Toliver (though she has posted a better 2 point field goal % this season).
Yesterday, I posted the first point guard rankings of the season including an analysis of the three rookie point guards drafted in the first six picks of the draft.
However, I did not initially post the full stats of all the point guards due to time constraints, so I figured I would do that today since there were no games yesterday.
As I got ready to post the tables of stats for all 25 point guards, I noticed that a few players had impressive games on Sunday that might be worth accounting for (e.g. Sue Bird: 9 assists, 0 turnovers against the Mercury on Sunday).
Then I just got curious about a few things.
Comments on last week's post about Briann January regarding whether the Chicago Sky should start Kristi Toliver over Dominique Canty made me wonder how well Jia Perkins is doing as a potential point guard option this season. And then I started thinking about another off guard who often plays the facilitator role: Cappie Pondexter of the Phoenix Mercury.
Both players have not only posted impressive point guard numbers this season, but have also managed to crack my top 10.
Update: Stats were updated @ 3pm PST due to a small Excel error and the addition of a new stat, Tendex. Some minor typos were corrected as well.
The skeptics will say there must be a flaw with this process if so many non-point guards – Perkins, Pondexter, Taurasi – can rank in my top ten. However, I would respond that the statistics are only describing very impressive play on the part of these players as lead guards thus far this season. And maybe, as these rankings initially set out to do, there are things beyond being the shortest player on the court that make someone an effective lead guard.
Pondexter’s point guard numbers, for example, really shocked me. I have watched her bring the ball up and initiate the offense, but never really thought much of her as a playmaker or facilitator for her team. The numbers tell a different story – Pondexter is among the most efficient lead guards in the league, making plays for others while limiting turnovers and still managing to score efficiently. You can only imagine what this team would have done with Lauren Jackson surrounded by such talented perimeter players.
Sorry for the oversight Cappie.
The Rankings (as of 6/21/09)
Below are the numbers for the top 10 point guards in each category: facilitator ability, scoring ability, and game impact. (Click here for the full explanation of why I’m using these statistics)
Ticha Penicheiro (injury) and Shannon Johnson (recovering) have been removed from the list to accommodate Perkins and Pondexter.
There is a lot to chew on here, so I will look forward to feedback from others.
Does Cappie Pondexter's performance thus far this season seem to match these impressive stats? What might the stats be missing/exaggerating?
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On Friday, I wrote a post singing the praises of Briann January with the intent to later post statistical rankings of her rookie point guard counterparts relative to the rest of the league.
I then set out to crunch the numbers and reflect on the best means with which to evaluate point guards. And those numbers were supposed to support my point...
As of Friday afternoon, Renee Montgomery and Briann January were neck and neck statistically, with Kristi Toliver ranking 24th in the league among my chosen point guards.
And then more games were played.
Hours after my Friday post, Indiana Fever coach Linn Dunn nailed January with a DNP-CD. Renee Montgomery struggled and slipped significantly statistically. And Kristi Toliver put together two consecutive solid games, despite the Sky losing.
In other words, everything I was going to write was rendered worthless within hours.
This of course is the fun of following sports and trying to apply statistical analysis before teams have even played five games.
I put all of that out there to make an obvious point about these statistical rankings: I fully acknowledge that they’re not only imperfect but also subject to change, either because of a coach’s change in strategy, a significant injury, or natural player development. All of that is exacerbated when looking at rookies who are constantly growing as players, figuring out their role on the team, and responding to the team’s demands of them.
It’s messy. And that makes it fun.
These numbers are not meant to be the final word on the hierarchy of WNBA point guards; instead, I would hope that they serve as a conversation piece. I personally love them exactly because of how my initial thoughts were ruined this season: they allow me to track trends in players across the league and hopefully help me see things I might have missed through standard observation.
To be clear, it would be silly to claim that statistics tell the full story of basketball. However, I find it equally silly for people to pretend that their own observations are perfect. The numbers complement what we see and what we see can complement the numbers. Whichever way you approach a sport, the more information we have, the better we are able to understand what we are looking at…and hopefully form grounded, substantive opinions.
With that in mind, the main purpose of this post is to present an analysis of the first three point guards drafted in the first round – Kristi Toliver, Renee Montgomery, and Briann January. At the end, I’ll look at their performance relative to the rest of the league’s point guards.
Ultimately, I think I can say this about these three right now: judging who’s best among these three point guards is more a matter of taste than any sort of objective standard. And in the end, the goodness of fit with their team might matter more than the isolated skills they bring to the court.
A refresher on the Rethinking Basketball point guard statistics…
(Feel free to skip down to the section titled "Who’s the WNBA’s best point guard after two weeks?" if you hated high school math as much as I did and have a PTSD reaction anytime you see numbers in sequence beyond your bank account or a digital clock. Near the end of the post is a narrative summary of the rookie point guards and the top 10 WNBA point guards overall)
Last season, I used the following statistics to evaluate point guards:
Pure point rating
Net plus/minus rating
Points per zero point possession
Hollinger assist ratio
Usage rate
Boxscores
True shooting percentage
I generally like the results – by the last rankings I posted last season (click here to see those), Lindsay Whalen and Sue Bird were on top…and you’d have a really difficult time convincing me there is something wrong with that outcome.
Nevertheless, I am going to continue to tweak things, with the intention of making the outcome even stronger.
As it happens, the NBA draft is point guard heavy this year so there have been a few stories floating around the web recently about point guard analysis. Draftexpress, ESPN’s TrueHoop (observation, not statistical), HoopsAnalyst, and the Wages of Wins have all had in depth analyses of NBA point guards that I took a look at before launching into my own analysis of WNBA point guards.
First, the Arbitrarian blog no longer posts its “Boxscores” so I am not going to use that (sorry, just extra numbers for me to crunch right now). So for now, I will go back to Dave Berri’s Win Score, simply because it’s easy to calculate (petrel’s description from last year is pretty solid). I will think further on this for future iterations of these point guard rankings.
Update: I settled on Tendex ratings for now. More on that here:
http://rethinkbball.blogspot.com/2009/06/point-guard-rankings-update-surprises.html
Second, after reading through all the other articles, I realized that my framework did not really have any way of accounting for a point guard’s ability to break down the defense and get to the basket, whether to score or set up a play for someone else. The importance of this was especially evident in TrueHoops account of Minnesota’s recent point guard prospect workout – the ability to beat a defender and score either on pull-up jumpers or getting to the rim. It says something about quickness, ball handling, and a player’s instincts.
And when you think about it, if a point guard is going to have the ball in their hands at the end of a game, it would be a huge asset to be able to beat a defender and set up easy shots for their team. That was exactly the problem I described when I watched Sacramento playing Minnesota the other day.
So I spent some time thinking about how best to capture that.
Draftexpress suggests that free throw attempts per possession are a pretty good way to assess a player’s aggressiveness driving the lane. And while that’s true, it doesn’t seem to practically capture what one might want. At the end of a game, for example, a player might simply pick up free throw attempts in the bonus as a team fouls to stop the clock. A player could get fouled on a three. And really, if a player goes to the basket for a layup and gets fouled, getting one free throw for being able to complete the play is much better than getting two for not completing the play.
But HoopsAnalyst has used a different metric for years that I have ignored until now: 2 point field goal percentage. Again, when you think about how point guards might score, a more effective way to assess their ability to get to the basket might be their ability to complete two point plays. Point guards are unlikely to be scoring two point field goals on post ups or set shots because, for the most part, they have the ball in their hands making plays.
TrueHoop nicely characterized some of the ways a point guard might score two point field goals:
Anyway, Tyreke was dominant.Given how an elite point guard is likely to get two point field goals – pull-ups, runners, fade-aways, driving lay ups, changing pace in space – knowing that they are able to complete those plays tells me a lot more about their ability to attack the basket and complete plays than free throw attempts. And if they are able to beat a defender in the variety of ways described on TrueHoop, they will draw a defense in ways that enable them to distribute more effectively as well. So ultimately, I went with 2 point percentage.
Refusing to simply muscle his way to the hoop (which he did handily a few times), he scored in a half a dozen different ways. Pull-ups on the wing, runners, balanced fade-aways, and a particularly spectacular jab-step and crossover that sent Flynn (without question the best defender of the group) reeling. His jumper needs work but I wouldn't call it a weakness, and he'll definitely hit enough to force defenders to respect it.
Lawson and Flynn played about how I expected them to. Controlled the ball well, took high percentage shots and occasionally switched gears to get to the rim.
One of the of knocks on her before we drafted her was that she's not physically as strong as a lot of other people. She's not as big as everybody else. But she also has a larger skill set than most people do. We've been working with her on that, trying to make that adjustment, until she can get a little stronger, until she can gauge how deep she can go into lane before she can still get her shot off, how much body contact can she take and not be off-balance. Until she figures that out, we're helping her get around it the best she can.Perhaps this explains her low 2 point% -- a tentativeness about scoring in the lane.
“Well I think part of her problem was that people were always trying to get her to be a starter where she was…in LA they started her a lot of games. And what happens with a lot of teams is they go get a cheaper backup…and what you get is a situation where we don’t need her to be a starter now. We’re not looking for her to be a starter. She could be if we had an emergency. But we’re looking for a player that can play a couple of roles for us – at both guard spots. And so I think it makes a difference in how you fit in a team when you know what the expectations are. LA needed her to be the starting point guard..and we don’t need her to be that, we need her to be a complement to Lindsay Whalen. And this may be why she can settle in a little bit better.”The funny thing is that the same could be said about Temeka Johnson’s shift from LA to Phoenix – her role and expectations got clearer and she performed better. Obviously, Thibault was not taking a cheap shot at LA’s system…but…
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