Blazers Update: Concerns Aside, Room for Optimism at the Q-Pole by: torridjoe Mon Nov 30, 2009 at 14:00:00 PM PST

For any true Blazer fan, it was a harsh weekend of reality: think your team is the Lakers or the Celtics--or even the Hawks or Nuggets--this year just by fiat of the calendar? The natural outcome of added pounds and maturity on the players, and some vague belief that the NBA universe follows orderly and justified patterns? Welcome back to Planet Actuality, gentle naifs. It was a pretty jouncy ride; I sympathize. Perhaps Utah on the road was not the best tonic for a surprising home loss to an improving Grizzlies squad, but for a team that looked like it had gone narcoleptic during that epic Memphis run Friday night you had to trust that such an extended mental and physical lapse wouldn't happen again. It happened again, though. The players blamed fatigue and the Jazz proudly bragged that they had gameplanned with that expectation, but it looked like more (or less) than that. The team looked diffident at both ends but particularly on defense, where off-ball movement was apparently a worthy ideal rather than something of an imperative. And there's also hesitancy, like you can hear the gears grinding instead of muscles firing on shots and drives to the hole. Do I make the entry pass? Shoot, he sent it back, do I make it again? Should I shoot this umpteenth jumper, or oh geez I should not just think it and HEAVE...damn. If there is one thing that the team misses most about Travis Outlaw (and since Martell and Rudy have awakened I don't think it has caused much of the distress), it's his reckless abandon, his conscience-less ability to shrug off four really awful shots in a row and bury one when it's most needed. The Blazers did in fact play better overall against the Jazz, a strong team who had spent most of the last week blasting opponents in almost exactly the same fashion as they did to Portland, with their second 60+% shooting night in a row. That's ridiculous, 60%, and even with laconic defense it was clear both Boozer and Williams were unconscious. That will happen with top drawer players. (It doesn't explain Fesenko looking like the second coming of Oscar Robertson in his 13 minutes, though).  It's not quite the quarter-pole of the season; I'll be at the Garden sitting up in the 300's Saturday night, when the Blazers play their 20.5th game of the season against the Rockets. But it's a good point for reflection, particularly since the conclusion of Saturday's nightmare offered two full days of rest before the Heat come to town Tuesday, and particularly since it ends a grueling 19-game open to the first month of play. It's now a day later and still only three teams even have 18. Some have just 14! Even against the weaker schedule the Blazers have had, that's a lot of games and certainly takes its toll.  So it's a good time to look back, both because of the break and because with 20-25 games the stats start to form a gentler curve and become more reliable season-long tools of projection. The news is actually pretty good, although it's clear there are some negative changes relative to last season's performance. We'll check 'em out, below. {Come on down!}

torridjoe :: Blazers Update: Concerns Aside, Room for Optimism at the Q-Pole

The Blazers are at 12-7, which is not too bad if you try not to think about it being 12-5 and the team looking even better than that just last week against Chicago. That's a 52-win season, extrapolated out to 82 games--although here the weaker opening schedule suggests something more like 48-50 once everything evens out. And frankly, that's the kind of record I was thinking the team was playing like during the other drought just before the switch to the 3-guard. They've switched back, but are still playing at about the same level, by that standard. The concept that despite the good record they're playing underneath their level is borne out by my calculation of Portland's Pythagorean Wins expectation. If you don't recognize the concept from baseball stats, it's essentially points for vs points against, carried out to ridiculous exponents (in this case 16.5 per Hollinger's version) and then divided into a percentage, which can be translated to wins. After the nuts math you reach a WPCT of .744, or 14-5, a 61-win season at year's end.  This early in the season it's subject to some distortion because every win is more impactful on WPCT, but if you were getting the sense that Portland was underachieving by a couple of games so far, you're probably right. Obviously you can take that two ways: the Blazers are underachieving on wins relative to their performance model, so mathematically they should return to the mean and win more games. Or, the Blazers are underachieving and won't win as many games as they should.  There's not a whole lot of point in reviewing numbers if you don't believe in the power of the numbers to explain behavior, but it's also true that numbers are not necessarily predictive of the immediate future, just really good observers of the past. That's certainly something to keep in mind in the NBA, where night-to-night parity lets a fairly lame Charlotte team knock off the Cavaliers, or allows the Knicks to drop 38 on a very good Denver team playing at home, losing by just three. Sometimes Memphis will beat you at home even if you're the Lakers or Celtics, and sometimes Utah will definitely whip your ass in Utah.  Still, with me you're going to get a healthy reliance on the numeric news to tell the tale of play so far, and other numbers besides Pythag-W make the case that there's plenty of time to right the ship and secure victories with the bodies on the floor every night, because as a team they're producing well. What I suspect is causing the angst is that the individual focus is different and more spread than in the past, and it's not only causing adjustment but is potentially bruising some egos. Most interestingly perhaps, as a team they have flipped their offensive and defensive efficiency ratings to essentially end up in about the same tier overall--2nd. Again working with Hollinger's numbers, the Blazers are a strong fifth, a contrast to their below-average rating last year. Conversely, they are 11th in offensive efficiency, in a third tier instead of the first tier they used to occupy much of last season. It explained how they could win more often with a lower PPG, due to their dead-bottom pace: high efficiency. To the extent that they are less efficient on O so far, it is failing to bail out their relative lack of possessions. Other teams with more looks naturally tend to score more points, given the same efficiency. You have to beat a team like that by being more efficient with your possessions. Controlling the opponent's efficiency can also work, and their success in controlling points per possession should be balancing things out. I like to compare the offensive and defensive efficiencies to get a differential, which I call EffDiff. Like a point differential, the more in the black you are the better. Think the Celtics are just one of the Pack of Four in the East at 13-4? Think again--their EffDiff is a whopping 10.6, due to a sixth best offensive EFF and #2 defensive EFF. Phoenix at #2 overall is almost three full points behind at 7.7, and the Nuggets (7.4). Mavs (7.3) and Lakers (7.2) round out the top five.  But who's right there at #6? Portland at 6.8, heading up a group with Orlando and Atlanta both over 6, but quickly dropping off after that. Boston also leads the NBA in raw point differential, and the cast of characters behind them are largely the same and who you'd expect--but as you can see the margins are smaller and the pack looks a lot closer to Boston. Based on how they're strangling teams at both ends right now, objects may be farther away than they appear. On an individual level, I've suspected that the changes in Greg Oden's offensive and defensive roles have heavily impacted the team's production (not to mention psyche). He's now an option. What was a murmur last year is a roar this season--the crowd wants Oden to have the ball on offense, and when he has it you can taste the anticipation, feel the eyes no longer distracted by text messages or spilling nacho sauce...they're waiting to see if Oden is going to face somebody. When they explode, only a clutch Rudy three seems to make them as delirious as an Oden jam. And for good reason--they're scary things of beauty. But not only is this speculation, the numbers tend to agree. Last year, the top Blazer by EFF according to the NBA was Roy at a rather sparkling #19,  LaMarcus following fairly close behind at 40. Moreover, Brandon was the 5th-rated guard and LMA the 21st-best F. The next Blazers were Przybilla and Oden between 125 and 150. Fast forward to this year, and Roy is still the top-rated Blazer--but this time at #44. And look who's right behind, Greg Oden at #48. Both have an EFF in the 18s, which is a big step for Greg but a four point drop for Brandon. LaMarcus falls back to the 50s, and the next Blazer isn't until the 170s. Flipping back to Hollinger's individual stats, the Oden Rising theory gains credence when you discover that on a PER basis, which attempts to aggregate all of the various productivities into a single per-minute metric, places not Roy but Oden as the most "effective" Blazer so far with a 17th-ranked 23.06. Roy, who spent most of last year in the top 10 (sorry I don't have last year's Hollinger to show you), is now down at #44 with a still-decent 19.17. However, as a per-minute stat it heavily favors guys like Oden, who is not yet averaging 25 minutes per game. Two other metrics in that chart are the VA (value added) and EWA (estimated wins added), neither of which correct for minutes played and thus reward total output. By the VA measure, which asserts the number of "points over replacement-level" being scored by the player in question, Roy is in much more familiar territory, ranking 16th overall. But there's Oden right with him again at #18. (Because EWA is a function of VA, they are naturally right near each other for EWA as well).  So the upshot is that it's still Brandon's team, and he's still doing the most to help the Blazers of anyone on the roster--but that's primarily a function of his being on the court for almost 37 minutes a night. When Greg Oden is on the floor, however, he's been every bit as effective as The Natural--in fact, a little bit moreso, if anything.  The players and coaches quite probably don't need Hollinger to tell them this; they can see it unfold before them on the court every night: when Oden is in the game, he changes it at both ends--so naturally there is impetus if not imperative to feed the beast.  And therein, I believe, lies the uneasiness that permeates the team, especially Roy: should the offensive focus of the Blazers change to highlight Greg Oden instead of Brandon--or at the least, should Oden become Focus 1B to Roy's 1A? The numbers and the vibe both say yes, but in human terms that means Roy adjusting to the fact that his role as The Man When Things Get Out of Hand, taking over games in the 4th quarter and helping them through scoring droughts, may not be the best thing for the team anymore. And that is likely why the team looks a little confused and hesitant on the court, and Roy continues to use the words "adjust" and "figure out" after the games when it comes to roles and rhythm: there's been a paradigm shift in those roles and that rhythm, and everyone's trying to deal with it as delicately as possible.  The perception is that with the addition of Andre Miller, Roy cannot feel like the floor general he wants to be. And Roy has bolstered that perception by speaking about his "comfort level" with Steve Blake, who does little in the way to horn in on Roy's game, offensively. He takes threes to stretch the D, but doesn't drive and dish or pop midrangers like Brandon does. Miller does both of those things fairly well, and perhaps Roy sees that as a complication to letting him play his game. But I'd argue that what's really going on is not the Miller Effect but the Oden Effect. A team that was clearly led by Roy and backed up by Aldridge last year, so far this year is essentially being co-led by Roy and Oden--not at all a minor change, particularly given how different from a typical PF LMA tends to be in his offense and rebounding style. So the rest of the team surely is thinking while out on the court, "Is our Job One to get it into the post, or clear the decks for our All-Star playmaker?"  The former great Redskins quarterback Sonny Jurgensen is fond of saying that if an NFL team tries to say they have two great quarterbacks, the truth is they probably have none. The notion of field leadership in football is sacrosanct--it's the guy with the fewest bars on his facemask, making the most money.  In basketball it's a murkier situation. It's quite often a guard, like Kobe or Iverson back in the day, but it can also be a forward (LeBron) or even a center like Jabbar or Wilt. There is not necessarily a single position from which all offense must flow.  So it's not an intractable problem the Blazers face; certainly there is room for a great SG and a topflight C to coexist and even make the team better by their combined presence. There's no reason in the world that the adjustments can't be successful, and we can't be hopeful for a future where Mr. Drive and Mr. Jam synergize their efforts into multiple NBA titles. But for that to happen, the team first needs to concretely realize the implications of an ascendant Oden, and how to modulate Roy's role to allow for that blooming, without cutting off Roy's own...blossom. Ultimately, it won't happen without Brandon's assent, and so let's hope it happens sooner rather than later (and doesn't misguidedly alienate Miller in the process).  It's actually a decent problem to have, certainly as opposed to not having any star-quality leadership in the first place. And the overall team statistics, despite the weaker competition so far in the season, point to a situation where the concerns that have arisen, need not topple the goals both team and fans had before the year started: Conference Semis or bust!

Tags: NBA, pro basketball, Blazers, update, stats, Hollinger, Pythagorean Wins, EffDiff, Efficiency, PER, 2009-10, (All Tags)

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