Marbury
All that’s really worth saying about that situation is- it’s not funny anymore, and the people who care about Stephon need to help him.
NBA Season Officially Begins!
Yeah, there’s games tonight and all, but you know the starting gun has really gone off once the Clippers’ star rookie is hurt. Regular as clockwork!
So Wrong
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to help coach Memphis?
On the one hand, he can probably help them: Kareem is one of the smartest and frankly wisest retired athletes out there, and as a player he was famed not just for his athletic excellence but also for his technical skill. As a coach, he’s been well-respected. On paper you couldn’t pick a better guy to help wring some value out of the Grizzle’s selfish, disorganized, inexperienced mess of a frontcourt. On the other hand…it’s KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR working with THE MEMPHIS GRIZZLIES. In a league where Michael Jordan GM’s a team which thankfully did not exist during his player career I suppose anything is possible, but honestly my sense of propriety just rebels against this. The Grizzlies are like the NBA’s answer to one of those forgotten, black-hole, forsaken-by-God NHL teams from places whose last snowfall came under a Whig president. There’s just no excuse for them.
Telling
All this week my DVR has been listing NBA preseason games as being from 2006, which seems appropriate as that’s about when it feels like preseason began. And STILL the season doesn’t begin until next week. Ridiculous.
The Season Approaches….
You know we’re getting close to NBA season when John Hollinger’s player previews come out on ESPN. I’ve been reading his stuff since the Basketball Forecast days, and whatever you think of PER (I like it, within its clear limits) I think it has to be agreed that Hollinger is a fantastic scout and knows as much about the minutia of the league as anyone in the media. He’s also an excellent and funny writer, which never hurts. I like to kick off each preseason by going through some of his player cards and looking for odd, weird, strange, queer, overlooked and just plain unexpected details from the last season, statistical and otherwise; it gets me excited for the season- especially a season where, let’s face it, the local teams are going to be pretty bad. Here’s a few of the more interesting ones I’ve found so far:
- Baron Davis shot 37% from the field last year, had the 65th out of 69 true shooting percentage (TS%) among PGs, and had a below-average PER of 14 and change- a drop of over 5 from his previous campaign. He’s now 30 and missed 17 games last season, while reportedly being out of shape most of the year. Another excellent signing by the Clippers!
- In possibly related news, the final tally for Elton Brand’s awful first year in the city of brotherly battery-throwing was a PER of 14.65, down from 23.17 in his last healthy year in LA. So after all the drama and hoopla of those two passing each other in the night and God knows how many words written about what their free agency choices would and would not mean, in the end they were both below-average players by this metric for largely irrelevant teams. It’s a funny ol’ league.
- Shaq’s turnover % in the last 5 years: 11.1, 13.0, 12.1, 18.5, 12.3. Just plain odd.
- Royal Ivey is entering his 6th year in the league, with his third team. His PER in his first five years has been 8.90, 8.48, 9.59, 9.00, and 7.67. And yet, despite this overall consistency, some of his component stats have varied wildly- his assist ratio has veered between 26.5 and 14.7, and his turnover rate between 14.9 and 6.1. This despite playing at least 500 minutes in every season, and having rock-solid consistency in his shooting percentages, rebounding, etc.
- Jason Kapono, renowned for his abilities as a 3 point shooter, took 38% of his shots from that distance last year…and 39% as long 2s. He has officially become the NBA’s Andy Wang. Shoot from three Jason… JASON, SHOOT FROM THREE!!
- Out of these PER figures from last year, guess which one is Nate Robinson:
18.94, 17.65, 16.63, 18.85, 14.54, 17.25
Lil’ Nate is up there at the top with the 18.94; the rest in order are Ramon Sessions, TJ Ford, Chauncey Billups, Baron Davis and Mo Williams. I’m aware of the drawbacks and limitations of PER and I’m not arguing that Nate is better than all of those guys, but he really is underrated at this point- offensively, he’s just really, really good.
- Jordan Farmer’s TS% by season: 51.5, 56.3, 46.6. His free throw percentages: .711, .679, .584. What the fuck?
- In related catch-a-falling-star news, Matt Carroll’s PER has dropped from 14.63 to 10.87 to 5.57 over the last three years. It appears his usage rate dropped first, after which his shooting was shot and his turnovers spiked. Very odd for a guy who’s only 29. He’s signed for 3 more years and $15 million, BTW, because Mark Cuban hates money.
- Speaking of Dallas, their new acquisition Shawn Marion did indeed finish the year with 3 consecutive seasons of declining PER as he’s dropped from 23 and change to 16, and is a 31 year old player hugely dependent on his athleticism, and has a new 5 year $40 million contract. Hates money. Just despises it.
- The Sacramento Kings have 4 players under contract who turned in a single-digit PER in their last season: Kenny Thomas (8.77), Sean May (6.24), Desmond Mason (7.12) and Donte Green (an atrocious 5.18). Sometimes there’s complicated reasons for why a team is bad; sometimes, not so much.
- Courtney Lee. Hollinger clearly loves his defense (“the Magic’s top defensive stopper”) and likes him as an overall player (“an underrated key to Orlando’s conference championship”) but I’m not at all convinced yet, personally. He had a negative adj +/- last year, and both basketballvalue.com and 82games.com show him as having a mild negative impact on the defensive performances of his teams. It’s only one year’s worth of data which means there’s a ton of noise in it, plus not accounting for improvement as a rookie year continues, plus limited correction for substitution patterns, etc.; but there’s just not a lot of statistical evidence so far to suggest a positive defensive impact from Lee, let alone a really game-changing one. I seem to recall him getting lit up like a light bulb during last year’s finals as well. Throw in a middling 10.78 PER as a rookie and his late first round draft status, and I’m just not that excited for a guy who looks on paper like a spare-part roleplayer. Hopefully he’ll end up better than that, but there’s not a lot of evidence trending that way so far.
- Eduardo Najera: 33 years old, knee troubles, PER dropped from 12.05 to 7.71 in a year. He’s signed for 3 more years at roughly $3 million per. We are so screwed.
More of these as I find them.
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On a completely different side note, check out this list of the ten best players of the last decade. It should be pointed out that it gets one thing absolutely correct, which is often missed- much of the time in NBA history, the best player in the world is a center. Because of the greatness of Michael Jordan I think we often fall into the trap of judging the best player to be the one who most resembles His Airness, especially if we’re not using the nitty-gritty of the more advanced statistical measures. I hate to say it, but I think this has been a huge part of the reason there’s even still a debate about Kobe and LeBron, and probably also part of why CP3 and Dwyane Wade enter these discussions much more rarely than their actual production would justify.
Heartwarming
Amidst all the often stupid or sad stories in the sports world, let’s take a moment to appreciate Cavs center Zydrunas Ilgauskas, who along with his wife just adopted a pair of orphans. There’s a lot of sportsmen I find interesting for one reason or another; but a man like this is my hero.
Gilbert Arenas
Kanye West with a basketball. The level of self-absorption and lack of professionalism here is really amazing, because it’s so obvious to everyone that if they’d tried to curtail or control him in any way during the process he’d have whined the stars out of the heavens. To be perfectly honest, since the Wiz are going to suck this year anyway, I’d love to see them suspend him for two weeks at the start of the season for “conditioning purposes”, just to call his bluff. They’ve got him signed until the end of time which means they’ve got to learn to deal with him, and so far he’s run right over that organization and gone out of his way to trash them in one way or another for much of his tenure. It’s probably time to send a message- this sort of thing is more or less definitional of conduct detrimental to the team.
EDIT: for a totally different and more sympathetic read on Arenas, try Bullets Forever. Strikes me as the kind of microparsing you have to do to defend your team’s star when your team’s star is a goof, but hey- Nate Robinson’s my favorite current player, so what do I know?
Balls
Adrian Wojnarowski calls out Jordan
Takes balls to write that on some level, since even now so much of the Jordan mystique lingers. And yet, Wojnarowski isn’t alone; Truehoop had a similar in tone post a few days ago referring to the ingrained lie about Jordan being cut from his high school team, and a lot of the public forum comments on the occasion have been 50-50 in regards to their general tone about the man. The funny thing is, for such an iconic and heavily built up public figure Jordan hasn’t really fooled anyone who cared to look in years, possibly not since before “The Jordan Rules” came out. He IS a conman, an asshole, a man who by most accounts has treated nearly everyone in his life poorly, a poor sport, and a fraud who never made a decision he didn’t first run past a marketing department unless gambling was involved. On the other hand, he was the greatest basketball player of all time, a winner like few in history, and one of a vanishingly small collection of professional athletes to have simultaneously been gifted with unparalleled natural ability AND to have worked harder than almost anyone else to get the most out of that ability. In one area of his life, he’s been worthy of respect and admiration of the highest degree; in most others he’s something of a joke and an embarrassment.
It’s tempting to say that this is the path of all athletes with the ability and drive to be the best at their sport: the mind looks for comparisons to Barry Bonds and his steroids and relationship problems, Maradona’s cocaine issues and managerial incompetence, Micky Mantel’s drinking, Ray Robinson’s family issues, etc. And yet, for every individual along those lines, there’s a Bill Russell or a Kareem Abdul-Jabbar or a Pele or a Wayne Gretzky or a Roger Federer without any evidence of those sorts of glaring personality flaws. So what can you say? Some people are just assholes, independent of talent or any other characteristics. And as great as Jordan was, that’s part of his legacy as well- a meanness of spirit. That, and the Charlotte Bobcats.
Oooh Dear
I am a cruel and heartless fan shaped by years of Isiah Thomas-as-GM and Derrick Coleman-as-Net, so I have to admit I was kind of rooting for this to happen. Next year’s Grizzlies will probably be a good offensive team by dint of pure talent, but they’re also likely to be the single most disorganized and incoherent offensive outfit of recent times. Rudy Gay has been gaining a ballhog’s rep of late, Iverson’s always been ball-dominant (and in fairness has often played on teams designed around him being so), OJ Mayo needs his shots to be worth anything, and… Zbo, who speaks for himself. They should run a contest to guess the average team assists per game, and if they do put me in for 4.5. This has a chance to be the greatest Rucker Park unit of all time, and as much as I hate to admit it I’m actually quite interested in how well it does or does not work this year- the Grizz will be bad, but the question is whether it’s an ordinary bad (25 wins?) or a towering, extraordinary bad (15?). They won 24 last year and in theory the maturation of a young roster plus the addition of new talent should make them better, but I’ve never yet seen Zbo be a positive and there’s a limit to the potential marginal improvement of adding more players who do the same things as the players you already had.
At least the Grizzlies understand that if you’re going to be awful, be interesting in the process.
About
- Our guide and leader
Hello all, this here is a sports blog run by two guys from Brooklyn, Brendan and Sean, who between them have an interest in almost everything- soccer, hockey, basketball, boxing, MMA, some NFL, some baseball- you name it. In particular we’ll cover Arsenal FC who we both follow; the NY Knicks, the NJ Nets, NY Rangers and boxing (Brendan); and the Montreal Canadiens, Celtic FC, LA Lakers and San Francisco Giants (Sean). We’ll also both tackle MMA and the NY Giants and Jets from time to time, as well as leaguewide issues and the role of sports in society. Feel free to look around and use the categories to find what you’re looking for. Thanks for stopping by!
We can be reached via email at shaddax@aol.com for comments or questions.
