(Friday, March 01, 2019 9:45:00 PM)
Kevin Durant claims he already feels validated and isn’t chasing achievements or a higher legacy. What this means regarding his free agency is anybody’s guess, mostly because Durant was so vague in an interview with NBC Sports Bay Area it’s impossible to draw any conclusions.
But with the Knicks…
(Friday, March 01, 2019 5:25:00 PM)
Willy Hernangomez understands why his buddy Kristaps Porzingis requested a trade from the Knicks.
“Yeah. Sometimes you can understand the plans change a little bit. I think KP wasn’t happy that they weren’t treating him the best way, the way he really deserves,” Hernangomez told the Daily News….
(Friday, March 01, 2019 9:13:57 PM)
Rookie walls are like unicorns to Allonzo Trier. They don’t exist. “That’s like a fairy tale,’’ Trier said. “A myth to me.’’ The undrafted rookie fell into a deep tailspin after he signed a fresh two-year contract in mid-December, but he has since resuscitated his season. In his past six games, the 23-year-old Trier has…
(Friday, March 01, 2019 12:58:37 PM)
Knicks veteran center DeAndre Jordan introduced rookie Mitchell Robinson to his old Clippers mentor Marcus Camby late Thursday in the locker room. It was the lone positive to come out of Thursday night’s late-game collapse against the Cavaliers. Camby, the ex-Knick shot-blocking center who starred on their 1999 Finals team and returned as a locker-room…
[NYTimes] Keeping Score: The Perimeter Can’t Protect You From Mitchell Robinson (Friday, March 01, 2019 1:22:35 PM)
The Knicks rookie is blocking shots at a rate unseen since the days of Manute Bol. On a bad team, he’s a reason to keep watching.
[NYTimes] On Pro Basketball: Luka Doncic Is a Sore Loser. He Is Also a Sensation. (Friday, March 01, 2019 1:41:50 PM)
The Mavericks rookie is drawing LeBron James comparisons and has “fast-forwarded” his team’s decision-making.
(Friday, March 01, 2019 12:45:09 PM)
The Knicks want Kevin Durant to be a savior for their franchise, but is that what the Warriors star wants in his next stage of his career?
84 replies on “Knicks Morning News (2019.03.02)”
The other day I called Zach Lowe out about sleeping on Mitch. In a mid-Feb pod he claimed there was no reason to watch the Knicks. He said Frank is out injured and DSJ is a nice piece but not all that interesting. Never mentioned Mitch. Now he’s gushing over Mitch. But if Zach was sleeping on Mitch, Nate Duncan is comatose. Someone wrote them asking who is the Knicks best young player. He then reframed the question in terms of ceiling and claimed DSJ and Knox have a higher ceiling than Mitch but Mitch might have a higher floor. Huh?
TBF, the former lawyer appeared to be taking a very narrow path where Mitch’s ceiling is lower because he’s not able to create his own shot. First of all, by that logic, most players in the NBA have a higher ceiling than Mitch. Knox could be the next Giannis and DSJ could be Westbrook. He wasn’t being responsive to the original question. Second, I think his weighting of vertical spacing + offensive rebounding + game changing defense versus shot creation is off. He appeared to be equating Mitch to a player like Mahinmi. Mitch isn’t that far from Gobert at the moment. Third, there’s no “might” about Mitch having the higher floor.
I know Zach and Nate have to cover 30 teams but missing Mitch in the NY market is a capital offense.
Someone mentioned the other day the possibility of trading Knox and another piece for Anderson. Interesting suggestion because Memphis is transitioning to a rebuild team. Anderson’s just 25yo on a terrific contract so I don’t know if Memphis would trade him. But what if Kyrie and AD end up in Boston. Would KD join the Knicks if we traded for Conley. If the price were Knox and our 2019 pick (not Zion), do you make that trade? Both KD and Conley are > 30yo.
Sounds good but I’m really leery of the Knicks and 30. Conley and Durant are excellent players, but I’d still rather roll the dice with youth and development- unless we sign a young star. Or trade for one as long as it doesn’t cost us MitchRob. Still though, you’d get no complaints from me if KD and Conley were on the team
I know the braintrust around here (dumbly) hates PER, but PER doesn’t hate Mitch (and as I’ve said for years, PER is a far more accurate and useful stat than the now debunked and defunct WP48.)
Does any metric not have a total hard on for Mitch?
RPM is meh on Mitch but I think that’s because, like VORP, the metric factors in total minutes played or MPG. He’s ranked 30th among centers at +.46.
PIPM ranks him 32nd across all NBA players.
@4
But nobody even touches WP48 anymore, just like we don’t touch PER. There’s really no reason to.
About Kyle Anderson, I like him, he’s a good defender and a good passer, but by this point he’s 25 and he hasn’t progressed at all, if anything he’s regressing a bit in his 5th season. He’s a nice player to have, but I’m not sure I’d target him on a trade or anything.
By the way, the completely useless, not worth a 2nd round pick Willy Hernangomez is 42nd in the entire league in PER, just ahead of Ben Simmons, Al Horford, Jrue Holiday and Chris Paul.
If we miss on Zion (I just assume we will), I feel like it’s a toss up between Ja and Barrett. I’d like Barrett to get his ts% up a little by the end of the year though. If we fall lower than that, I’d trade down for Culver or Hunter. Both look like useful future starters.
Straw man alert: no one said that WHG was totally useless, only that his market value was no more than what we got for him (2 probably decent 2nd rounders) either at the time or since, and therefore trading him was not a bad move. That has been established beyond doubt, hasn’t it? And isn’t it pretty much agreed around here that all of the box-score-based metrics do a poor job of measuring individual defensive impact, which is the main reason why WHG is not valued as his stats would suggest?
Also, one side of a lot of heated arguments here over the years were based on WP48, which some pretty smart people saw as vastly superior to PER when it really wasn’t at all. And if you go back and look at those arguments and replace WP48 with BPM or VORP, the conclusions are more correlated with PER than with WP48.
I guess Trae Young is getting good a LOT faster than I expected.
Tommy Beer
@TommyBeer
forget a rookie wall…
Over the Hawks last five games, Trae Young is averaging:
34.8 points,
10.4 assists,
4.4 rebounds,
4.6 made 3-pointers,
while shooting 47% from the floor, 49% from downtown and 92% from the FT line.
Those are insane numbers.
WHG has 9 DNP-CD in the last 10 games,
for a team fighting for a playoff spot.
So yes, PER is defintively the way to go for judging players…
I never saw the WHG debate as complicated.
He’s young, rebounds well, scores efficiently inside, can pass a bit, and can even knock down the occasional 3. What he can’t do is protect the rim well (which is kind of important for a C these days) and his overall defense has been highly suspect, especially this year.
On a net basis, I think most would agree he’s a young backup C that isn’t making a lot of progress.
Setting aside market value (markets are sometimes wrong and imho draft picks are being overvalued these days), I ask myself, what is the probability “on average” a team is going to get a player like Willy with the two 2nd round picks we got?
Granted, the Knicks have done well finding value in these kinds of situations. But that’s not the question to ask. We shouldn’t get less because we have been pretty good finding value in the 2nd round and among undrafted players. We should get what he is worth. If we add value that’s great.
I still don’t think on average teams are going to find a Willy with those 2 2nd round picks. Most of the players selected will be out of the league.
It wasn’t a terrible deal and maybe the 2nd rounders can be used to help facilitate a deal I do love since teams seem to love picks. But I’d still rather have Willy than the picks even though we don’t necessarily need a backup C.
PER has Enes Kanter ahead of Mitch Rob, Ben Simmons, and Chris Paul.
We’re signing Ellenson for the rest of the season.
@13 PER says Willy is better than Cody Zeller, Frank Kaminsky or Bismack Biyombo. WS48 says Cody, Willy and BB are about the same (well above average) and Frank is below average. BPM and VORP says Cody is far superior to BB and Willy, and Frank is terrible.
Mitchell Robinson is better than all of them in every stat.
@17
A stat (PER) for which a player that never play is the 42th best player in the league is a joke.
Can we all agree it’s extremely weird that Charlotte traded 2 second rounders for Willy and then promptly stapled him to the bench? They’re not exactly trotting out world beaters at center instead.
@19 Can we all agree that, after more than a year, having WHG’s trade as a topic is a waste of time?
(same as talking over and over about how good/bad was Phil)
We all have opinions about those topics and nobody’s gonna change his view only because we talk about them ad nauseam.
Let’s enjoy Mitch.
@18
Yes, and that was the bulk of the criticism wp48 received for years here, how it terribly overrated low usage guys who played small roles for good teams. It’s not really useful and we’ve all moved on from that. It’s like saying Cardi B is a far superior rapper than Nicki Minaj, like ok, a D+ is probably far superior than a F.
BPM has Mason Plumlee ahead of Ben Simmons, Luka Doncic, Joel Embiid and Andre Drummond
WS48 has Daniel Theis ahead of Steph, KD, Durant, etc.
VORP (which seems to have the fewest outliers but like aggregate WS seems to be playing time dependent) has Nikola Vucevic tied with Paul George and ahead of LeBron James, Steph Curry, and Kevin Durant
Heh, just checked boxscoregeeks.com and it looks like there’s only a single guy (Andres Alvarez) writing all of the articles for them nowadays whereas there used to a stable of deluded 20somethings. Andres is like the Japanese soldiers they found in caves after 1946 who were still fighting WW2.
@21 But it still revealed the bias towards low-usage high-efficiency scorers and rebounders over high-volume moderate efficiency scorers, defense being equal. I am suggesting that that bias still exists here but has become harder to defend now that BPM, which seems to account for usage, has become the stat du jour. For example, Melo had a MUCH higher OBPM than Chandler in 2012-13 but it was often argued back then that Chandler was the better offensive player that year.
@23 lol! Of course, no one wants to go back and re-litigate all of those heated battles, but it does seem that we’ve all gravitated towards the middle ground in evaluating players since then. That’s a good thing, right? Maybe our politicians can follow suit!
@20 this in nonsense, as a number of posters HAVE changed their view on that trade.
@21 also, regarding PER, there is still a legitimate argument here over interaction effects i.e. gravity created by high-volume medium-efficiency shooters like Russell Westbrook or Damian Lillard.
Kyle Anderson has been dealing with a nagging shoulder injury this year that has probably brought down his shooting %’s. I thought, once he recovers, this type of player (good defender and passer) would be a good compliment to ball-dominant players like Kyrie and could facilitate offense through KD & Mitch. Obviously that already assumes Kyrie & KD are signing here.
Yeah PER in and of itself is limited in value, but it gives a reasonable snap-shot of a player’s performance. Kevin Knox’s PER is 8.0, that seems about right..towards the very bottom of the league. Interesting to note that, for whatever reason, I pulled up Draymond Green’s stats and his rookie year (age 22) he had a horrible FG% (.327) and PER (7.1). Seeing this gives me hope for some of our younger guys.
If I had a nickel every time we had a “Young Player I Don’t Like is rated higher than Player I Do Like by Stat I Don’t Understand therefore said stat is bad” thread, I’d have a fuckton of nickels
Like if we want to sit here and discount per-possession stats because of playing time, or evaluate the accuracy of stats because they clash with player reputation, we might as well merge with r/nyknicks and drink bleach to increase our collective IQ
All I know is that here is the all time list of rookies eligible for the minutes leader scoreboard who have a PER of 21 or more.
Here is the all time list for rookies eligible for the minutes leader scoreboard who have a WS/48 of .200 or more.
Here is the all time list for rookies eligible for the minutes leader scoreboard who have a BPM of 6 or higher.
Here is the all time list for rookies eligible for the minutes leader scoreboard who accomplish all three.
So if the Knicks come out of the draft with Morant and whiff on the real max guys, would anyone be down to pay Noel something like 4/$48M and have the best defensive frontcourt in the league through 2023?
I should preface my statement by saying that Noel was actually one of my top acquisition targets for the Knicks the past few years. However, Mitch makes Noel redundant. The modern NBA requires 4’s to shoot 3’s and minimizes their impact on D.
On defense a 4 is so far from the basket that he can’t possibly generate the defensive value as a center can. When they were both near the basket, it was worth grabbing two phenom team defenders.
On offense, the value of shooting 3’s is so high, that by giving up on more than one offensive slot for a 3pt shooter is extremely costly. If we can grab Noel as a backup for Mitch/split minute, let’s do it. But, I don’t think it’s worth it unless one can shoot 3’s.
Still very tempting.
Robinson keeps up what he is doing he’s going to be a Superstar in this league. Those are some cool stats.
If Durant comes here they are going to be one Hell of a team quickly I think. Add our 2019 draft pick + Kyrie. I hope it happens. I’d love to see some meaningful playoff basketball soon.
@30
No, his PER is too low, I’d rather pay that money to WHG.
🙂
I share EB’s doubts, and I’m a bit hesitant at 4/48, I’m less worried at the 4/30-4/32 range or a bit more but with some team protection (options and/or not guaranteed years).
Noel and Mitch occupy the same niche and they probably shouldn’t be on the floor at the same time, so I’d spend the money somewhere else. But he’s definitely a good player and that would be reasonable value for him.
@32
From your keyboard to God’s eyes. Would a Morant/Irving backcourt work if he don’t get the top pick?
Noel for anything around 8-10 million would be amazing value, and the Knicks could stagger his and Mitch’s minutes to get a team that has a great defender + efficient scorer at center for the entire 48 minutes. I don’t know if I’d go for him considering Center should be the least important position to fill if the Knicks are looking to be competitive, and there’s no point in signing Noel if we’re not aiming to be truly competitive. It would be amazing if we could somehow snatch him on the mid level exception after signing Durant and someone else, but I doubt he’d sign for that much.
It probably would be fine. One of Zion, Barrett, or Morant would be fine if we attract a superstar or two.
I just think that the drop-off in production per dollar spent is less at C than at other positions. Paying $12 mill for a guy who you can replace for less than half that at a modest decrease in production, especially when you hopefully have a starter at that position locked up on a much smaller deal, it makes no sense to me. $12 mill is starter money. I’d rather throw it at a 2-way wing and back up Mitch with someone like KOQ or Vonleh.
The thing with Mitch is he’s also such a great perimeter defender that the idea of having another rim protector isn’t completely redundant.
No, but is it the best use of cap space? I don’t think so.
Its not completely redundant, but diminishing returns heavily influence the lineups effectiveness on offense and defense for 36 min a night.
I guess the question for me turns on how it affects our ability to add in max contracts in the future.
Value-wise, Noel is a near max player to me in a vacuum. But the NBA rewards fitting in as many max-worthy players as possible. Noel is not max-worthy when playing alongside Robinson.
How much is 12 min of superstar play worth at the opportunity cost for a 36 min player?
I can’t get over the fact that the perfect 4 to complete a front line with Durant and Mitchell would be Porzingis.
That isn’t to say I regret trading him. I wouldn’t be willing to give him a max contract just bc he’d be a great fit when healthy. And also his ego doesn’t seem like it would accept a lesser role supporting a true superstar (although it’s going to have to in Dallas now).
There was a Lowe/Begley podcast btw where they both said they were told Porzingis wasn’t happy about the idea of teaming up with Durant and wouldn’t want to cede his role to him.
@41
But that’s considering you find another guy who can play 36 minutes at another position at the same production level, which is not easy at all. Like of course if we could sign a wing player that produces at a similar level than Noel for the same price, then yes, it’s becomes a opportunity cost question. It’s not an easy answer and it depends on so much stuff.
Jeez, that’s pretty delusional thinking by KP.
“I’d prefer not to concede the primary scoring role to one of the greatest offensive players of all time”
Good riddance.
I mean yeah, if the expectation is that Mitch can play 82 games at 36 minutes a night, there’s no reason for Noel to be here, nor a reason for him to sign here.
I actually do want Noel to make some money somewhere. He’s an outstanding basketball player and not even 25 yet. Still don’t understand why Colangelo traded him for Justin Anderson and some draft assets. Then again, I still don’t understand those shirt collars.
Do you know just what kind of responses I get when I say, “I’m a Knicks fan, and we won the Porzingis trade?”
Sort of generic off-day question here:
If we took the board’s regulars and turned the Knicks’ front office into a simple-majority democracy back in 2012-13, do you think this team would have won more games than it has? Do you think the team would be better positioned to go into the 2019-20 through 2022-23 seasons?
As much as I love Mitch I don’t know if we can expect him to do that next year, so I like the idea of pairing him with another center if you can get one at good value. Noel is better than Jordan but I do think Jordan has a lot to offer in addition to his play, e.g. leadership, mentorship, relationship with Durant (and pretty much every NBA player; he’s arguably the most popular player in the NBA).
So yeah, if I could get either Jordan or Noel around $8-10mm I would probably do it.
@47
Oh yes, for sure. Just avoiding the Bargnani, Noah and Melo mega max moves would have been a great thing, it would probably lead to fewer wins in the first couple of years but then a much better position since.
It’s a tough question because there were far more Phil supporters here at the time and people who believed the moves weren’t bad, but I still firmly believe we could have at least done a better job than Phil Jackson.
Well, I’m not well versed in the salary cap and contract rules, and I don’t really have relationships with players and agents and I have no experience in negotiating contracts but I SURE AS HELL WOULD HAVE KNOWN NOT TO GIVE JOAKIM NOAH FOUR YEARS AND SEVENTY TWO MILLION DOLLARS
Barrett only shot 8-18 but he filled the box score again with 10 rebounds and 7 assists. I don’t think we’re going to be mad if we draft him.
Yeah, it’s kind of a silly question, since as a consensus we look much better than the FO in retrospect.
@43 but it’s not that simple, a Noel at $12 AAV doesn’t have to be replaced by another player at that salary, the money be used as part of a max deal or several low-ball deals, or to facilitate a trade. It’s more a question of what is the best way to build a team based on what we already have, taking our cap situation, current market conditions, and the way the game is played into account. $12 mill is a lot to tie up when we have glaring needs at other positions.
@47
Of course the board will pat itself on the back and say Yes, but…we are still litigating some small moves (Willy, for example), and there was some dissent on the major moves (a couple Melo-lovers), and a few we may have got kind of wrong (WCS instead of KP? Cole capable of playing more than 15 mpg?), but we would have avoided almost all of the crucial errors. Which is a list too long to recap, really, starting with Melo, through the nadir (Bargs), to the paper cut death if the current crew (Mudiay trade, Hez signing).
So while we might not have identified all the opportunities, we certainly would have prevented the catastrophies.
A really good thread once the season ended would be a specific list of moves people here would make as GM, taking into account salary cap restrictions, the that would never fly, etc. Let’s get everyone on the record with recommendations… Far more difficult than saying, Trading for Bargs is unbelievably stupid!
Perry is the first GM that I think we wouldn’t collectively have done a better job than.
I don’t know if a KB collective would have drafted Robinson. The Porzingis situation was difficult to manage. We obv wouldn’t have traded Willy, either, and I think those two 2nds will eventually help us more than Willy would have.
But yeah we could’ve done a better job than Phil and the week where Mills had his own show.
The Knicks have had a lot of WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU KIDDING ME kind of transactions over the past couple of decades. Those kind of transactions where you know the instant it is announced that it will never work out, the kind that are almost impossible to rationalize. The Hardaway free agent contract, the Joakim Noah signing, the Derrick Rose trade and the Andrea Bargnani trade are the most obvious recent examples.
I don’t think a collective Knickerblogger GM panel would have made any transactions as woefully bad as those four. Those are transactions made by people who absolutely had no idea what the fuck they were doing.
@53
Well, but most of the dissent in those questions is related to things we as fans can’t possibly know. Were there better offers available for Hernangomez at any time? Why did they decide to trade him when they did? There’s a lot of stuff we can’t even speculate on because we truly have no idea.
I can come out here and say I would offer Noel a good deal, but maybe he really fucking hates New York for whatever reason, so he accepts less to play wherever else. That’s mostly the core of the big never ending questions we have around here, in my opinion, speculating on stuff we don’t know and won’t know.
What we can know is that Joakim Noah was washed, Bargnani sucked, Melo was done as a productive player, Tyson Chandler was generally better than he was given credit for, so it makes sense that the consensus on the board is generally more likely to be right on the big moves that are related to the productivity of veteran players.
The only arguments I can think of for the Grunwald/Mills/Phil/Mills again/Perry side are:
-We probably wouldn’t have drafted Porzingis (though if we took Turner we’d be better off)
-We probably would’ve taken De’anthony Melton over Mitch
I’m inclined to think we could’ve made up for the value lost from not making those two moves by not doing a ton of the dumbest possible shit imaginable
It’s a shame Porzingis didn’t want to see if some kind of arrangement could be worked out where Durant takes a backseat during November and then Porzingis takes a backseat for all of the other months
I still get a lousy feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I think about the Porzingis trade, even though I believe it was for the best. I wonder if there’s a clinical name for that…seller’s remorse?
I don’t think we would have drafted Knox and the board was pretty split on Ntilikina.
I suppose if we really struck out on maxes next year, there’s MUCH worse ways to spend our cap than on Noel. I do think it’s better to stay flexible and attempt to grab role players at a decent price.
All that said, I do want Noel. I would feel bad if he ended up in another philly situation tho, odd man out as a young big.
Hell of an experiment. Who plays the 4?
Yeah, Knox for sure wouldn’t have been the pick, I think Mikal was probably the pick, and Ntilikina would probably still be picked, unfortunately with the help of me and others, but it would have been crazy close.
Noel got shipped out of Philly because of off the court stuff.
I would not have picked Ntilikina that high. I did think he’d be better than he’s been. Never believed in his PG ability.l, but figured 3&D would be there. (That said, I don’t think I’m considered a regular.)
@64, what happened there? I assumed he was sent away because of Embiid and Okafor were crowding the front court.
Zing!
No one wanted Knox. Most were ok with Mikal, a few of us preferred SGA. The board was divided on Frank, and that was a mistake (though I still hope against hope it wasn’t). KP was more of a “???”
I feel like some were justifying the DRose trade, though. That wasn’t unanimous (but it should have been)!
Johnny Walker can be the future of light heavyweight in MMA if his stupidity doesn’t get in his way.
If we were the GMs of the Knicks we would constantly be taking on bad contracts for picks for all eternity until we got to draft the whole first round one year.
@70 of course, that would be the year when the draft was one player deep and that player would break his foot in the opening day layup line…
I dunno, he’s kind of a palooka in my liquor cabinet…
Man, ever since people started paying attention to the Nets they’ve been in total free fall.
That narrative got way overblown. They’ve been a .500 Pythag team for awhile
What JK47 said.
Bargnani, Courtney Lee, Joakim Noah, NTC or hell even re-signing Melo, Tim Hardaway. There are so many things we never would have done. Myles Turner is a great call him. I loved that kid and took him third in fantasy. I might have taken WCS IRL too, loved him also.
I never would have traded for Eddy Curry.
It’s funny to me that people periodically still bag on WP here. Like him or not, and most people don’t, Berri played a significant role in popularizing a moneyball approach to basketball. He was by no means the first guy saying all this stuff. He built on the foundation that Dean Oliver laid out in Basketball on Paper in 2005. Hollinger was out there, Pelton, Chaikin, etc. And Kurylo! Where is that handsome bastard? This site was actually one of the few places on the internet you could easily find the Four Factors.
Berri though really pushed the conversation out to a mass audience with polemical stuff that ran in big media outlets and generated some heat. With his blog and book, with his attacks on Hollinger, he made it interesting and kind of fun. Who would have thought that Malcolm Gladwell, at the height of his fame, would review a book on applying econometrics to basketball?
I don’t think it takes a genius to see that missing a shot is kind of like making an out and should be avoided at all costs. Or that 3 points are more than 2 points. Or that shooting 80% from the foul line is better than shooting 40% from the floor. Or that turnovers are bad. But in the Dark Ages before Pelton and Oliver and Hollinger and Berri no one really talked about any of it. And now they do and the entire NBA has changed. It probably would have happened anyway but I do think a small group of people in some remote areas of the internet played a part in it.
And as I have said a million times, there is a lot of stuff in the WOW beyond the metric that no one know really disputes and has become conventional wisdom.
Yes! Hit my limit!…
I’m with you, Owen. As I said, at the end of the day, we’ve all gravitated towards a reasonable center between the various extremes. I, for one, admit to learning some hard lessons after being a bit late to the party. But also at the end of the day, it’s pretty clear that Berri went too far in his methodology.
wow, lebron looks like he’s aged 10 years since the groin injury…he just moves soooooooo slow now…
he’s still really big and strong, and, can pass great – but, his defense is near non-existent lately…
the suns looking good tonight for the win…
Man, if the Lakers lose to the Suns… at what point does LeBron simply snaps and has a breakdown? Or is he more worried about Space Jam 2 and doesn’t give a fuck about this year?
I’m a baseball stat nerd, and I was reading Bill James books in the mid-80’s, so I’ve seen how statistical analysis in sports improves and improves over the years. Bill James took the work of Pete Palmer and improved on it, then the disciples of Bill James took his work and improved on that, and then things like Pitch FX and detailed batted ball data became available and now there are very few things that we don’t know. We can peg the value of baseball players pretty accurately. The formulas the Bill James invented in the 80’s are obsolete now, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t valuable building blocks.
I know it’s one of those “iconic” flicks, but, I don’t think i ever saw the first space jam…
dang, lakers making it close…booker really sucks…
just checked the boxscore, booker actually had a good game…
time to seriously cut lebron’s minutes…
the last few drafts really angered me…. i probably was wrong on the kp pick… but having winslow on his contract vs kp on a max makes me think it might’ve worked out anyway…
and the last two really took the cake…. i really liked dsj but the pick really should’ve been zach collins…. and he was probably not on our radar at all because of kp…. that is why drafting bpa is the only way to go especially when you’re as bad as us… and knox was just bad… the definition of a landmine…. i daydream sometimes of having a squad of winslow… collins and troy brown… but alas…
so we have dsj and robinson… and cap space.. which isn’t nothing… but it’s also a far cry from what could have been with at least some diligence….
Melo should be happy he didn’t get picked up by the Lakers or he’d be getting the blame for this.
The problem with Berri was not that his model had some flaws (it does). It’s that he and his minions knew close to nothing about basketball when they created that model. When confronted with obvious issues that needed to be addressed, rather than accept the criticism and improve the model they insisted that everyone else was wrong. It was one of the worst cases of cognitive bias I have ever seen.
There are rare times when everyone is wrong, but when a lot of the players you have ranked at the top of the league have trouble getting off the bench, it’s probably you that have a problem.
Coaches have long had a boxscore to work with and can generally see which players are helping/hurting the team by how it does when they are on or off the court. The idea should have been to give them more data and a better understanding of it so they could get there quicker. I think creating these catch all ratings was one of the biggest mistakes the stats community made. I guess that’s what the fans and media wanted, but all those models are a “fail”. Basketball is not baseball.