:)

jon abbey: this applies to every Robert Silverman recap IMO, I find them pretty much unreadable and never make it all the way through. sorry, my two cents…

Blithering fuckwit.

jon abbey: Allen Iverson carried a team to the Finals while shooting inefficiently, and there have been plenty of recent studies about the debatable value of offensive rebounds, we’ve talked about those more than a few times here and I’m sure you’re aware of them.

everything is context-driven in the NBA: for instance, the better your team defense is, the less efficient your shooting needs to be for the team to be successful.

It’s not the value of offensive rebounds that’s debatable per se, it’s the value of game planning around getting offensive rebounds. I’ve written at length about this, and I’m pretty sure there has been more than one study posted on here about it, but it’s a nonlinear optimization problem between the value of getting an offensive rebound and the cost of giving up defensive position if you fail. A team like Chicago that has players like Noah, Gibson, Deng, and Rose can both crash the boards and run back fast enough with big enough players to slow down the opposition and play excellent defense. Older teams like the Knicks, Celtics, and Spurs, teams who can’t be expending too much energy every single game of the season like the Bulls do, prefer to play solid defense and make their opponents work for their shots.

There isn’t one answer, it depends on your personnel. Still like my solution of making the offensive rebound erase the missed shot. Not some “Kobe Assist”, and this actually gives offensive rebounders the same credit for “shot creation” that other players do. THCJ is right in a way, offensive rebounds are a form of shot creation, but not a way of creating a new possession. If the defense can’t secure the rebound then it’s like they never played defense in the first place

DRed:
Reggie Evans is making 5 million for the next three years.Jamal Crawford makes 5 million a year (and he used to get paid a lot more)Teams choose to value inefficient, one dimensional scorers like Crawford more than someone like Evans.

What’s your research showing that rebounds aren’t as valuable?Maybe rebounds are overvalued in WP, but rebounds are certainly more valuable than missed shots.NBA execs have shown repeatedly that they don’t care how much you miss as long as you score.Think of it this way.Reggie and Jamal both have basically one skill.Jamal scores points and Reggie rebounds.Getting rebounds actually helps you win basketball games.Shooting inefficiently doesn’t.

But I think Jamal Crawford is a piece of shit player, and a major part of the reason is that he can’t defend. I don’t argue that front offices universally have it right, but some of the smart ones are certainly making more informed and well reasoned decisions than any person on the internet. You want to tell me that guys like Al Harrington and Jamal Crawford are barely positive? Fine by me, they really can’t do anything except take a large volume of bad shots. I think they have SOME value in the right context, but they’re certainly not worth much more than the mini mid level, there is no competition between someone like Ray Allen and someone like Jamal Crawford.

Biggest straw men in all this argument is that Melo’s major “skill” is just shooting a lot. Coaches like Greg Poppovich don’t abandon their standard defense and sell out with hard double teams to stop Ben Gordon, he does that to stop Kobe and Melo. I don’t care about the shots, I care about the space that opens up when defenses prioritize stopping a guy like Melo over stopping a guy like Steve Novak. I also care about the number of shots they can take with low turnovers

DRed:
Shooting inefficiently doesn’t.

Allen Iverson carried a team to the Finals while shooting inefficiently, and there have been plenty of recent studies about the debatable value of offensive rebounds, we’ve talked about those more than a few times here and I’m sure you’re aware of them.

everything is context-driven in the NBA: for instance, the better your team defense is, the less efficient your shooting needs to be for the team to be successful.

What’s your research showing that rebounds aren’t as valuable? Maybe rebounds are overvalued in WP, but rebounds are certainly more valuable than missed shots. NBA execs have shown repeatedly that they don’t care how much you miss as long as you score. Think of it this way. Reggie and Jamal both have basically one skill. Jamal scores points and Reggie rebounds. Getting rebounds actually helps you win basketball games. Shooting inefficiently doesn’t.

jon abbey: Jeff Foster? Kris Humphries? you’d take Evans on your team, but you wouldn’t build your team around him or probably even start him.

the WP48 list linked to above (http://wagesofwins.com/wins-produced-2011/, sort by WP48) speaks for itself, valuing rebounding and shooting as little as possible over pretty much every other skill set in the game.

No, I wouldn’t build a team around Reggie Evans. But I’d sure as shit take him over Jamal Crawford. I’d take Kris Humphries over Eddy Curry.

Wins Produced doesn’t value shooting as little as possible. That’s a total misrepresentation. It subtracts value for missing. Someone like Kevin Durant, who shoots a lot, has a really high WP48, not because he doesn’t shoot a lot, but because he doesn’t miss a lot when he shoots.

jon abbey: this applies to every Robert Silverman recap IMO, I find them pretty much unreadable and never make it all the way through. sorry, my two cents…

Robert has some excellent basketball acumen; that bad Ray is like Calderon without the jump shot was interesting as one example. Please Robert cut out 75% of the humor and non basketball inside reference es. Your writing will sparkle then. As Strunk and White stress: “omit needless words.”

Juany8: The funniest part about the whole thing is that there IS a skillset that is heavily undervalued by the general basketball community, but it’s not rebounding or efficient low usage scoring, it’s defense. A guy like Ibaka gets called a first team all defensive player because he gets a lot of blocks, there needs to be some kind of defensive WP stat that calls bullshit and points out that Ibaka (probably) has a terrible block to block attempt ratio. A guy like Jeremy Lin shouldn’t get a bunch of defensive credit for steals then he smashes into screens and allows point guards to do as they please every other game.

if someone could solidly quantify defense somehow and add in “percentage of defensive attention commanded” by an offensive player, they’d be making real progress.