Tag Archives: NBA

The good, the bad, and the ugly shooting stats from SportVU

2014 NBA Season, Sport VU December 2, 2013 1 Comment

sportvu

We’re now one month into the NBA season, but also one month into sorting through STATS LLC’s SportVU Player Tracking system where stats from hockey assists to a player’s speed can be tracked, among other things. (Shameless promotion: I wrote about my first impressions of it here.)

And though it’s still too early to draw permanent impressions from information it’s spat out, some of it is still glaring like shooting percentages, for example. It’s easy to decipher between a pull-up jumper and a catch-and-shoot situation, making those two statistics a couple of the easiest to sort through the good, bad, and ugly that I handpicked and posted here.

For ‘the good’ and ‘the bad’, I took a handful of players from each category I thought qualified while one special player made ‘the ugly’.

I also included two other SportVU categories: Drives and Defensive Impact to go along with Pull-Up and Catch and Shoot.

Anyway, enjoy:

Pull-Up

The good:

FGM FGA FG% 3PTM 3PTA 3PT%
Patty Mills 21 37 56.8% 5 7 71.4%
Dirk Nowitzki 41 86 48.3% 2 4 50%
O.J. Mayo 40 84 47.6% 9 15 60%
Eric Bledsoe 36 77 46.8% 10 22 45.5%
Kevin Durant 52 115 45.2% 11 21 52.4%

This is all quite amazing. Bledsoe, a perceived brick thrower last year, has been hot this season. It’s one example of why I wrote some of the stats being glaring. These all may be small sample sizes right now, but they catch the eye nonetheless and make me curious if they hold up in the long run.

The bad:

  FGM FGA FG% 3PTM 3PTA 3PT%
Steve Nash 9 38 23.7% 2 6 33.3%
Luke Ridnour 9 46 19.6% 1 9 11.1%
Lance Stephenson 5 30 16.7% 0 4 0%
Tyreke Evans 7 43 16.3% 0 7 0%
J.R. Smith 10 62 16.1% 1 17 5.9%

Even with his improvements across the board, I still think Lance Stephenson shoots with his eyes closed.

The ugly:

  FGM FGA FG% 3PTM 3PTA 3PT%
Corey Brewer 0 30 0% 0 8 0%

Kevin Love‘s outlet passes make up for this.

Catch and Shoot

The good:

FGM FGA FG% 3PTM 3PTA 3PT%
Harrison Barnes 18 27 66.7% 12 20 60%
Andre Iguodala 24 39 61.5% 21 34 61.8%
LeBron James 21 36 58.3% 18 30 60%
Anderson Varejao 27 48 56.3% 0 4 0%
Ryan Anderson 28 52 53.8% 26 46 56.5%

Could someone make this a 5-man lineup and see if anyone dribbles?

The ugly:

FGM FGA FG% 3PTM 3PTA 3PT%
Jeff Teague 8 35 22.9% 8 31 23.3%
Trey Burke 4 20 20% 4 14 28.6%
Reggie Bullock 4 22 18.2% 4 21 19%
Eric Bledsoe 3 17 17.6% 2 15 13.3%
Alexey Shved 3 18 16.7% 3 15 20%

There’s Eric Bledsoe again. Another notable is Reggie Bullock, who has the potential to carve out a career as a three-and-D wing, one the Clippers could use right now but he hasn’t provided much so far.

The ugly:

FGM FGA FG% 3PTM 3PTA 3PT%
Jamaal Tinsley 0 13 0 0 13 0

Who knows if Tinsley can revive these numbers. He was waived three weeks ago by the Jazz.

Defensive Impact

The good:

OPP FGM at rim per game OPP FGA at rim per game OPP FG% at rim
Brook Lopez 3.0 8.8 34.1%
Roy Hibbert 3.6 9.9 36.9%
Chris Kaman 2.2 5.8 37.7%
John Henson 2.3 5.7 40.0%
Bismack Biyombo 2.1 5.3 40.5%

Chris Kaman making a list like this is so much better than one about centers who take wayyy too many jumpers. Also worth noting is John Henson, who in time can form a nice rim-protecting duo with Larry Sanders (whenever the latter plays again).

The bad:

OPP FGM at rim per game OPP FGA at rim per game OPP FG% at rim
DeAndre Jordan 5 8.4 59.2%
J.J. Hickson 3.3 5.4 59.8%
Gustavo Ayon 3.3 5.4 60.5%
Al Jefferson 3.8 6.1 61.8%
Anderson Varejao 4.1 6.4 63.3%

Before the season, it sounded like DeAndre Jordan was going to be Defensive Player of the Year, so this disappoints me intensely.

The ugly:

OPP FGM at rim per game OPP FGA at rim per game OPP FG% at rim
Udonis Haslem 1.8 2.4 72.7%

Who knows just how much of an impact Haslem will be going forward since Michael Beasley is logging consistent (AND PRODUCTIVE!!!) minutes off the bench.

Drives

The good:

FG% on drives Total Drives Player PTS on Drives Drives per game PPG on Drives Team PPG on drives
Manu Ginobili 75.0% 53 42 3.1 2.5 4.1
LeBron James 68.4% 92 72 5.4 4.2 6.6
Andre Iguodala 66.7% 32 15 2.5 1.2 3.3
Jeremy Lin  65.4% 137 96 8.6 6 10.6
Tony Parker 64.5% 154 111 9.6 6.9 11.3

You can pick and choose which player is more meaningful when driving to the rim, with LeBron likely being a favorite.

The bad:

FG% on drives Total Drives Player PTS on Drives Drives per game PPG on Drives Team PPG on drives
Vince Carter  33.3% 50 34 2.9 2 3.1
Deron Williams  33.3% 39 10 4.3 1.1 4.1
Corey Brewer 33.3% 37 20 1.9 1.1 2.3
O.J. Mayo 27.6% 47 22 3.1 1.5 2.9
Russell Westbrook  21.7% 90 35 7.5 2.9 7.1

Surely Russell Westbrook’s percentages will bounce back. I worry about Corey Brewer’s though. He’s like a paper airplane: once you let him fly, you have no idea where he’ll land. It’s made for several “noooo…yes!” moments and vice versa.

The ugly:

FG% on drives Total Drives Player PTS on Drives Drives per game PPG on Drives Team PPG on drives
Jose Calderon 0% 30 2 1.8 0.1 1.7

This isn’t really terrible since Jose Calderon is in the top 50 in hockey assists at least. He rarely gets into the paint anyway compared to the rest of the league’s guards, though the points he generates per drive is more similar to those in ‘the bad’ category than ‘the good’.

Through 17 games, Calderon’s stats when driving to the rim are more perplexing than ugly.

All statistics are from NBA.com. 

Since 2003, over 3/4 of teams under .500 on November 18 miss the playoffs

2014 NBA Season, Boredom, NBA Playoffs, Stats November 18, 2013 1 Comment

If your favorite team is off to a bad start, you can look that stat in the headline in two different ways:

  • Since 2003, 76.7 percent of teams that are under .500 coming into November 18 have missed the playoffs, failing to put the pieces together in another season of letdowns.
  • Since 2003, 23.3 percent have come back to make the playoffs and win their fans back with five months of great basketball. The first three weeks? Well, that was just a flesh wound.

A total of 30 teams out of 129 have come back to contend. You might think most of those came from the East since we’re in an era where the West has been loaded, but only 16 were from the inferior conference. And they’re not all teams who just barely make the postseason. Two defending champions, the Shaq-led ’03 Lakers and ’07 Heat, started out flat. Others like the ’07 Suns, ’07 Bulls, and ’11 Grizzlies were pesky outs.

Here’s the complete list. I left out the lockout-shortened 2012 season:

2003 (4 out of 13 teams): Los Angeles Lakers (3-7), Portland (4-6), Utah (4-7), Minnesota (5-6)

2004 (2/11): New Jersey (5-6), New York (3-7)

2005 (4/12): New Jersey (2-6), Chicago (0-6), Denver (3-5), Memphis (3-5)

2006 (3/14): Chicago (3-5), Los Angeles Lakers (4-5), Sacramento (4-5)

2007 (5/14): Toronto (2-7), Chicago (3-6), Miami (4-5), Washington (4-5), Phoenix (3-6)

2008 (2/14): New Jersey (3-6), Washington (4-5)

2009 (2/12): Chicago (5-6), Dallas (4-7)

2010 (2/14): Charlotte (3-8), San Antonio (4-5)

2011 (3/13): New York (4-8), Philadelphia (2-10), Memphis (4-8)

2013 (3/12): Indiana (4-7), Denver (4-6), Houston (4-6) 

2014 (???/15): 

Who will make the list this year?

So far, 15 teams are under .500: (deep breath) Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, New York, Brooklyn, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Orlando, Washington, New Orleans, Sacramento, Los Angeles Lakers, Utah, and Denver. No more than five and no less than two have made the playoffs. If we’re going straight by the math over the last decade, we can pick three or four.

I’ll pick four and they’re all coming from the East. Out in the West, the most likely under .500 candidates to surge back are the Lakers and Pelicans yet they’ll have to overtake Memphis, who sits in tenth place and in time will pass ninth-place Phoenix. Basically, nobody under .500 from the West will come back this year, though Kobe Bryant‘s return and Anthony Davis‘ monster sophomore season at least made me think about it. Oh well. There are still nine teams from the East to choose from.

Every team in the Atlantic Division is under .500, which is embarrassing but one has to win and get the fourth seed by default. I’d expect New York and Brooklyn to limp into the finish line, maybe seeing them battle in the first round of the playoffs. At the very least, they both get in. The East is just too terrible for them not to.

From there I’ll go with Detroit, who didn’t sign Josh Smith just to tank the season away. I already wrote a little about their frontcourt woes while wondering why nobody is fouling Andre Drummond, but I expect the team to play better as the season goes on. I mean, they can’t be much worse defensively, right? If they somehow are, Greg Monroe can be moved for a piece that’s a better fit, one that’s good enough to put Detroit in the playoffs. I’d like to think of them being a pesky out for a title contender, at least pushing the series to five games.

That leaves one more team, and it gets painful to pick and choose who will get destroyed by Miami or Indiana, but I’ll go with Washington. They can make a move or two before the deadline with whatever Trevor Ariza will attract, but could (and probably will) also fire Randy Wittman and hopefully gain wins down the line with a coach that, you know, can get the job done with John Wall, Bradley Beal, and Marcin ‘Too Hot To’ Gortat.

Toronto can make moves too, especially with Rudy Gay and DeMar DeRozan, but a trade will more often than one to push themselves into the lottery. As for Cleveland, they seem to be a mess led by Kyrie Irving, Dion Waiters, and Anderson Varejao. Somehow, they can’t score with those three guys. Cleveland was a tough choice though since they too are primed for a trade down the road.

The East in general is a crap shoot, but it wasn’t expected to be this bad out of the gates. Right now if the conference were a Myspace account, Orlando, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Charlotte would be in the East’s top eight, along with Miami and the like. By the end of the season, they’ll all have grown sour and made room for New York, Brooklyn, Detroit, and Washington.

Andre Iguodala’s shot chart resembes a putting green (with a sand trap too)

Golden State Warriors, Screenshots, Shot Charts November 15, 2013 Leave a comment

Everything’s sunny for Andre Iguodala, who gave the Golden State Warriors a game-winning bucket last night only after Russell Westbrook did all he could for Oklahoma City.

But this isn’t about just last night. Iguodala, widely known for his great defense, has turned in a terrific season offensively as well. In fact, his shot chart seems like one normally reserved for Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, or Kevin Durant, but it also brings back memories of golfing in the summer. Introducing, the putting green that is Iguodala’s shot chart:

Shotchart_1384502833329

The rectangular sand trap in the right corner is a bit awkward since I doubt such bunkers exist, but it’s hard to complain when it could cover the entire court should Iguodala, for some reason, go on a horrific shooting slump.

Let’s not mix basketball and golf any more than we should though. Charles Barkley has shown what could go wrong when we take it too far:

Houston’s twin’s towers: A permanent breakup or temporary?

2014 NBA Season, Houston Rockets November 14, 2013 Leave a comment

200px-Houston_Rockets.svg

Playing Dwight Howard and Omer Asik together seemed hopeless from the get-go.

You could say Kevin McHale’s change in the lineup last night was a one-time adjustment, meant to match up with a smaller, hectic 76ers lineup that started Thaddeus Young at power forward, but the results of playing the two centers at once justify scrapping the ‘Twin Tower’ idea altogether. In 92 minutes, the Rockets were minus-35 in point-differential when Howard and Asik were on the floor, scoring at a rate that would’ve ranked far and away dead last in the league. Defensively, they flirted with the bottom ten in efficiency, that side of the court being where the two centers would be effective.

But not when they’re paired together.  

Enter Terrence Jones, the second-year forward who started in Asik’s place in last night’s overtime-loss. He had 10 points, 11 rebounds, three blocks, and two threes in 37 minutes. Pick and choose which of those statistics is most surprising, whether it’s the threes he helped stretch the floor with, the rebounding that was very good for the playing time he was given, or even just the fact that he played 37 minutes even if the game went to overtime.

Or maybe Asik all but joining ‘Club Trillion’ in only four minutes of play stuck out more than whatever Jones did. It’s too early to peg just how many minutes he will receive if he continues coming off the bench, though he only played 10-15 minutes when he was a backup for the Chicago Bulls.  Who knows what McHale has in store for Asik and the Houston’s rotation going forward. 

Jones playing 37 minutes was also surprising, as mentioned earlier, but he made them count. 30 of them were with Howard, resulting in Houston being plus-eight in point-differential in that timeframe. The starting lineup with Jones and Howard was even better as they logged 25 minutes as a unit and were plus-11. Defensively, they had about the same efficiency as any lineup featuring Asik and Howard together, but the offense was so much better. It also helps when Jeremy Lin makes, say, nine three pointers, though his defense continues to be a question mark going forward.

It was obviously only one game (I feel like I’ll have to type ‘SMALL SAMPLE SIZE ALERT’ in every post for another month) and the absence of James Harden and Michael Carter-Williams, the triple-double of Tony Wroten, and the 36-point outburst of James Anderson were just a few reasons to take last night’s results with a whole saltshaker. 

But Houston’s experiment with playing Terrence Jones at power forward was a necessary one, in my couch potato opinion, regardless of the opposition. Tonight, the Rockets match up with the Knicks, another team featuring a small ball starting lineup. Let’s see what McHale does next.

All stats are from NBA.com.

Looking at the corner 3, where the Utah Jazz are shooting nine percent

2014 NBA Season, Shot Charts, Utah Jazz November 13, 2013 Comments: 3
Shotchart_1384330671093

Utah’s shot chart. So much blood.

It might be overkill to look at the Utah Jazz’s struggles when I wrote about Toronto’s shooting yesterday. That, and Zach Lowe touched on the cramped spacing for Utah at the end of his latest column. But I’ll also look at a few more things about the corner three, including which team was once so good from that special area that it was silly.

But to start, as you can see in the Jazz’s shot chart, there are a lot of areas where the Jazz are struggling to convert offense from. None of it is worse than the corner three though, where they’ve shot a whopping 9.1 percent (3 for 33). It’s obviously a small sample size and a few other teams have been brutal from the area that usually produces the most efficient shot outside of a layup, but it’s difficult imagining the Jazz not being one of the five worst shooting teams from that area by season’s end. Who’s going to make those shots? Can Richard Jefferson catch fire for like one game? Where’s Brandon Rush? It might be up to Gordon Hayward, who was at least 45 percent from the right corner last year.

Again, it’s only been eight games, but hopefully they don’t break the record for worst shooting ever from the corners. That record belongs to Grant Hill, Jerry Stackhouse and the 1998 Detroit Pistons who shot a record-worst 25.2 percent, according to NBA.com. To stay above that mark, Utah, if they keep taking the same amount of shots from the corner as they previously have, will have to make at least 28 percent from here on out.

Hopefully that’s manageable, and it should be. No team has made less than 30 percent of their corner threes since the Jazz of 2007. If it’s not, then starting 0-8 may only be the beginning of a long, frustrating season in Salt Lake City. (At least there’s college basketball to look forward to.)

It’s weird though. Utah used to traditionally be at or near the bottom in corner threes attempted but were very good at making them. And since they were good at making them (they shot 50.7 percent in 1999, which is nowhere near the best and soon you’ll see who is) then why didn’t they shoot more? Why didn’t every team shoot more from the corner? No team neglected corner threes as much as Portland did in 1997 though, according to NBA.com, setting the record for the least corner threes attempted in a season with 86. Last year, 12 teams surpassed that many attempts before December.

But in 1997, another record involving corner threes was set–and this one is way better! The Charlotte Hornets, featuring Dell Curry and Glen Rice in his career year, set the record for the most accurate shooting from the corners by making 108 of their 175 attempts for a blistering 61.7 percent. Most teams today don’t even shoot that well around the rim. (Edit: Glen Rice was 45 for 68 from the corner three — 66.2 percent) 

There are a ton of good shooters from the corner today but picturing a team breaking that mark, combined with the total number of shots taken there? That would surely be a team for the ages. Hopefully the Utah Jazz don’t end up on the opposite end of that discussion.