Knicks Morning News (2019.03.12)

@1 you mean unreal plus-minus, the same stat that ranks Mitch 53rd among C’s? ok.

Doc Rivers and Jerry West deserve some votes for coach and executive of the year. The Clippers continue to rebuild in brilliant fashion and Doc continues to get more out of them than the talent they put on the court. They are basically a #2 scorer (Gallo), a 6th man of the year (Lou Williams), and a bunch of good cheap young role players. Yet they keep hanging around in the tougher western conference and may be playing their best ball of the year right now. I can’t see how at least one of the superstars doesn’t join that team in free agency.

@4

Clippers can get Kawhi and possibly trade for AD.

NBA PLUS MINUS (like all on/off data) seems to suffer from sample size issues. I suspect they try to overcome that by also partly using either boxscore metrics, Bayesian analysis, or team Net Rating (SRS) to anchor the ratings to something (as far as know it’s not public). I know they also use multiple years and weight it towards recent data.

That works better “on average” if you are looking at 500 players.

But the very reason to look at things other than the boxscore, perceptions, or team level data is to try to pick up on all the things an individual player does especially well or poorly that are not in the boxscore, not easy to observe, or that some players on the team are a lot better at than others at on average. Those things will tend to show up over time in raw Net Ratings or via lineup analysis over a large enough sample (the problem being how long and what happens if the player is improving or deteriorating short term).

The Knicks are a horrible defensive team overall, but the team does have a few very good individual defenders. I suspect ALL them are underrated on NBA Plus/Minus. Perhaps it’s because team level, boxscore, etc.. data is leaking into the individual ratings.

@6

People have been saying the Clippers are the favorites to land Kawhi, but I guess it somewhat depends on how happy he is in Toronto and how far they go this year. I’m not sure why Durant would’t consider them also. He’s already in CA and he’d be “the man” on the Clippers.

I’d like to see Gallo in his appropriate role for the first time in his career. He’s not rally a #1 guy, yet he was cast in that role in Denver and is in that role now in LA. He’s had a great career on the offensive side hitting 3s, getting to the FT line, and not taking many dumb shots. When you consider how often he’s played with or while recovering from injuries that have surely slowed him down and caused some bad stretches on the court, I don’t think he’s gotten the credit he deserves as a player.

I actually think Bol is more like KP, but even better off the dribble somehow.
The injury is worrisome, sure, but hopefully he’s healed and can fill out a little more. I agree that he’s maybe a reach at 5, but from 7 down, I’d consider him.

In a trade down from #3 for 2 Boston picks, would you really rather have Bennett than say, Bol and White?

Individual defense isn’t really quite as important as it once was. Today it’s more of a team concept— you want to have switchable wings who can credibly guard guys a little bit bigger and smaller than they are, backed up by the anchor of the defense, the rim protecting/shot blocking center. If your rim protector is a little bit mobile and can also guard a wing out in space (like Clint Capela) then even better.

Defense is more of a system thing these days. Those wings on the Bucks, they’re all solid defenders. But when you play them together, and they execute a coherent and disciplined defensive system, we’ll then you’ve really got something.

But you really need some wings with good size and length if you want to pull this off. The Knicks don’t have guys like that. The Knicks need versatile wing defenders in the worst way, which is why I’m okay with Barrett or Culver if a top two pick doesn’t pan out.

I agree with you JK, and there’s the issue that Bol’s rim protection might be duplicative and hurt his overall value to us (though I’d still consider him lower down because of backup minutes and his top-rate shooting). My concern with Barrett is will he ever even be an average 3pt shooter? If not, that really hurts an offense (see: Celtics when Smart is on the floor).

I have two major concerns with Bol: his health (including his knees, feet, and pretty much his entire body) and his ability to move in concert with the fast-paced NBA game. I see KP with less of the positives and more of the negatives. Let’s not pretend that he will get many of those wide-open deep 3’s in the NBA, or will be able to create shots off the dribble, or defend anyone in space, or box out anyone with a lower center of gravity (look where his hips are.)

If we draft him at #5, I’ll obviously be disappointed but would hope for a KP-like outcome…high trade value based on hype and flashes of brilliance between long spells of injuries and ineffectiveness.

Bol Bol is the guy we draft if the sure things are gone. I want upside and Bol Bol has upside.

To the extent Bol Bol is an unknown quantity–and I’m not sure we’ve drafted many unknown quantities–it’s all good, that can’t be said about Frank Ntilikina.

On the other hand, Knox and KP were both known quantities. MitchGod was also an unknown quantity. I don’t see the issue here.

Stimulating there are sample size issues what exactly did/does KP have over this guy. KP wasn’t and probably isn’t today as good a shooter. KP was a horrible rebounder. KP never showed a nice jump hook over his right shoulder ever that he could use in the post.

I’m not sure how a 7’3 guy is going to have trouble getting a 3 ball off on the next level in a motion offense (there is only one Mitch Robinson in the NBA). If he can just shoot spot up 3’s and obstruct the rim occasionally( 9’6″ standing reach) he’s a pretty formidable force.

He’ doesn’t need to be a track star to be a very effective player with his obvious skill set.

Individual defense isn’t really quite as important as it once was. Today it’s more of a team concept— you want to have switchable wings who can credibly guard guys a little bit bigger and smaller than they are, backed up by the anchor of the defense, the rim protecting/shot blocking center.

You’re right, individual defense matters less than it used to. But, perhaps paradoxically, an individual’s inability to defend matters more than ever. You can’t hide bad defenders against good teams any more. The weak link will be heavily exploited.

Strat, respectfully, you don’t understand how any of the models work based on your attempts to describe their shortcomings, including the team adjustments you cite but incorrectly describe.

Respectfully, I know care about the details of the math. I care about why the math guys are always wrong. BPM and Wins Produced describe what they do in the documentation.

https://www.basketball-reference.com/about/bpm.html

After they figure out team level efficiency and what each player contributed on offense, they “back into” the individual defense. As I said, that’s not capturing individual defense well at all.

“Defensive BPM is simply overall BPM minus offensive BPM”.

Win Produced also uses team defense, which runs into the same problems.

What I don’t understand is ESPN’s NBA Real Plus Minus because (as I said) they don’t give any details.

So what I do is look for players whose ratings I very strongly disagree with based on other statistical data like net rating, general perceptions, visual observation, etc.. and try to find patterns in them. That’s a good way to identify model weaknesses and which players ARE rated incorrectly. That’s what I do for all these models.

That’s how I knew Kanter was actually a “dog with fleas” when other people thought he was either very good or good. Some models badly overrate bad defenders that score a lot off OREBs.

The one pattern I’ve seen with ESPN’s NBA Real +/- is on the defensive side.

If the team sucks defensively but has a few solid individual defenders, those few will tend to be underrated defensively.

If the team is great on defense but has a few individual mediocre defenders, those few will tend to be overrated defensively.

I can’t know why that is and said so, but I am speculating it’s because they are using team level data, a Bayesian estimate, or backing into it like BPM.

Individual defense isn’t really quite as important as it once was. Today it’s more of a team concept— you want to have switchable wings who can credibly guard guys a little bit bigger and smaller than they are, backed up by the anchor of the defense, the rim protecting/shot blocking center. If your rim protector is a little bit mobile and can also guard a wing out in space (like Clint Capela) then even better.

I agree, but having the size, strength, length, and quickness to make the switch to a bigger or smaller man and still be effective and also having the basketball IQ to make the “right” switch when you are supposed to is not universal. It’s still individual. The defensive strategy is more team oriented, but you need versatile defenders to implement it. The NBA has learned that having that kind of versatility can be important and is valuing it higher as a way of stopping the modern offenses.

“General perceptions”

sounds legit

As I said, I am looking for extremes.

If you tell me Ed Davis is the 9th best player in the NBA now with over 350 minutes, I’m going to start laughing even though I happen to be an Ed Davis fan and think he’s been underrated for years. That’s what Wins Produced says this afternoon. https://www.boxscoregeeks.com/players?sort=per48_wins_produced&direction=desc&minimum=true

If you find 10 players at one extreme and 10 players at the other extreme using the same model, the pattern will sometimes quickly emerge about where the model is broken. Then you can use that to inform your views further when looking at that model.

“Basically I start off with whatever I believe, then find some way to discredit any information that doesn’t fit in with my perceptions, also horse racing”

100% wrong.

I look at and compare the results of all the models. Then I look at on court results to see if the on court results are reasonably in line with what each model says. When I find things that are way off and inconsistent, I start looking for patterns and explanations. I am looking at multiple sources of hard and soft data and allowing them to tell me what’s reasonable and what’s clearly wrong.

Horse racing is much easier.

I start with a concept and then test it against thousands of back races. If it looks promising I may tweak it further as I take a better look at the details. If it remains promising I will slowly test it with real money on live races. If it produces a profitable ROI, I slowly increase my bets.

You might think I am, or used to be, a believer in WP48. You’d be wrong. Search the archives.

No.

I think you are very insightful. I like you even though you may feel differently about me. 🙂

I was just explaining the type of thing that raises a red flag with me and how I then use that information to try to find the pattern.

I mean, if you’re not a starter, how can you claim to be good at basketball?

Havlicek stole the ball…… Havlicek stole the ball…….

Re: Ed Davis

Guys like Ed Davis seem to be the equivalent of a high-OBP baseball player in the 1970’s, like say Bobby Grich or somebody. Bobby Grich was indeed one of the best players in baseball, he was routinely a 6-7 WAR player in his prime, but nobody would have said he was a true star player, because he only batted .260.

Ed Davis is kind of an outlier example, because yeah, he’s probably not a top 10 NBA player. But those grindingly efficient players like him help you win games. We’re now starting to see the Clint Capelas of the world (not so much the Ed Davises) get recognized as really outstanding players, just as guys like Bobby Grich eventually got recognized as outstanding players.

Dolan will be on Michael Kay at 5pm. That’s a getcha popcorn interview. Kay will not treat him with kid gloves.

…but mitigating does not mean eliminating, and you can roll around bare-assed in the data and buy it dinner, there is still going to be a ton of noise in even long-seeming samples of adjusted plus-minus data. You’re trying to extract a very narrow signal from a very noisy ocean of partial data… that’s hard. But there is no evidence that the adjustments systematically under-correct for having bad defensive teammates; there is actually a small amount of evidence the opposite might be true. You are just making up the problem you think you see.

4. WP. This is not a legitimate summary stat. This is more like what the sokal hoax would be if sokal wasn’t in on it.

5. Most people sympathize with your revelation that some of the results seem obviously stupid. Had people like Berri not decided to defend the idea that Dennis Rodman was better than Michael Jordan or whatever, you’d be tilting at windmills. But most people understand that these statistics are rife with imperfections. Summary stats are averages and they are absolute, real life has heterogenous distributions and basketball is contextual. But even the methodology can be problematic because coefficients can be overfit and the game can change a lot from the sampling periods.

A more interesting question is whether people like you, who seem over overrate their personal ability to know it when you see it, do themselves more harm than good by subjectively deciding when to like and when to not like a model in an ad hoc way. But even if the strat algorithm really is a better predictor of NBA productivity on average than BPM/RPM/WS, you’re still wrong about where model biases lie.

Also, sometimes the stat guys are kind of wrong, because better stats become available. Like the Fire Joe Morgan guys used to like fun at Tim McCarver for talking about the importance of pitch framing. But then PitchFX came out, and there was a consistent pattern of certain catchers “stealing” strikes. Tim McCarver was right, and Ken Tremendous was wrong, pitch framing is a real thing that has real value.

This is a really valuable insight that I do think we should be mindful of. One day, stats are going to evolve and cover what we previously couldn’t. In the meantime, visual observation shouldn’t be so readily dismissed, as long as it isn’t easily refutable.

On the 3 or 4 occasions where Frank has actually played well in his career, I think he was a good example of this. There was a game against the Celtics in Boston early this year, for instance, where he was an absolute monster on defense. And his box score showed absolutely nothing. I do think we’ll get to a point where impacts like that will be measurable.

Strat takes something I agree with a little too far. There’s a lot not in the box score, yes. But there’s a lot more in the box score, too! It’s probably like an 80/20 split, and the 80 can’t be dismissed so easily.

if you thought that was useless you should have seen the rest of my day

Dolan will be on Michael Kay at 5pm. That’s a getcha popcorn interview. Kay will not treat him with kid gloves.

I wonder if he’ll have his binder with him…

At least thanks to ptmilo’s free day this garbage discussion became a very interesting read, thanks a lot hahahaha.

I really thought we had come to a conclusion as a collective that stats aren’t perfect but they are useful tools to help us analyze stuff. You got to be extremely naive to think everyone who’s ever dedicated themselves so much to building statistics about a game is clueless and don’t realize there’s stuff that escapes their models.

That’s funny, geo, bc I feel the same way about Michael Kay. He could interview a resurrected Abe Lincoln and I’d probably pass.

This Dolan interview is a total disaster. Dolan is so bad that he really could cost the team max free agents. He’s so arrogant he obviously didn’t even prepare for this interview.

This Dolan interview is a total disaster. Dolan is so bad that he really could cost the team max free agents. He’s so arrogant he obviously didn’t even prepare for this interview.

Of course it’s a disaster. He’s a walking disaster. He is the epitome of the guy who thinks he’s too clever to get tripped up on stuff and then, you know, gets tripped on stuff constantly because he isn’t as clever as he thinks he is.

He’s so arrogant he obviously didn’t even prepare for this interview.

what?!?!? no binder, no note cards, no illegible ink markings somewhere on his palm or forearm…

jimmy d must be feeling very bold indeed today…

I will say this for Dolan: on a Begley/Lowe podcast the two of them said his image with players is much different than with fans. To Durant, in particular, Dolan is a media giant, something he wants to be. They both suggested the recent rumors about him wanting to sell were coming from teams that were trying to sabotage the Knicks.

According to Twitter, Dolan confirmed that theory in this interview. Said Ainge is using that twat Bill Simmons to put the story out there.

I know Dolan has been terrible for two decades but if he actually got the right guy in place (Scott Perry) his image could change very quickly. I saw it with Steinbrenner. For two decades he was reviled, then Gene Michael, Buck Showalter, Joe Torre, and Brian Cashman happened to him.

Those comments where he’s basically bragging that agents are telling him their players want to come here seem like they shouldn’t have been said out loud.

There’s a clip on herring’s twitter where Dolan has to consult his notes to remember the names Knox, Robinson, and “Allonzo”.

What are you talking about? He watched every game, you fool! You don’t deserve to be a fan of the Knicks!

While that certainly makes him look like a fool, I’m actually encouraged that he is so detached from the team he doesn’t even know who his players are. That’s the best version of Dolan we can ask for. Just sign the check.

Yeah, I’m on board with this. I just find it hard to believe he’ll continue to look away if KD is on the team.

Posted a game thread, had a pun I was dying to use…