Archive for the 'Layups' Category

Typical Hoopism awesomeness (with guest artist Robb Harskamp).

Vote in the second annual Internet Basketball Awards at BBall Prospectus: Link

At Back Picks, ElGee took a look at the top individual defenders of the 2010-11 NBA season.

...Artis Gilmore is going to be a Hall of Famer!

This means we will have to come up with a new answer to #6 on our Keltner List posts.

A general overview of the MVP race and the statistical argument against Derrick Rose:

Keeping Score: Why Derrick Rose Should Not Win M.V.P. - NYTimes.com

You can catch it in tomorrow morning's paper as well.

And for a similar (longer) take on Rose -- albeit with a different conclusion about who the real MVP is -- John Hollinger also had a good piece at ESPN today.

This is only tangentially related to the NBA, but it's one of the most moving columns I have read in a long time:

A father’s choice: Family over Final Four dreams

Fantastic work by Dan Wetzel.

Just a collection of links I found today:

• Brewer’s D - At The Two-Man Game, Ian Levy digs into the analytics on Corey Brewer’s defensive impact.
• Unlikeliest triple-doubles - Basketball Prospectus’ Kevin Pelton on Chuck Hayes’ place among unlikely triple-double accumulators.
• Gerald Wallace, Blazer numbers - Portland Roundball Society’s Django Radonich-Camp looks at the data on Wallace as a Blazer.
• Rondo, Celts offense slumping - SI’s Point Forward takes a statistical look at Rajon Rondo & the struggling C’s offense.
• Isos hurt Hawks - Also at BBPro, Sebastian Pruiti uses film and Synergy data to critique the Atlanta offense.
• Lazy RPI - A shortform way to calculate RPI, courtesy of The Basketball Distribution’s Nathan Walker.
• Regularized APM updated - Advanced Stats for the NBA updated their ridge-regression adjusted +/- ratings today.
• RAPM MVP - At The Basketball Distribution, Nathan Walker uses the new RAPM data to see who is truly most valuable.
• Best of the Big 10, NBA style - Harlan Schreiber of HoopsAnalyst looks at the best historical starting fives from Big Ten schools.
• Butler’s razor-thin margin - Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal on how, win or lose, Butler rarely plays games decided by a huge margin.
• ‘Fresh Prince’ metrics - David Roher of the Harvard College Sports Analysis Collective looked at Will Smith’s usage rate from an episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

As part of the impressive 12 by 30 online art project, artist Dustin Watson is creating portraits of 30 NBA players (1 for each team). They're really great, so check them out at Dustin's blog -- or go to the 12 by 30 main site, go through each day #, and try to identify the players from their eyes alone before clicking to see the full pic. (Can you guess which option I chose?)

Surely you've seen this already, but if not, a brief recap:

• ESPN had a pretty good documentary about the legendary Michigan "Fab Five" team on Sunday night.
• In it, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Jimmy King, & Ray Jackson spoke very frankly about their feelings on Duke 20 years ago.
• Notably, they felt that Christian Laettner & Grant Hill were "bitches", that Duke only recruited black players who were "Uncle Toms", and Rose in particular felt jealous & bitter toward Hill because Hill's pro-athlete dad was in his life (Rose's father, Jimmy Walker, was also a pro athlete but had no relationship with Rose).
• Grant Hill took offense at Rose's comments and responded in the New York Times yesterday.

My take on this:

Hill was understandably upset and hurt by the statements Rose & his teammates made -- it's never easy to hear that people harbored negative feelings toward you because of factors that were beyond your control. But I think Hill missed Rose's point. In essence, Rose was giving voice to his mindset as a 19-year-old and how it motivated his play back then. And the level of honesty & self-examination with which Rose looked at those emotions was a meditation on Rose's own life more than a knock on Grant Hill. Though he doesn't come out and say it, it seems somewhat obvious that Rose no longer holds the same feelings, if not just from the fact that he now recognizes the true source of his resentment (Rose admits it came from a place of jealousy, not a hatred of Hill himself). That Hill seems unwilling or unable to make a distinction between feelings at 19 and feelings at 38 makes me wonder whether he or Rose has grown more as a person in the last 20 years.

Of course, that's just my opinion -- what's yours on this Jalen Rose-Grant Hill spat?

Lots of good NCAA Tournament links to throw Slate Magazine's way this week...

First, here's Ken Pomeroy (him again!) on why the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) is a terrible metric for the committee to use when picking the field of 64 68. Like the hated BCS formula, it doesn't use margin of victory, thus discarding a great deal of key information about relative team strengths. Worse yet, it weighs a team's strength of schedule three times as heavily as its W-L%, making the teams you play more important to your ranking than whether you actually beat them.

Next, we have a great piece by Chris Wilson that (unfortunately) gives away the big secret of winning an NCAA pool: go by the numbers on the majority of your bracket, but be sure to choose a contrarian champion. This is why I'm picking Texas to win -- of all the non-#1 seeds, the Longhorns captured the most titles in my 10,000-bracket simulation. Then again, that strategy is nullified if you play with other people who know it, so be wary of how savvy your pool-mates are.

Finally, Justin Peters researched the most popular majors among players on this year's Tourney teams. Turns out that basketball players "tend to choose majors that emphasize leadership, teamwork, and communication—basically, everything you'd need to successfully execute the flex offense." This is probably why, as Peters writes, business was the runaway #1 when it came to player majors.