New Guy:
Is there a site that keeps track of the amount of times a player is doubled?

So to me, the answer is – when he’s on the floor with Amare, Chandler, and Lin, they should let him be the primary PNR ball handler every now and again, or run that awesome play where he is the roll man and Amare or TC cut to the hoop at the right time. Or play him in the post and have him either force a double team to get the ball movement going, or do his thing and score, with other guys spotting up behind the arc or crashing the offensive boards.

As I wrote that, I just realized that this starting lineup really is just not well put together. There are a bunch of guys with duplicated strengths and no real deadeye shooter to really space things out.

Anyway, it’s ridiculous to think that drawing double teams is not useful at some level to the offense. All you have to do is watch the game we just played against the Bulls, where the entire Knicks defense was focused on Rose, leading to 35 “open” jumpers for other Bulls players (according to @stats_hoops – it’s the twitter account that gets #s from sportvu, that awesome camera system that tracks every last thing that ever happens on the court), not to mention the poor positioning that (in part) led to the 22 o-rebounds. The question is what you do with the ball when double teamed. If you go 1-on-2 like Eddy Curry, it’s bad. If you pass the ball to the open man forcing rotations or an open shot, it’s a good thing. The problem with Melo is that he’s too inconsistent with ball movement, and that the other players on the team tend to sit around and watch him (prob because he’s inconsistent with his ball movement).

I think they really need to get the ball his Melo’s hands again. Play Lin 32 min/game, have him do his thing on 2/3 of the possessions. The other 1/3, let Melo have the ball in the post or as the PNR ball handler and do his thing. I know this whole firestorm happened right after a tough loss to the Bulls, but if you watch the offense, there were A LOT of promising things going on. Lin running PNR with Melo. Lin running PNR with Amare. Lin running PNR with Melo or TC with Amare cutting to the basket. Melo running PNR with TC/Amare. We didn’t lose that game because of the offense, which is what everyone is talking about here. We lost because we got absolutely murdered on the defensive boards, which to be honest, is mostly a PF/C problem.

The +/- #s in the beck article obviously aren’t good, and the not-being-in-the-huddle stuff is worrisome, but I really feel like most of this is media sensationalism.

Juany8: Jesus guys, I know ruruland defends Melo almost to the point of irrationality, but pretending that creating double teams is meaningless unless there’s a recorded stat is just dumb. There’s a lot of perfectly good arguments to make against Melo without ignoring how basketball works. Until there’s some way to measure both skill sets and how teammates impact one another, most advanced stats are childish and flawed from a mathematical perspective, not just a basketball perspective (let’s just say if I ever made an objective decision in my job based on something like WS/48 I’d be fired, my boss expects me to do better than a high schooler lol)Melo has been historically better at drawing double teams than all but around 5-10 guys in the league, you can ignore this if you want, but that’s why he gets the level of respect he does in this league. I don’t see how it’s hard to understand that when a player like Afflalo takes an open, high efficiency shot, it’s because his defender considered him a lesser threat than the player being helped on. That means that defenses don’t game plan much around Afflalo, and they certainly don’t consider stopping him a priority. Again, there’s plenty of valid arguments to make against Melo (and certainly Amar’e) without pretending this is fantasy basketball, and that the result matters more than the way its achieved (this leads to teams like Miami getting all excited because they blow away teams with fast break opportunities in the regular season, ignoring that those opportunities WILL go away late in the playoffs. But hey, they have a high point differential, who cares how they got it right?)

and Eddy Curry and Zach Randolph both playing down low was going to be unguardable and result in tons of open kickouts.
BTW Afflalo had been going off over the last two weeks or at least posting 20+ games regularly.

Melo has been historically better at drawing double teams than all but around 5-10 guys in the league, you can ignore this if you want, but that’s why he gets the level of respect he does in this league. I don’t see how it’s hard to understand that when a player like Afflalo takes an open, high efficiency shot, it’s because his defender considered him a lesser threat than the player being helped on. That means that defenses don’t game plan much around Afflalo, and they certainly don’t consider stopping him a priority. Again, there’s plenty of valid arguments to make against Melo (and certainly Amar’e) without pretending this is fantasy basketball, and that the result matters more than the way its achieved (this leads to teams like Miami getting all excited because they blow away teams with fast break opportunities in the regular season, ignoring that those opportunities WILL go away late in the playoffs. But hey, they have a high point differential, who cares how they got it right?)

Maybe JR Smith holds the answer. He still has Melo (but not Nene), so his TS% should be in line with his career norm or higher. But it’s a career low! Same with Baron. Same with Amare. Even Novak is down 7 pts from last year. Hmm…

ruruland: Uh, ok. It was more of an aside, making sure you’refactuallycorrect, as I’ve been throughout the thread. Nene’s efficiency is down this year, too,and I’ve already defeated your argument regarding usage.Sure, there are fluctuations with every guy in the league. But to write off the overwhelming pattern, the very obvious trend of guys consistently playing their best andmost efficient ball with Melo is to deny my argument andreality on the grounds that anything can be deemed arbitrary. It’s really sad to see someone who apparently claims to be statistically tostoop to that kind of rhetoric.

Nene has been playing hurt all year. It’s not fair to lay his poorer numbers on having Melo off his team.

ruruland: . . Your biases are too obvious. .

LOL