1 - Great explanation of how high volume / low efficiency scorers make life easier for high efficiency / low usage players who don't often create shooting attempts for themselves.

2 - While Ewing did the have worst playoff series of his career, he wasn't actually matched up against Hakeem for most of it. Thorpe covered Ewing (and Oakley primarily covered Hakeem as well), and Hakeem was there on the rotation. Having the physical PF banging on him and the ultra quick C trapping him ruined Ewing's game. He just didn't have the speed or explosiveness to get good looks at the hoop anymore.

It lets you dish it out to the other guys if they're open, but at worst, you've got the guy who can get a 45% shot off when all the other options are exhausted. It also lets the other guys take it easy on offense and use their energy rebounding and playing D.

For the record, I'm generally in favor of guys who can get really good shots off, get to the line, and hit threes, but you can still find advantage in having guys who can shoot 45% at all times. It's a good last resort, you know?

Think of an auto that gets only 16 mpg. If it carries 8 passengers, that's pretty good, compared to a car that carries but 4 and gets 28 mpg. It depends on the situation.

Having lots of serviceable players, with various skill sets, may have a value apart from their measured efficiencies/usages. More offenses to throw at the opponent, more weaponry, might offset a coaching advantage.

I think overall the piece was fine, but if you just said:

"The main weakness of the team, and what contributed to its mediocre offensive efficiency was the low offensive efficiency numbers of Vernon “Mad Max” Maxwell and Sam Cassell, who took 21% of the team's shots."

Then I think the story would be much more complete and accurate, rather than pretending that it's an advantage to have mediocre shooters taking a bunch of your shots. I mean, clearly not every team can find a lot of efficient scorers, but the roughly 50% of teams that year that had a better offense than the rockets somehow managed to find marginally more efficient ones.

When we talk about the Rockets' good fortune in '93-'94, it's also worth mentioning the top-seeded Sonics getting knocked off in the first round. Not only did that guarantee Houston home-court advantage the rest of the way, the conventional wisdom back then was that there was a rock-paper-scissors relationship of the top three contenders in the West. The Sonics beat Houston in both '93 and '96, bookending their championships, while Houston beat Phoenix back-to-back years and Phoenix beat the Sonics in '93 the only time they met in the playoffs before the Charles Barkley trade changed the whole dynamic. The problem for the Sonics was that they couldn't beat inferior teams in the first round.

Lastly, while taking a dominant post player and surrounding him with shooters and defenders may have been a good template for the Rockets, it sure made for some boring basketball in the mid-/late-'90s. Combine the Knicks' handchecking and that Finals series set the NBA back considerably.

However, the next best thing to having a roster stocked with high-volume, high-efficiency players (or at least players capable of that) is to do what the Rockets did in '94: have a few players who can handle a high volume of possessions (even if their efficiency isn't the greatest), and a few players who are very efficient in limited offensive roles. You see, because the former group can create shots late in the shot clock, it affords the latter group the chance to pick their spots and be as efficient as they were.

Maxwell/Cassell had an ORtg of 98.5 while the role players had an ORtg of 109.1; if the "creators" toned it down and shot less, their ORtg would undoubtedly be better, but that of the "role players" would have decreased at a greater rate than the creators' would have improved, and it would have hurt the team dynamic. That's what we mean when we speak of "skill curves" (if you've ever read Basketball on Paper, there's a chapter on this) -- the trade-off between usage rate and ORtg is real, and it creates a dynamic optimization problem in terms of maximizing team offensive efficiency. Maybe Houston didn't optimize things perfectly, but I have a feeling they struck the best balance they could between the responsibilities of the "creators" vs. that of the "role players".

Plus, you have to consider the value of when Mad Max & Cassell were willing to take shots. That was another point I was trying to make -- their ability to create with the clock running down came in handy on multiple occasions for this team, especially in the playoffs, when they each knocked down some pretty clutch shots. No one else on the team (save for Hakeem, but his shooting range was limited) could have created the big shot on demand late in the game like those 2 did. On the surface, this post is about the '94 Rockets, but I was trying to make a bigger point about the true value of high-volume, low-efficiency players -- a value we as statheads don't always see at first glance.

"The other major creators, guards Vernon “Mad Max” Maxwell and Sam Cassell, weren’t overly efficient (97.6 and 100.5 ORtgs, respectively), but they each took on more than 21% of Houston’s offensive workload, and in doing so they made things easier for Houston’s role players (Thorpe, Horry, Elie, Kenny Smith, Carl Herrera, Scott Brooks, and, yes, Matt Bullard), who collectively had an offensive rating of 109.1. Having a dominant go-to big man in Hakeem helped a lot, but it was still a great example of how high-volume, low-efficiency players can be valuable by making their teammates better — which, in combination with their great defense, made Houston a formidable team going into the playoffs."

You're saying that it was a good thing that 21% of the team's shots were taken by people with a poor offensive rating? Perhaps this would explain why they were just a middle of the road offensive team. Because some of their players were efficient offensively, and some weren't! It's clear that you CAN win with some inefficient offensive players. But it seems silly to say that they somehow contributed to the offense by taking bad shots. Had they been high-volume, high efficiency players, the Rockets probably would have won several more games.

Everything else looks good though. Thanks for your analysis.