You Say Bender, I Say Bendtner, Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off

I suppose I should say something about the Knicks signing Jonathan Bender, given that I am a sometime Knicks blogger and all. So, uh… something.

Actually, seriously, to me this signing is only meaningful as it highlights the categorization of GM moves in basketball, in which any given action can fall into one of the following four broad zones:

Good Moves

Things which are just unassailably, obviously correct maneuvers. Drafting Tim Duncan or LeBron James #1 overall falls here.

Bad Moves

The Isiah Thomas zone, AKA the Kevin McHale zone, AKA the Bruce Ratner zone, etc. etc.

Arguable Moves

80% or so of all transactions lie here, the place where it could work if, it would have worked but for, it’ll pay off in 3 years probably, and it-was-too-good-to-pass-up happen. In Knicks terms trying to negotiate a long term deal for David Lee or Nate would be this sort of move, something which could be a useful part of a long term plan but is not the keystone upon which that plan rests. These are discretionary judgment calls, and unless you’re dealing with a man of incredible luck or towering incompetence these are the moves by which a GM is evaluated.

Doesn’t Really Matter Moves

This is where a signing like Bender falls. Yeah, maybe he could come back and be a semi-competent backup forward at a low cost; more likely, after three years in retirement due to injury he’ll never be an NBA caliber player again. But much like having Allen Houston hanging around training camp there’s neither a big payoff nor a real risk to making a move like this, so it falls under the category of letting your GM tinker because hey, why not? Bender always seemed like a really nice guy and he’s obviously motivated to try this, so it can’t hurt much to let him have a go- worst case scenario he’ll be another warm body in practice. To me, moves like this are really only notable for two reasons: sometimes they’re a favor to an agent which can pay off later; and sometimes you’ll find certain people who OBSESS about these kinds of moves, as though they somehow represented the only chance to improve a team, and if Walsh is doing this is clearly means he’s lost the plot and has no idea how to improve the team in other ways. Light the torches, it’s time to drive Count Walshenstein from Castle Squaregarden. Moves like this are thus useful to a fanbase, as they quickly let you know who to stop paying attention to.

So yeah, best wishes to Jonathan Bender on this one. Can’t say I expect it to work out, but I’d love to be wrong. There’s always the chance that if some of his athleticism remains he could yet carve out a niche as a long stopper on D. And if not, he can rest assured he gave it his best go and the Knicks can be the organization which gave him the chance instead of the organization of Truck Party.

A Bullet For The General

…Did that Knicks game just happen?

Well Done, Knicks

Knicks pass on Iverson

I’m especially heartened by the reasons given, namely that the team is continuing to focus on the long term. There’s been no bigger problem for this organization in recent years than brainless short-termism; it’s what lay behind most of the terrible Isiah trades and arguably played a part in the ruinous decisions made previous to those involving cap mismanagement with Allen Houston, Patrick Ewing, etc. Iverson is not done as a player and he can be a help to someone; but not the Knicks, not now. In the midst of a brutal season, it’s nice to see that Knicks management still has the capacity to stick to their guns about the rebuild- there’s no way you’ll ever make it to the top in this league above all if you can’t endure the fallow periods to get there.

No.

Iverson? Fuck off.

Yeah, that’s what the Knicks need, sure. Let’s take a team which is currently 25th in the league in both offensive and defensive efficiency, and add a low-efficiency shooter who plays no defense to a 1-9 team after he just fucked off from a different awful team because he wasn’t getting enough limelight and focus and was on a loser. Let’s take a team of young guys who’ve finally in the last year or so shown some degree of mutual trust and have begun to develop a positive organizational culture, and chuck that into the gully in favor of watching Iverson and Al Harrington have knife fights over shots. We HAVE one Nate Robinson already, what the fuck do we want with an old, broken-down second one with major attitude issues? As a person Iverson gets a bad rap I think and as a player there has been a lot good to say about him over the years, but this is wrong time, wrong place, for the wrong reasons if it happens.

And what are those reasons? Two occur to mind: sign him and flip him at the deadline to a contender who wants a scorer and a veteran and is willing to take a shitty contract to get one; or, this is Jimmy Boy Dolan losing his shit about attendance and demanding a star to fills seats. If it’s the former, well, why would any of those clubs not just grab him now? Why didn’t they sign him last season for cheap? What’s changed to make him more valuable? If it’s the other than it means the Knicks are backsliding into what they were, a fifth-rate incompetently administered moneymaking operation for Chuck Dolan’s idiot son to run (into the ground). Whee.

And another thing, from the above article:

“Plus, he’s still popular with many fans — some of whom have already grown impatient with Walsh’s plan to rebuild through free agency next summer that left the team so vulnerable this season.”

This kind of gambit is the biggest bullshit line in the world. Oh? “Some fans”? Which ones? How many? Got some poll data? A single quote? What are the attendance figures from last year, this year, and 5 years ago? And if they’re down, what were the alternative options to keep them up? Why do any hard work researching and writing answers to these questions when you can perpetuate the lie that New Yorkers won’t stand for rebuilding, a completely unproven assumptions which has done nothing but serve the stupidest and laziest general managers in this city for years, the ones who would rather do something, anything, other than wait, work out a plan, and do the right thing at the right time. So yeah, in short, fuck off ESPN, sorry and best wishes elsewhere to Iverson, and here’s to hoping we’re not heading back to the bad old days. Personally, I would always rather suffer through the locals being a combined 1-19 or whatever they are now than be Charlotte or Memphis or Golden State- better to suffer through being bad on the way to being good, than to just be mediocre forever.

Yeah, I Believe It

Eddy Curry to practice

I love how he somehow managed to lose a bunch of weight while… out with a leg injury. I know whenever I have a leg injury it really helps me do cardio! No chance he was out for other reasons at all!

Perspective

The NBA season is 5 games old, 10 games total for someone like me who follows both of the locals. We’re 1-9 on a regional basis. There’s 82 games each for the Knicks and the Nets, and if you anticipate between 20-30 wins for the teams each that projects out to a combined record of roughly 50-114.

I am basketball’s version of a Pittsburgh Pirates fan.

Knicks-Bobcats

Apparently I am still in preseason form as a fan, because I only saw regulation of this one before my DVR cut out. C-, must do better for me. Anyway, based on what I saw- this was like a replay of the Miami game except that the Bobcats are far more inept than the Heat, the Knicks seemed to get their shit together relatively quicker, and the officials had one of those Donaghy-had-a-point nights where almost every call went for the Knicks in regulation, especially once the Charlotte lead got big. Overall it was some of the dirt-worst basketball you’ll see at NBA level. What can you do? The problems are the same, but the spirit seems to be improving, so that’s some progress anyway. Still, through two games, the offense is kind of busted: the team shot 38% and change from the field last night and 25% from three, and the reasons looked to be the same- a lot of guys taking mediocre shots early in the shot clock plus few focused plays happening in the half-court offense. The S/R with Duhon and David Lee is still very effective and those guys played a combined 106 minutes last night, but I don’t recall them running it seriously more than a handful of times in regulation. Why? Fucked if I know.

Oddly, it almost seems as though at the same time as the team has found a defensive identity based on holding shape and position with constant switching against all screens, they’ve lost it on the offensive end. There’s still some kinks in the former (like: why is Darko Milicic trying to guard guys on the perimeter?), but it’s progress; if they can find a way to combine last year’s more organized and intelligent offense with this year’s defense- and get better and sharper at both- there’s the makings of a passable team here.

Heat 115, Knicks 93

It’s game 1 so I’m certainly not going to get bent out of shape about this one, but man, that was rough to watch. It’s not really a secret what the issue was: Knicks were better on the boards, the O-boards, at the free throw line and in turnovers (three of the classic 4 factors right there) but they got out-shot 56.6% to 37.9% and hit only 25.6% of their three pointers- and quite a a few of those came from Gallinari late, long past when this one had a chance to be competitive. As a general rule this is going to happen to teams like the Knicks from time to time: playing 3 point mad bomber is a high-variability strategy, and some times that means you build a house and get pasted even by a likely-to-be-meh Miami team. Those results can be minimized however, and the Knicks are going to have to tighten up as the season goes on and change things a little to deal with games like this. The team was and is more effective in the halfcourt working out of a set play at the start- usually the Duhon/Lee pick and roll- which allows them to open up the defense a bit and force some movement, where their shooters spreading the floor becomes more of a weapon. Without that you get what we had in the second and third quarters of this one: a team of guys who all have the green light to shoot from anywhere, who are being given mediocre shots by the opposition and are willing to take them instead of working for the best available shot.

Still, there are positives: Gallinari is obviously this year’s big development project, and tonight was a solid step in that direction as he got more minutes than anyone but the starters and produced effectively (albeit in mostly garbage time). Two major things stick out about his play: he did a nice job of showing his basketball smarts in flashes, using a shot fake to draw contact and a foul on the perimeter from Michael Beasley as the shot clock ran down. He also had the anti-Jason Kapono line for a shooter, taking 14 shots overall and 13 of them from three point range. He’s got the relatively rare attribute for a young player right now of knowing where his best abilities lie and confining himself to employing them, instead of trying to do things he’s simply not really equipped to do yet. On a night when the Knicks got absolutely flambe’d, that’s a decent consolation take-away.

Notes:

- How nice of Q Rich to lose 25 pounds and give a care immediately after leaving New York. That was great to see, and says a lot about his professionalism.

- Whisper it, but Darko looked ok. I’m not crazy enough to think he’ll eventually be what he was supposed to be, but his defense and boards were welcome additions, and it’s just possible that Mike Dan Tony’s coaching may get a bit more offense out of him, enough to make him, say, a league average center? Yeah, I know, but the season opener is all about dreams….

- Jared Jefferies appears to be the permanent idea as the more or less lead perimeter defender when he’s out there, presumably on the idea that his wingspan and footwork will let him disrupt some passes and switch effectively on S/R plays. I recall this being a solid change of pace defensive call last year- we’ll see how much it gets used this year and how it works.

- On the Heat’s first two offensive plays of the year they went right to Jermine O’Neal posting up on David Lee. How Lee’s defense evolves, or doesn’t, over the course of the year will be an ongoing sub-plot to the season.

Not much more to say about this one. It was full of sloppy junk like TO’s from guys stepping on the baseline and intercepted inbounds passes, and hopefully that will be worked out by the second or third week of the season, and we’ll have a better sense of what exactly we’re watching with this year’s Knicks.

Today Is My Birthday

And somebody down there likes me. Throw in a spanking of Liverpool today for Arsenal, and it’s the best day ever.

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.