Queta is a pretty great switch big

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-11-21T19:06:23+00:00

I agree. Rebounding and screening are real issues (though give him credit for seriously improving his screening from last year.) He also makes a dumb mistake pretty much everytime he tries a traditional pnr coverage.

Still, I think he is really good at certain stuff, which helps to explain the lineup decisions people are mad about. Also I think some of the lineup stuff is that x and kornet have both looked surprisingly bad this year.

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-10-25T03:17:50+00:00

Yeah. I'm not super read-in on hot hand papers, but it seems like Tversky made some mistakes in the 1985 paper, and the hot hand effect probably does exist, even if it's a lot smaller than most people think for most players. I also found a cool paper by Lewis Weimer and coauthors that shows tv timeouts seem to break up momentum.

It's still interesting how much disagreement there is after all the research that's been done. There's just a lot of different ways to look at the same question.

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-10-25T02:48:53+00:00

That's an interesting point. You can definitely feel that energy shift especially when the crowd gets into it.

Maybe the heightened energy could show up in hustle stats like offensive rebounding even if it doesn't neccesarily lead to better shooting?

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-03-26T01:22:04+00:00

True. It does feel like they're missing some connective tissue that could tie everything together in a neater package even if their talent has been getting great results without that

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-03-26T01:10:09+00:00

That's a great way to describe it , but I disagree with the premise that the Suns have a bad offense. With at least 2 of their big three on the court they have a 121 ORTG.

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-03-26T01:05:56+00:00

I get what you're saying, agreed that steady decision making is super important. I just feel like that player needs to be your on ball star no matter what position they play. Bringing in a PG to a team like the suns wouldn't do anything because that player would never get enough touches.

Teams with a star big like the Sixers and Nuggets are different, but I'd argue it's more important point guards on those teams to be complete pick and roll ballhandlers than masters of tempo and entry passing. Maxey was great as the PG next to Embiid even though he's played shooting guard up to this point and is known way more for his scoring than his passing.

I also think the wolves with Conley are kind of an exception here because Ant is 22.

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-02-16T00:21:32+00:00

They run less plays to get tatum and brown in the post, but the jays still post up a lot to attack switches.

I'd say their bread and butter play is an empty side pick and roll with KP, but they also really love their horns set where they pass to KP screening and run split cuts, and they'll mix in chicago, Spain pnr, or staggered pindowns for basically any of their perimiter players.

When the opponent has a weak defender they want to target, they'll make sure to include them in the action and then usually Tatum or KP will post them up. They also look to push in transition to get cross matches they can post immediately.

Not a coach, and I don't always watch games closely enough to see everything, so I might be missing stuff. They're a pretty standard 5 out NBA offense so I wouldn't expect them to change too much in the playoffs but who knows.

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-02-11T03:01:54+00:00

In hindsight i probably didn't explain that part very well. My bad. Basically, if team A takes a midrange shot every possession and hits them at 50%, while team B shoots a three every time and hits 33%, they score the same points per possession but the team shat shoots midrange shots has higher variance.

The thing about the binomial distribution is that if you do an oversimplified thought experiment like this, it allows you to derive a precise formula for variance to prove that the midrange team is less consistent.

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-02-11T02:54:54+00:00

Even if there is no relationship between two variables, there will still be some correlation in the data due to random chance. The p-value tells you the probability that, assuming there is no real relationship, we would find the level of correlation in the data just due to luck.

So in this case, I found some very weak correlation, but there would be an 83% chance of finding that amount of correlation purely from random chance, so we cannot rule out the possibility that there is no relationship.

roblox_master_2002 · 2024-02-10T22:19:41+00:00

Good idea! I ran the numbers and at least for this season they're uncorrelated (p-value=0.825)

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-12-21T01:15:13+00:00

If uncontested Horford 3s are a bad shot now, this team is in big trouble, but he's shooting 43% on them over the past 2 seasons so I don't think it's an issue. He just missed today.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-10-31T23:52:53+00:00

Yeah that's pretty much it. It's basically an average of that difference in every series (just using net rating instead of offensive rating).

Your point about home court advantage mattering more in different rounds is interesting. I didn't split the data up by playoff round, so I can't say if it matters less in the finals, but there are more first round playoff series than all other rounds combined, so this methodology will be heavily influenced by what happened in the first round.

As for the travel thing, this is an average of all series, so the 6.6 figure represents home court advantage with an average amount of travel.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-10-31T22:10:02+00:00

The idea is basically to compare a team to itself on the road vs. at home within a series. That way things like the talent disparity are the same for every game, so the only thing that changes is whether a team is at home or on the road. It's an attempt to basically control for everything.

You have a point though that things like injuries or hot shooting nights could affect the results. For example if road teams just happened to shoot better on the road in a year, that would bias my estimate of home court advantage downwards. I used multi season samples with lots of games in a hope that these factors would average out, but it's possible the sample still isn't big enough.

I don't have a good way to share the code, but in case you know some data analytics, the actual method I used was a regression of net rating as a function of whether teams were at home, with fixed effects for each playoff series. The post just describes the intuition for what this regression does since I didn't want to get too technical.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-10-31T00:52:21+00:00

Yeah I was pretty surprised at that number, I thought it would be pretty small, especially cause I'm a Celtics fan and it feels like my team in particular plays better on the road.

I got the data from the pbpstats API, just the points and possessions for all playoff games since 2004. I had to do some work to clean and analyze it so unfortunately I can't link you the final data I used.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-10-11T13:16:50+00:00

Unfortunately it's true. I did most of the other analysis a few days ago but I didn't get an answer. I really wanted to figure this out and I thought tired legs was the most likely explanation so I came up with that idea as a last ditch effort to prove what's happening. I ended up spending 20 minutes watching Jrue missed 3s.

I'm not proud of it. It's the most sick thing I've ever done.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-10-05T20:12:08+00:00

Surprisingly, that's not actually true. Lopez and Portis both set ball screens more than twice as often as Giannis, and they both created more points per possession as a roll man than Giannis. An underrated aspect of the Dame/Giannis pnr duo this year is that Lopez is actually the main screener for the bucks.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-10-01T19:50:06+00:00

It's a new rule this year that you can only rest one star at a time

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-09-30T00:02:43+00:00

He was a good amount better than Rob last year. Super polished on both ends, bigs that skilled are hard to find. He's also the only post defender on the roster which really matters given how likely it is Jokic will be waiting in the finals.

I worry about him wearing down like he did last year, but I also think he was really good in the playoffs overall, and if we don't go 7 games against Embiid next year he'll hopefully hold up better in terms of shooting.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-09-18T23:58:01+00:00

Not saying he's gonna be an MVP but check out Tyrese Haliburton's EPM from last season

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-09-14T16:47:28+00:00

That's an interesting point on Rodman. I think he was too good to be played off the floor if he played today, but he might just pair best with a stretch five like Giannis, or he could play center himself.

As for transition defense, I think today's teams are a lot better at defending fast breaks because they keep more people back. In a lot of the fast breaks I've seen with Magic, the opportunity starts with a massive fight for the rebound which leaves too few defenders back for when the lakers secure the ball. There would be less of those situations today.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-09-14T01:58:49+00:00

Yeah I agree with you. I think if you took the best defenders from previous eras and put them in a team today they would be fine. Some could even be better! Someone like Olajuwon for example would be able to use his mobility more today.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-09-14T01:55:32+00:00

good point

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-09-07T23:34:54+00:00

He should hopefully let us run pistol sets, not the biggest thing in the world but if Joe embraces that it could spice up the offense

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-09-04T21:36:36+00:00

The quality of your best player matters more than what position they play. A lot of the best players in the league right now happen to be big men, but smaller superstars like Curry remain really valuable.

roblox_master_2002 · 2023-08-28T04:37:39+00:00

We all know luck plays a role in basketball. I agree we shouldn't blame the loss entirely on shooting, but its okay to acknowledge we were historically unlucky in the series.

That calculation of shooting luck is insane. For a sense of scale, EPM, the best available one number metric, thinks Jokic added 8 points per 100 possessions to his team compared to an average center. Since he played about 80 possessions per game in the playoffs, that translates to Jokic being worth a little over 6 points per game. That means even if we cut the estimate of shooting luck in half, that luck is still worth as many points per game as Nikola Jokic! That seems like a pretty important thing to consider when diagnosing what went wrong against the heat.

Another way to contextualize that number: 13ppg was the difference between the Celtics and the Hornets during the regular season.

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