Nothing could be further from my typical Statophile post than this one. I was more than a little frustrated by many in the Raptors fan base. The initial negative reaction to the pick of Jonas Valanciunas was based on less than stellar knowledge of the player.
Those who disliked the pick often cited one or more of three main reasons:
With all the rumours flying around and a bit of “selective memory” arguments on who should lead the Raptors next season, we thought it was an opportune time to set the record straight. We put together coaching data from several sources as we not only wanted to show historical W-L, but perhaps more importantly metrics like Offensive and Defensive Ratings.
During Bryan Colangelo’s presser on June 1st, he noted he was looking for candidates with “a great deal of experience” and one with a defensive focus. The typical list of potential candidates include: Jeff Van Gundy, Rick Adelman, Lawrence Frank, Dwane Casey, and Maurice Cheeks. I believe that both Van Gundy and Adelman are long shots as I see them only stepping into a situation were the team is poised to make a significant playoff run. So our focus was narrowed to the three most rumoured candidates: Frank, Casey and Cheeks.
With the regular season over, we present the overall data for the year in this Statophile. Yes, most of the metrics are a bit ugly, but were expectations all that much higher?
Nothing overly surprising: defense was the major issue for losses this year. Wonder if this guy may have helped? Man games missed due to the mid season trades as well as significant injuries certainly doesn’t help build a cohesive unit on defense. And perhaps a center that helped on D or blocked ashot (57th out of 64, really?!). Finally, having the league second youngest roster means a step learning curve on defense.
The Four Factors
The Raptors were in the middle of the pack in both turnover rate differential and offensive rebound rate differential. So overall, these two were not major factors, although if it wasn’t for Evans’ and Johnson’s offensive rebound prowess, ORR would have been (hello Bargnani defensive rebounds). The Raptors committed way too many fouls (with Dorsey, Johnson, Davis and Evans being the main culprits). Without the PG and wings slowing their men down and little to no help defense from your Center, this is not a surprise. The other issue was effective field goal differential; the biggest problem being defensive three point FG% – where the Raptors ranked 28th in the league with eFG% 56.4%.
The Roster
Our inaugural “Statophile MVP” is Amir Johnson. Yes, most of you realize that I may be am biased, but it was advanced statistics that made me a fan of his last year. Many were “surprised” at many of his performances this year. However, advanced statistics helped identify him as a potentially effective player over the last several years. His 1.08 points per possession (PPP) this year ranks him 17th in the league in this category. He’s 22nd in the league in blocks per game. He also leads the team is most advanced measures, even despite playing injured for a portion of the year. Perhaps his contract may be good value after all.
Our “Worst Teammate of the Year” award goes to Sonny Weems. His True Shooting Percentage was 67th out of 79 qualified shooting guards. Looking up his points per possession (PPP) data at Synergy Sports, we find he is ranked 340 at 0.85 per. This year Mr. Weems took 5 field goal attempts for every one he assisted on.
Our productive rook (yeah, Solomon Alabi wasn’t really considered, so no need for an “award”): Ed Davis Despite not being projected to be in the ROY mix, Mr. Davis showed up in several top 5 lists at the end of the year. He’s proving to be one of the steals of the draft when you look at his rookie rankings over at Basketball Prospectus (where he’s ranked 5th, just behind John Wall) or the Wages of Wins blog (also ranked 5th, again just behind Wall).
The “Advanced-Statistics-Told-You-For-Years-He-Should-Be-Traded-And-Now-Every-Reporter-Is-Writing-About-It” Award goes to Andrea Bargnani, who still pretends its the position he plays that makes a difference. (Seriously, I mean, seriously – we’ll call you a 4, great. Which means we need you to post up more and take less threes. And 4s have to rebound to. And help on defense. So…. your statistics will improve “at the 4″?! No. Mr. Bargnani, you have some qualities of a 3, 4 and 5 on offence and largely fit the 5 on defense. It’s not the position we put you in that’s the problem.). Andrea Bargnani was ranked dead last out of 59 Centers for rebound rate. Whoops, I forgot he was a 4. Okay, he would rank 76th of our 80 of Power Forwards. Assist ratio? 42nd among Centers (62nd among PFs). Blocks per 48 minutes? 78th out of 85. The opponents he guarded had a Player Efficiency Rating (PER) of 21.1 against him – almost 5 points higher than Bargnani’s 16.2. The good news? His contract isn’t too bad for a big and he has enough diversity on offense to be attractive to several teams. He may fit quite well with a team with a penetrating PG and/or a big defensive center. The other good news? The media and many fans have finally accepted the idea of moving Bargnani, making it much easier for Bryan Colangelo to do so without significant negative repercussions.
I scrapped three other posts before I settled on trying to tackle the coaching topic. Given our record, it seemed a bit pointless to work on Bayless starting/bench data, lineup combinations, Evans/Bargnani rebounding and other topics that have been rehashed enough.
Certainly its the time of year to lay blame for what’s been a tough season. But where does the blame lie? The easiest/laziest method is to simply blame the coach. They are the conductors and, if the performance is poor, they should ultimately get the blame. Or should they?
National Post’s Eric Koreen also inspired this post with two of his latest: “Tough to judge Triano given expectations” and “Unplugged: A year of hope in the face of losses“. Over at our forums section, we have no less than three threads on the topic. And I may have had a Twitter debate or two on the topic. I owe to a few people to back up my comments with at least a bit of research.
So how do we measure how much success (or lack thereof) a coach has on a team?
What does Reggie Evans mean to the Toronto Raptors? The most quoted stat is:
Ideally, its the best metric as ultimately it comes down wins and losses. But how much of this is his impact (opposed to strength of opponents, small data set, etc…)?
….
A quick take on James Johnson, who’s been a nice “surprise” for the Raptors.But is it a surprise?
In an interview, with the media yesterday, Coach Jay Triano said
We’re the seventh or eighth best shooting team in the NBA without being able to make a 3-point shot.
It is true they are tied for 8th in FG% (at 46.6%)
However, the Raptors are 19th for effective FG% (at 49.14%). Overall, FG% means very little. If you’re team cannot shoot the 3 ball, you’re likely in trouble.
Primarily, you want your players to:
Unfortunately, the Raptors are dead last in 3pt FG% (at 31.2% which translates to 46.8% eFG%) and 25th for Free Throw Rate (FTA/FGA).
While this study was presented at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference two years ago, I reviewed it again during this year’s conference and thought it was worth reviewing here. Sandy Weill (who presented the “Optical Tracking” session that I reviewed yesterday), along with John Huizinga (University of Chicago Professor – and Yao Ming’s agent) published a very interesting study dismissing the concept of a “hot hand”.
Why do I bring this up now? The study doesn’t appear to be well known to many announcers/media/fans and the Raptors/Nets game on Saturday emphasized that point.
What’s a “hot hand”?
Announcers, media and fans (and video games!) often refer to a player as “hot” (“he’s on fire!“) and demand teammates continually feed him the ball.
What did the authors find?
There is no evidence of “hot hand” exists, but NBA players act as though they are hot.
We had the opportunity to attend M.I.T.’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference this year. The conference offered sessions for a wide range of sports, but we focused our attention on the basketball-related sessions. After 11 sessions over 10 hours (1 1/2 days), we attempted to summarize the highlights below. We have sectioned this post by session, so the reader is able to focus on specific interests. For more detail on sessions I was not able to attend, see the posts from the excellent group of TrueHoop bloggers here.
Salaries are not PERfect Edition:
We’re not likely to be active at the trade deadline (ending this Thursday), but I developed a database that compared salary, number of years under contract and Player Efficiency Rating (PER) to see what assets the Raptors’ have versus what the team could acquire. This article shows us how PER is calculated.
TSN’s esteemed basketball writer Tim Chisholm offered these ideas:
Mr. Chisholm is correct it looking for “difficult” cases as the reality is Toronto’a assets are either: a) youth they should want to keep or b) difficult contracts to move. This makes the Raptors’ options limited.