Quick Thoughts

Quick Thoughts

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1.    Memphis Surge Reviewed:    One of the more interesting stories of the season is the unexpected improvement of the Grizz, who are now 20-18 after going 24-58 all of last year.  Well, it’s not that improvement was unexpected it’s just that the extent of improvement is the surprising part.  When the Grizz grabbed Zach Randolph for nothing, we kind of figured there would be some improvement but the team is a fringe playoff team.  What’s going on here?  Well, the Grizz of 2008-09 were one of the worst offensive teams we’ve seen for a while.  Let’s take a look at the basic stats for the Grizz the last two years:

                                                        2008-09            2009-10

-Offensive Rating:         103.5 (28th)         110.2 (7th)

-Defensive Rating:        109.5 (21st)         110.5 (27th)

-PPG:                               93.9 (29th)         104.0 (4th)

-OPPG:                            99.3 (14th)         104.2 (25th)

-Pace Factor                    90.1 (20th)            93.6 (10th)

-Attendance Per Game:  12,680 (30th)      12,685 (30th)

The Grizz have changed their style drastically.  The putrid offense of 2008-09, which involved O.J. Mayo and Rudy Gay chucking has become faster and more efficient (though the chucking hasn’t exactly stopped).  There has been sacrifice of in defense (from bad to terrible) but this is easily counter-balanced by the offensive improvement.  Mayo and Gay are both improved a little bit (though Mike Conley hasn’t been much better).  The real improvement has come from Marc Gasol (who went from good to very good) and newly acquired Zach Randolph, who is playing as well as any time since 2006-07 and is huge upgrade over Darko Milicic and Hakim Warrick.

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NBA Draft

NBA Draft Update

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Right now the 2010 draft class is a little tough to gauge. As with recent drafts the strength will be in the freshman class. My feeling is that this class is somewhat below-average. Other than Wall and Henry the guards are a very weak group. The big guys look OK now, but the conference games are starting and that always thins their ranks out. This list is a little scattershot and not exactly a top 60 that’s in a strict order of the ability and future of the players. After the first 15 or so I have players bunched in groups, because that’s where they are at this point in the season. While my guess is that Avery Bradley will move into the lottery and possibly the top 5 by season’s end, his numbers just aren’t quite there yet. I do it this way because the season is early and when the analysis is based mainly on statistics, like this one is, it takes a full season before things really come into focus. 

1. John Wall, PG Kentucky: This is a shakier vote than most. Wall has been impressive. He clearly can be dominant when he wants to be. There is one number that concerns me though. If you take out games against small college opponents his A/TO is 1.08, which is unacceptable for a PG. I’ll just throw that out there as something to think about as the conference season gets going. Wall seems good enough that this will get corrected, so it shouldn’t be a concern unless it continues to happen. 

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Uncategorized

Agent Schmuck

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What more can we add to the Gilbert Arenas controversy?  Probably not a whole heck of a lot but let’s piece together the facts and see what we can learn here, separated from all the hype and emotions of this story: 

The Facts

-On December 21, 2009, Arenas places several unloaded guns in front of the locker of teammate Javaris Crittenton.  The guns were apparently put out because Arenas and Crittenton had a dispute about who should pay have to pay the pot in a poker game.  Arenas and Crittenton both lost the hand but Arenas had refused to pay, enraging Crittenton.  It’s not clear what the details of why Arenas wouldn’t pay or whether his refusal was legitimate but it’s hard not to notice that Arenas is set to make $16.2 million this season and has five more years left at about $20 million per year while Crittenton is on a one-year $1.5 million deal. 

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FAQs

Big Bells Bellamy

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Like other NBA fans who never saw them play live, I’ve always had a fascination with some of the older players from the 1950s and 1960s.  Often, the footage that is available tends to underwhelm me.  We also know that the stats of the early 1960s are particularly inflated by a run-and-gun style.  Still, even knowing all these facts, the numbers make an impact.  One player in particular who has always fascinated me was Walt Bellamy.  Bellamy put up raw numbers his first two seasons that look Shaq-like, combine those states with a few black-and-white photos of Bellamy dunking on much smaller players that are etched in my mind, and he seems almost like an unknown monster of the pre-historic NBA days.  I hadn’t really thought much about Bellamy lately until I was reading through Bill Simmons’ new book on the NBA, “The Book of Basketball”, which re-articulated the common refrain, that Bellamy was a decent stat guy but not a winner.  According to Simmons’ editor (who is quoted copiously in footnotes for the book): “Walt Bellamy had the smallest head of any seven-footer ever.  He was built like the Washington Monument.  And played that way.” 

Despite this sentiment, there is remarkably little written about Bellamy just an unspoken understanding of his worth by the basketball powers that be.  Even “Tall Tales”, the seminal book on the 1960s basketball, only mentions Bellamy in passing.  I thought we could run through Bellamy a little better and see if we could learn something new about Bellamy the player, how this common knowledge developed, and whether it is actually accurate.

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Decade Review

We Take ESPN’s 2000s Poll

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A few months ago, we took a look at the All-2000s team and some of the other notable issues of the decade.  Now ESPN.com is turning to the end of the decade and has its own poll of its burning questions of the 2000s.  Just for fun, let’s run through our choices, as limited by ESPN’s ballot: 

1)  Which is the franchise of the decade?

-Lakers

-Spurs 

We addressed this question in the summer and previously chose the Lakers, even though they weren’t as consistently good (the Spurs average 58 wins per season and the Lakers averaged 53).  The tie breaker was that Spurs never could beat the Lakers when L.A. was at full strength.  The Lakers destroyed the Spurs in the playoffs in 2000-01 and 2001-02, when both teams were at full strength.  The Lakers also upset the Spurs in 2003-04 (on the crazy Derek Fisher shot), as well as in 2007-08, when the Lakers were clearly better. Still, there is some merit to the fact that the Spurs had no lulls like the Lakers did mid-decade.  This is really a coin-flip but the fact that the Lakers were better at their peak makes me choose L.A..

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Quick Thoughts

Quick Thoughts

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1.    Taking Stock in Boston:    As the standings start to sort themselves out in the NBA, it is clear that Boston is, once again, a serious title contender.  With their current winning streak, the Celts are 20-4 and have the best record in the NBA and the best SRS rating, though Atlanta and the Lakers are very close.  (Surprisingly, the Magic and Cavs are far behind these three in SRS).  Boston has been winning, as they usually do, with suffocating defense.  The Celts have the top defense in the NBA (99.4 efficiency) and are within shouting distance of their historic 2007-08 pace (98.9 defensive rating).  An interesting question is whether the Celts can keep this defensive pace up.  Last year, Boston started out quite hot (22-2) but tapered off to merely a very good defensive team, partly because of Kevin Garnett’s knee injury and partly because they could not possibly sustain such a hot start. 

With an older team, there is a tendency to believe something similar could happen this year too.  KG, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, and Rasheed Wallace are all approaching 35.  Let’s take a look at how hard Doc Rivers have been monitoring these four this season so far versus the past two years: 

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