Knicks Morning News (2018.07.21)

Also, I’m not buying that the Spurs are regressing yet. They lost Parker who was absolutely garbage last year, Kyle Anderson (who I like) and Danny Green who was also garbage, and replaced them with DeRozan, who had a pretty good regular season, Poeltl, who was quietly very good and Belinelli who is a very good shooter, plus whatever Lonnie Walker can contribute.

They won 47 games without Kawhi and now they add DeRozan in his place. I hate the fit with Aldridge and Murray, but they have good shooting with Belinelli and Bertans and I really wouldn’t put it past Popovich to coach the hell out of DeRozan on this team.

You make some valid points, but last year w/o Kawhi the Spurs went from 61 to 47 wins and from the ECFs to getting spanked by GSW in the first round. LMA is 33, Gasol and Ginobili are ancient and I’m sure they know there will be no long playoff run for them so who knows if they can get the juices flowing. Murray is a good defender but can’t shoot. Green had an off year but still made over 36% of his 3’s and had a positive BPM and VORP (6th and 4th on the team, respectively.) Parker played less than 20mpg. LMA is 33. Anderson is a big loss.

DeRozan is another not Pop’s kind of player (along with LMA and Gay) and his BPM and VORP were only slightly better than Danny Green’s.

At the very least, I would say that the Spurs have at least as low of a floor and a significantly lower ceiling than the Lakers. They have virtually no 2-way players and can’t really shoot 3’s. They need guys like Murray, Bertans and Walker to step up, or for DeRozan to transform himself into a legit star. My guess is that the Lakers finish with a better record and go further in the playoffs.

Between Rondo, weird Lance, crazy Beas and a-hole LaVar, I actually think the Lakers will self destruct at some point. There’s no Pat Riley leading with a steady hand. I think it’s too much.

@3 that’s the fear, although I think Rondo’s stuff is overblown and Beas and Lance have both been on excellent teams without derailing them (and Beas has played with LeBron on a Heat team that lost in the finals). Beas says some crazy shit but hasn’t been much of a distraction to any of his recent teams.

And for all his craziness, LaVar was one of the first to predict that LeBron was coming. OTOH, if he shoots his mouth off, that could grease the skids for a Ball for Leonard swap.

When I look at what the Spurs are doing, I think back to the evolution of the Oakland A’s under Billy Beane. The Moneyball team put an emphasis on slow guys who walked a lot, and then as the OBP obsession filtered throughout MLB, Beane recognized that those kinds of guys were no longer undervalued assets, and began turning his focus towards building a better defense, even at the cost of OBP.

With the emphasis on 3-point shooting from every position, is it possible that mid-range specialists are becoming undervalued assets? I’m not saying DeRozan and Aldridge in particular, given how highly they’re paid, but if you could put together a team of cheap Trey Burke types that nobody else wants because their specialty is long 2s, might you have something that could pleasantly surprise people?

A midrange shooting team can only win if they have an excellent defense and can limit opposing threes. The Knicks lost so many games last year—to terrible teams like the Hawks—simply because the other team shot better from outside the arc. Aside from Frank, there’s not one good perimeter defender on the team.

Since this has become Lakerblogger I’ll put my two cents in.

I think Magic sees Ball, Ingram, Hart and Kuzma + draft picks as trade pieces. I think he sees all the one year deals as checks he can eventually write to FA’s. So, I think there are two more stars coming. I imagine, Kawhi and AD next summer.

Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if dominoes started to fall earlier than that. I just have a hard time imagining them playing a whole season with this roster. I mean, Lonzo seems totally lost. How does he get any run next to LBJ or Rondo?

Question: Let’s say they cut bait on the idea of Kawhi, who might be a trade target right now?

@1

Yeah, I agree, there’s a lot that could go wrong with the Spurs. I just have an irrational confidence in Popovich I guess, and I’m feeling he’ll know how to channel DeRozan’s anger about being traded in a productive way for the team. I think their future looks terrible, but that they will put together at least one good season with this core before inevitably having to look towards a massive rebuild.

With the emphasis on 3-point shooting from every position, is it possible that mid-range specialists are becoming undervalued assets?

I think it’s a brilliant question, and thanks for the info about Billy Beane changing course once the entire league adjusted to his strategy. (strategy = looking for market inefficiencies, NOT the result of this strategy which was looking to improve OBP).

It’d be interesting to experiment with it and look for players who…

1. Rate high on statistical models
2. Do not shoot 3’s very well, and
3. Are paid less than what the average player makes given his said statistical model score.

If Demar Derozan and LMA are on this list — wow. I’d prioritize going after the other players on this list.

I still feel like the lakers need a center, I’m just not sure who is crazy enough. Can Birdman come out of retirement? What about Paul Mokeski? How tall is Kim Jong-un?

Jowles, you have any thoughts on the Moneyball question?

I won’t miss Beasley in NY at all. Had he stayed you could count on him going off at some point and producing 2 or 3 meaningless wins. He’s also the not the kind of player you want mentoring the younger guys.

@11 I hate the Lakers, but if I were them I would target Jimmy Butler. He’d be cheaper than Kawhi and they could likely get him sooner.

From yesterday’s thread – “I have come to believe that the entire GOP was bought with Siberian oil money” . It’s completely exaggerated statements like this and others (“Trump is a Russian spy” , “Putin must have something on him” , “Traitor” ) that make the stupid shit that comes out of Trump’s mouth sound almost reasonable in comparison. For someone “colluding with the Russians” it’s kind of counterintuitive that he’s approved more arms sales to Ukraine, expelled dozens of Russian diplomats, and levied new sanctions against the Russians.

Yeah, given that 50% on 2s equals 33.3% on 3s, it’s tough for midrange shooting to be truly valuable. The only arguments I can see:
1. Against good, switching defenses in the playoffs, the expected points per possession goes down and being able to generate middling efficiency midrange shots becomes more valuable. The same holds true in late clock situations generally. Still, as someone like Harden shows, you can still generate 3s, FTs, and shots at the rim in isolation.
2. If you can make defense adjust to the midrange, it could make other shots more open/valuable. I would argue that’s bad strategy by the defense though. Maybe this could happen if a player consistently hit like 60% of their midrange shots.

The question is not are long 2’s better than 3’s. Clearly they are not. The question is are good players that cannot shoot 3’s become so undervalued that adding them at a good price is a winning strategy.

@25

But that doesn’t really happen in today’s NBA, in fact it always seems that the mid range shooters are the ones overvalued, like DeRozan, Wiggins, Melo, Aldridge etc.

I would say being very good at making mid range shots is so hard, since it requires footwork, good handle, athleticism that there’s no middle ground, there’s very few players that can do it, while you can find guys who can hit open 3s at super low wages even (and it’s much easier to create an open 3 than a very good mid range shot I think).

Like, can you think of a very good mid range shooter that’s currently undervalued? I might be missing the mark entirely here but I really can’t recall many players that fit this definition. Most of them are considered superstars and paid accordingly even when they aren’t superstar level.

I think it could theoretically happen down the line but it really still hasn’t happened. Maybe in a few years.

Jowles, you have any thoughts on the Moneyball question?

As usual, I agree with Bruno. This is a big, macro-level question, one I’m struggling to organize my thoughts around, but the difference between the value of successful 20-footers and a 23-footers is so large, and the degree of difficulty so narrow, that it seems that you’d never be able to pay so little that you reach the break-even point.

It’s like bunting: there’s no market for bunt specialists because the expected value of a bunt is so low. It got moneyballed out of the league, but that market deflation looks permanent.

I think you’d have to create 2-, 3- and 4-point zones to balance the value of these kinds of shots.

Say, 0-15 = 2
15-25 = 3
25+ = 4

Perhaps then you could flatten the distribution of shots, and it could lead to some very exciting positions.

It would be very interesting to run on-court experiments with different shooting-zone incentives to see how it affects the xPPS value of each shot, as well as the spacing between players when you have 3, as opposed to 2 outcomes (sans FTA) for any given FGM. As it stands, I don’t see the long midrange shot coming back into fashion, so long as players are learning to shoot from deep from an early age.

I think the more interesting question would not be mid range specialists against 3 point shooters, but iso heavy players against spot up shooters. Houston’s offense is heavily based around the 3 pointer but it’s also one of the most iso heavy offensive sets we’ve seen in a while. In that environment, a guy like Eric Gordon for example is extremely valuable, as he not only can shoot 3s and drive to the rim but create a bit for his team, all coming from iso sets or one screen, go actions. Gordon makes considerably less money than guys like Allen Crabbe or Otto Porter Jr who are mostly spot up shooters.

There’s a lot of side stuff here, Gordon’s injury history and age, the inflation of the cap recently and all, but there might be a market inefficiency in terms of undervaluing players who can create efficient offense off of iso sets, as long as they add other skills to the mix (3 point shooting, free throws, passing, defense etc). Lou Williams is another guy who seems heavily underpaid to me now and fits the same definition.

Again, just food for thought.

Harden shot 34.6% on tightly guarded 3s. Aldridge shot 45.8% on wide open 2s >10ft and 44.8% on open 2s >10ft. DeRozan shot 47.1% on wide open 2s >10ft and 40.8% on open 2s >10ft

Of course if you have Harden you shoot threes, because he can hit at that rate even defended. But he’s so good, he’s not a representative example. If you are the Spurs your three point shot has to have a 30% chance of going in to match Aldridge’s points per shot on open two pointers. Does Patty Mills hit three pointers at better than 30% when he’s tightly guarded? If not, it’s better for him to pass to an open Aldridge.

Note: I don’t know how to look up Mills’ shooting percentage when guarded, or I would have.

Speaking of undervalued players, the Clippers re-sign another one, Montrezl Harrell for 2 years 12 million.

I’m a big fan, can’t believe no one else took at least an extended look at him.

Most of the Lakers FA signings are market inefficiency guys, though in many cases the inefficiency is “he’s a complete knucklehead.”

Prepare yourself for a year of references to the island of misfit toys….

Predictable 2018-2019 Lakers headline:

“______ and _______ have to be separated after exchanging words in practice”

(any combination of Rondo, Stephenson and McGee)

It’s quite startling to me that Mills shoots only 1% worse than Harden on contested threes. Is Patty Mills really good at threes or is the typical spread between players much smaller than I thought?

Apparently he’s much better han Mills or Harden.

@44

And shoots almost TWO threes per game! I mean, you can’t really argue with the percentages, we’ve got a bargain on our hands.

I think the 3-point shot brings excitement to the game, but it causes a problem when it trivializes the long 2. There is a solution: eliminate the corner 3 and add 3 more feet to the arc. Make the 3 a tougher shot by a full yard. That reduces the percent and evens the values better.

I like the idea of making the court overall bigger and the 3pt line 25 feet.

I honestly have no issue with guys like Curry for example making 30 footers. He’s a transcendental superstar who has worked tirelessly on becoming one of the top shooters ever, it’s a strategy and one that I don’t think is cheap or lessens the game in anyway. Anyone can take those shots, only the absolute top tier can consistently make them.

However it does bother me that tons of guys can just sit on the corner doing nothing and shoot 3s and get rewarded so much by what no longer should be considered a tough shot (or at least a shot tough enough to warrant 3 over 2).

Make it so that 3s are harder to hit, so specialists and superstars are rewarded for their work, while adding some relevance to a more 2 point oriented game.

25 foot arch and the bigger court makes sense. I would go to a full 100 feet in length and 60 feet wide. 60 feet wide allows for about 5′ of space for a corner 3 – if the 3 point distance was uniform. That’s another thing I would promote.

Alsep, I agree. I think often lost in the rush to doing more and more three pointers is the fact that an open two can be much better than a contested three. If you are Mike Antoni and you have a lot of good three point shooters you can design an offense that gets lots of open threes, but if you don’t have personnel to do that, available two pointers may be better shots.

Did you know that the Rockets had the sixth-best defense in the NBA this past season?

That D’Antoni probably gets too much grief over the defenses on his teams. When he’s had the personnel, his teams have been good on D. He just happened to coach Steve Nash and Amare Stoudemire during his prime years.