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.
As the first playoff game in six years approaches, no one--not the players or coaches, broadcasters or pundits, stat geeks or tools scouts, Vegas cons or Omaha housewives--has any idea how the Rockets-Blazers series, or the fate of the Blazers in general, will turn out. I hope, anyway. I can't handle another officiating scandal, for instance.
If you're hardcore, a short trip to Blazers Edge will give you as much pregame hype as you can stomach, all likely done with more BBIQ than mine. My niche is stats though, and with the end of the regular season there's a natural break point for retrospection.
Stats are good for telling you how something has already happened, and can offer insights for the future, but aren't good predicitive tools. What they're best used for here is deciding which teams that looked good to the eye were doing it on solid execution, and which were getting by on smoke and mirrors and are due for retrenchment.
There are several sources for useful stats info; I'll be looking at NBA.com, Hollinger at ESPN.com, and the great Basketball-reference.com site. I'll look at team stats and individual, team first.
Get a drink, a smoke, a pillow, whatever you do to make life bearable as Lou Reed once said, and we'll start below....numbers ahoy! (and yeah, that's a warning to the phobic)
Well, here we are on the other side of the All-Star break, and for the first time in years the Blazers are not thinking about next season. Precariously perched in 4th place of the Western Conference playoff race, the final slot for crucial home-court advantage in the first round, Portland is nonetheless perched--and with a favorable schedule most of the rest of the way, the opportunity exists to hold serve and even challenge for the division title.
On the other hand, the team's weaknesses are clear, and the period since 2009 began has been productive in terms of wins but also shows that the rest of the league is catching up to what was working for the Blazers earlier in the season. Brandon Roy is seeing a lot of doubles, Greg Oden is being attacked and baited in order to get him off the court, and everybody is pick n rolling like Chubby Checker invented it. And right now is when the bullies get serious and the stars wake up, so coasting is not a viable option for the Blazers right now.
Below the fold I'm going to share a little analyis work I did over the weekend using Hollingers stats profile, but this also seems like a good time to link you up and get you back to speed. Blazer's Edge of course gathers what you need to know; here's a cull from the last several days:
In order to estimate the likelihood of a win in any given game, I used John Hollinger's Power Rankings for NBA teams, and divided the competition into four tiers of difficulty: Elite (30% chance of a win in any one game); Peer (50% chance); Lesser (60% chance); and Chum (80% chance). The tiers and figures are all eyeballed, based loosely on the idea that a team with a .700 winning percentage would be 70% likely to win any one game. Cleveland, Boston and LA are over .800 right now, but when you include Orlando, Denver, and Utah the average gets closer to .700. (And a month later we'd likely swap San Antonio for Utah, but the principle would remain the same).
Obviously a "peer" team is one generally equivalent, and that fairly well describes most of the other West teams Portland is competing with. Then there's a group of teams who aren't quite on that level but remain dangerous--we'll call them the Unpredictables, and given Portland's .600+ record so far, I apply the reverse of the elites calculation, giving the other teams 40% win chance against the Blazers. The "chum" represent the bottom half, against whom--by reputation and also good Blazer efficiency against such teams in the past--one can expect a win 4 out of 5 times.
So, a month later, are the Blazers still on track?
A man with some interest in sports and numbers, and an Excel sheet, can be a dangerous thing. (Luckily I'm a trained professional.*) A popular parlor game among the Blazer faithful of late has been to look ahead at the rest of the season, and predict a level of wins that might be expected or realistically hoped for, as well as what the chances are that Portland makes the playoffs for the first time in what seems like forever.
Most striking to me so far has been Gavin at 95.5 on the most recent Blazer podcast, going the other way from Casey and BEdge Dave on whether the Blazers would make the final 8 in the West. I think barring injury and some complete meltdown, the chances are very strong--like, 75%--to see Portland at least somewhere among the eight.
But just guessing really isn't much fun, or at least my guesses aren't worth anything if they're just guesses. So I set about predicting wins the rest of the way based on some kind of rational analaysis. The short answer is that I look for the Blazers to win 29-30 more games of their final 47, to finish with at least 50...but not much more unless they really exceed expectations, either by total efficiency against the bottom dwellers or parity with the big boys.
I used the Hollinger Power Rankings, a fairly stable and reasonably well-fed sample of data this far into the season. I noted the order and rating of each team, and also their record against Portland so far, as well as how many games the Blazers had remaining against them. Based on those two factors, I assigned an expected win percentage in four broad tiers among the 29 other teams, and then applied that to the Blazers' remaining games. The results displaced in my shoddy but endearing graphical way, below. {Step back into the 20th century below the fold!}
I confess to being rather a stats geek, whether it's election statistics or fire/EMS or basic demography or sabermetrics. As much as I love football as a sport, it's a big downer that so few games means a small sample and much more variability in football stats. And other than Rachel Maddow and of course Barack Obama, who in politics came out of 2008 with their ticket punched more loudly than former Baseball Prospectus genius turned polling genius Nate Silver? It was a good year for geeks.
And then there's basketball, which is kind of in between baseball and football in stat utility. Since the last time I was heavy into the NBA however, folks like ESPN's John Hollinger have injected the stat geek's spirit into it, and several good ratio statistics have been introduced.
Some of the better basketball stats in terms of really seeing how well teams and players stack up are the points scored and allowed per 100 possessions, which compares efficiency against an even standard; and point differential (points scored minus points allowed). The differential can also be extrapolated in a quick formula to get what in baseball are called Pythagorean Wins: the expected win-loss total based on point differential. The excess is written off to luck and expected to be balanced out in the future as luck naturally turns.
These and other stats at the player level are combined by Hollinger into a PER stat, which estimates total production per minute, pace adjusted. One of the component stats that I think really gets to the essence of a particular skill is the suite of rebound stats. What Hollinger does is compute the percentage of all possible rebounds (offensive, defensive or both) that the player actually got. It stands to reason that every time a shot is missed and you're on the floor, in theory you should have a chance at a rebound and the best rebounders get the highest percentage of available boards.
I've spoiled the surprise, of course, but what I discovered while messing around with Hollinger's stats is that when it comes to rebounding, especially on the defensive end, there's no doubt that the best bound-for-bound glassman in the NBA is none other than the Vanilla Gorilla, Joel Pryzbilla.
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