Jeffries as a SF/SG
Chandler as a SF/PF
Gallinari as a SG/SF

Chandler was the starting SG the first half of the season and they are giving his minutes to anyone else they can. We all know for a fact Jeffries hasn’t played a minute at SG this season, he’s been a PF and the only time you could argue he’s a SF is if you try really hard not to think of Harrington as the SF.

Gallinari on the other hand they swear is the starting SG and not the starting SF.

How long was Jeffries the center? A week? On the season he chased around PGs much more than centers. And 82 games does positional ranking by subjective rankings, not necessarily height.

Fair points but for the following:

1) the 4%/66% issue was the reason I included last years numbers, which were PF-heavy but much closer to an even split

2) PF’s have an even higher PER against Lee than C’s do, check the page.

3) I believe 82games.com typically ranks players according to height in determining positions: i.e., the tallest guy on the floor is identified as the center. As the Darko section in Part IV will discuss, the data is clearly imperfect. But even looking at it from that angle, its still interesting to note that Lee has been better in each of the past two years when the biggest guy on the floor.

At any rate, you and I reached the same conclusion, which is that David Lee at center doesn’t make sense as a long term option. But I do think its fascinating to look at these numbers that, at the very least, are cause to question why that is the case.

Also, isn’t it a bit one-sided to only show his offensive production and not his defensive production? There’s a reason why Lee shouldn’t be regarded as a long term center despite his “increased” production. Opposing centers recorded 19.7 PER against Lee.

All you need to do though is check the 5 man units to know they don’t know which player to assign to what position. Jared Jeffries was the starting center for a good portion of the year and they have him listed as a SF.

Sometime around December 1st his spot should open up.

Here is the link…

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/book/091021‘

Here is the footnote to the part of their conversation about Curry and James.

“12. His funniest-in-retrospect explanation was for the hideous Jerome James signing. As Isiah spun it, he signed James to be his center, then had a chance to land Curry a few weeks later and went for it. A bummed-out James felt betrayed and never dedicated himself, but hey, Isiah had a chance to get a young low-post stud like Curry and it was worth the risk. I swear, this made sense as he was saying it. He swayed me enough that I never had the urge to sarcastically quip, “Hey, anytime you can lock up Eddy Curry and Jerome James for $90 million and lose two lottery picks, you have to do it.”