Does John Hollinger trust PER? Should we?

John Hollinger created Player Efficiency Rating (details about its calculation here). As John himself puts it,

The PER sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.

 

After a successful writing career for ESPN.com, the Memphis Grizzlies hired Hollinger as their VP of Basketball Operations. In his first season as VP of Basketball Operations, Hollinger’s most significant move was trading Rudy Gay for Tayshaun Prince, Austin Daye, and Ed Davis.

From a Wins Produced perspective, that’s a heck of a deal. Rudy Gay is unremarkable; Prince is solid; Daye seems to be productive when he’s played on the perimeter; and, Ed Davis is among the most underrated young big men in the league.

But what about from the perspective of PER?

Prior to the trade, Rudy Gay’s PER was 14.1, just below Hollinger’s average of 15. Prince’s? 12.7. Daye’s was also 12.7 in a weird coincidence, and like WP, PER says Davis is the best player of the bunch at 18.2.

Interesting, right?

When we look at minute distribution since the trade, it’s stranger still. For all intents and purposes, Tayshaun Prince is playing Rudy Gay’s minutes. And even though Daye and Davis have had some good moments, they’re not playing enough to matter.

Practically speaking, this trade was Rudy Gay for Tayshaun Prince.

From the perspective of PER, we’d expect the Grizzlies to be a little bit worse, at least so long as we look at it from a Prince-for-Gay standpoint, which is what it is in practice. Not a lot worse, but a little. But the Grizzlies are not worse. In fact, they’ve been quite a bit better since the trade (obligatory small sample size qualifier . That good play hasn’t been because TAyshaun Prince is playing like an All Star. He hasn’t been. But, Tayshaun Prince is quite a bit more productive all things considered, and that is certainly helping.

The question that then begs to be asked is, “Does Hollinger trust his own metric?”

There are a couple obvious counterpoints to my implicit point in that question. I’d like to quickly respond to some of them.

First, for those who followed the trade as it happened, it was obvious there was a financial reason to do this deal (and the one that immediately preceded it). Fair enough. But Hollinger flat out says that he believed Tayshaun would be able to replace Gay’s production, and that there were plenty of “basketball reasons” for the trade. So it wasn’t just a financial decision; it was also a basketball one. Reading between the lines, at worst it’s a lateral move that saves money. At least this year anyway, as Prince is already beginning his post-30 decent.

Second, Hollinger’s own trade machine predicted the Grizzlies would be better after the trade, but that prediction is heavily influenced Ed Davis’ PER, and as I mentioned, Ed Davis has hardly seen the floor. If this trade were about Ed Davis, this is an awfully strange way of showing it.

Third, you could also say that Davis is a big part of Hollinger’s plans, but from a long-term rather than short-term perspective. We’ll see how they cross that bridge when they get there, I guess, but color me skeptical. It’s hard to see them committing long-term, significant money to Davis after making all these money-saving cuts, and young big men like Davis tend to get MLE deals or better off rookie scale contracts. In a league where Darko makes millions, Ed Davis probably will too. That whole short supply of tall people and all.

To be fair to Hollinger, Rudy Gay isn’t a superstar by PER. He’s had some good, but not great, seasons. Even if Gay is as good as his best PER season, it’s reasonable for Hollinger not to want to pay him max money.

But my critical question is still worth asking, because it highlights the critical flaw in PER: players like Rudy Gay – who score lots of points by taking lots of shots – get significantly overrated by it, and players like Tayshaun Prince – who don’t score tons of points but are competent players overall – get underrated by it.

And maybe Hollinger knows this.

I am certainly anxious to see more of what he does so we can find out.

What if Andre Drummond played more?

When the Pistons drafted Andre Drummond, I was skeptical and with good reason. In spite of being one of the most athletic big men in the entire NCAA, he had avery mediocre freshman season, which raised questions for statheads and traditional scouts alike.

At the conclusion of the preseason, I was optimistic about Andre Drummond and again, with good reason. Dre had a brilliant season, at times looking and producing like the most dominant player on the floor.

And after 30 games, Andre Drummond looks like the real deal, putting up per minute numbers that in some key areas that outshine Dwight Howard’s rookie season. Yep, so far, he’s been that good.

However, Detroit remains committed to its preseason plan for Drummond: bring the kid along slowly. At one point, that plan made a lot of sense. Drummond wasn’t great as a freshman. He’s young. He’s still growing into his body. For the first time in his life, he’ll be playing against men his own size. Those are all good reasons to take the long view and develop Drummond slowly.

But at every opportunity, Drummond has demonstrated that none of these concerns are justified. His performance up to this point indicates that he’s more than ready. In fact, in spite of being a little rough around certain edges, he has been Detroit’s most impactful player, and it’s not all that close.

Drummond’s play demands that the Pistons reevaluate their plans.

2012-2013 Detroit Pistons Season Preview

Can the Pistons make the playoffs? And even if they can, will they? At least a few players will consider the season a failure if they do not. Playoffs or bust, then… or is it?

Last year at this time, Charlie Villanueva tweeted some things about insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is crazy. Turns out, he was right. Given the players on the roster, a below-freezing win forecast in the mid-twenties seemed likely. And in spite of finishing the season a whole lot better than they started, the Pistons completed the season at 25-41. By efficiency differential, from which Wins Produced is derived, the Pistons were actually a little bit worse and would have been expected to win only 22 games.

This year, the Pistons will return several of the same players, and many of those players are expected to play significant roles. However, this year there finally be some room for optimism  - in the numbers of all places! And while the NBA Playoffs are probably still out of reach, that won’t necessarily make this season a bust. There is an intriguing young core of players emerging here that should give the Pistons some hope.

Talking advanced stats and playing days with @BallinMichigan

Patrick Hayes is a writer every Piston fan should know about. He’s doing great work all over the place these days, and he recently started up a new blog, BallinMichigan, which as the title suggests, is focused on covering basketball in Michigan.

This week, Patrick explored connections between Michiganders and advanced stats in basketball, and he invited me to a Q&A about my experience as a former collegiate player who now embraced advanced statistical analysis of the game. Or as he puts it better,

But the reason I asked Ben to participate in this series goes deeper than just the fact that I admire his writing. He’s also a former college basketball player, as he’ll describe below, so I wanted to get his take on the perception that advanced stats are just for the numbers nerds with no athletic ability.

 

One of the things I hope these conversations this week help illuminate is that advanced stats are not scary or threatening or nerdy. They’re simply another way to continuously look at and evaluate the game we all love to come up with the best possible methods for evaluating and explaining what actually happens on a basketball court. Ben has a lot of interesting insight worth reading below and you’ll also get to find out which NBA All-Star he once hit a floater over.

Check it out here.

Pistons acquire Corey Maggette, has nothing to do with Corey Maggette

Today, Joe Dumars made progress.

And that progress has nothing to do with what Corey Maggette may or may not bring to the Detroit Pistons in the 2012-2013 NBA season.

There was a time when Corey Maggette was an intriguing and productive NBA player who demonstrated a remarkable ability to attack the basket and get to the free throw line. But age and injury raise serious questions about his ability to do that while wearing Red, White, and Piston Blue. A quick look at his stats illustrate the point.

Stats courtesy of The NBA Geek

Yes, it’s possible (if very unlikely) that being traded to Detroit could rejuvenate Corey Maggette’s career. Antonio McDyess and Tracy McGrady both know a little bit about how injured veterans can rediscover their productivity under the careful watch of Arnie Kander.

But even if he doesn’t return to his pre-thirty-year-old form, acquiring Corey Maggette is an important step for the Detroit Pistons – if for no other reason than it demonstrates that the franchise is finally moving forward from its dismal failures of the summer of 2009.

Ben Gordon, signed in the summer of 2009 along with Charlie Villanueva, has been an enigma. By Wins Produced, Ben Gordon was never a star player, but since coming to Detroit, he hasn’t even played at a rotation-caliber level. A quick look at his numbers illustrate the point.

Whatever Ben Gordon’s problems have been, I sincerely hope he figures them out in Charlotte and realizes his full potential. He’s been an active member of Detroit’s community and seems like a genuinely good person.

From a basketball perspective, Maggette’s best has been better than Gordon’s, but that simply cannot be Dumars’ motivation. Likely, Maggette’s career is nearing its end, and he doesn’t fit any need the Pistons currently have.

This trade wasn’t about a talent upgrade, filling a roster need, or making an immediate improvement in the Win-Loss department. Corey Maggette the player doesn’t make the Pistons better.

But the financial flexibility that his expiring contract may provide might.

If Jason Maxiell picks up his player option, the Pistons suddenly have two expiring contracts that may be enticing to teams who will be scrambling to avoid the increasingly punitive luxury tax of the NBA’s new Collective Bargaining Agreement by the summer of 2013.

But even if Maggette and Maxiel remain Pistons for the duration of the 2012-2013 season, this trade – I hope – was about cutting ties with a failed “retooling” strategy and starting a true rebuild around one of the game’s most promising young big men, Greg Monroe.

Here’s hoping that on draft night, Joe Dumars takes the next step in that reinvention.

The Dallas Mavericks’ Championship Deserves an Asterisk, or John Hollinger Says Stupid Things

John Hollinger receives as much criticism from the WoW Network as just about anyone else. Deservedly so, as has been shown time and again, PER fails to do anything useful.

This post, however, has nothing at all to do with PER. It has everything to do with one of John’s recent tweets:

Okay, I guess it does have something to do with PER, but only in passing. PER struggles to explain why the Pistons of the Going to Work era were so effective. By PER, the Pistons were a pretty unremarkable group while they were dominating the Eastern Conference and very nearly winning back-to-back championships. Perhaps that’s why Hollinger is looking for all the excuses he can find to explain why a team like the 2003-2004 Pistons won an NBA championship instead of a team like the 2003-2004 Los Angeles Lakers.

If your metric doesn’t work, mislead.

But I digress.

The point of this post is to apply the logic of Bill Simmons and John Hollinger to the reigning NBA Champions, the Dallas Mavericks, and their trip to the Finals through the Portland Trailblazers.

In Round One of the 2010-2011 NBA Playoffs, the Mavs defeated the Portland Trailblazers 4 games to 2, en route to the NBA Championship, as we all know.

But wouldn’t you know it, that Portland team was heavily depleted by injuries.

Brandon Roy, one-time NBA superstar, contributed almost nothing in Portland’s losses, due to devastating knee injuries that eventually ended his career. (As an aside, the games where he did manage to contribute were awe-inspiring and incredibly courageous. I’ll never forget those games as an NBA fan.)

But Roy wasn’t the only important Blazer to miss time. Former number one pick of the NBA Draft, Greg Oden, has been a very productive player when he was healthy, and he didn’t play a single minute in this series due to his own career-threatening knee injuries.

Therefore, Dallas’ NBA championship should be taken with a large grain of salt and probably deserves an asterisk.

Wait, what?

Of course it doesn’t. That’s absurd, and frankly, willfully ignorant stupidity.

It isn’t Dallas’ fault that Brandon Roy and Greg Oden got injured, is it? What would you have had them do, John and Bill, bench Nowitzki and Kidd to even the playing field?

Of course note. That’s a patently ludicrous idea that would get rightfully laughed out of every locker room in the NBA, and heck, every place where basketball fans gather to cheer on their teams.

Even Portland fans would read this and laugh mockingly.

Toning down the sarcasm, the obvious point here is obvious:

Teams can only compete against their opposition.

It’s not Dallas’ fault that Oden and Roy were injured, there’s nothing Dallas should have done differently as a result, and Dallas’ amazing accomplishment should not be jaded or tarnished because of Roy’s and Oden’s bad knees.

Dallas beat the teams they faced, and as a result, Dallas won the NBA Championship.

Full stop. Period. End of conversation.

This is no less true for the 2003-2004 Detroit Pistons - whose opponents’ injuries were arguably less significant than the injuries to Roy and Oden.

And lest we forget, Detroit didn’t just beat the Lakers; they pummeled the Lakers, a team that contrary to Hollinger’s revisionist history was mostly at full strength; they pummeled the Lakers so badly that the NBA changed its rules about how defense could be played legally.

Everything I have written here is publicly available fact that seems so obvious to me that I can hardly believe I’m taking the time to write it.

But thanks to the incompetence of professional sports writers like Hollinger and Simmons, guys like me have content long after our favorite teams season ends.

Kudos, gentlemen.

Charlie Villanueva played, but let’s not pretend he played well

I support Lawrence Frank’s decision to play Charlie Villanueva yesterday against the Chicago Bulls. Villanueva is one of the most obvious amnesty candidates in the league, and as frustrating a player as he’s been, the Pistons exercising the amnesty clause on him would be a humiliating acknowledgement of failure to perform up to expectations – and for all his faults as a player, I don’t wish that on anyone.

Plus, if he plays like he’s played as a Piston to date, more minutes for Villanueva means better odds at winning the lottery, as well as the potential to move up a position if we don’t. So there’s nothing lost at all by playing him.

But did he play well yesterday in his return to the Pistons’ rotation? That seems to be the consensus from Mlive.com and the Detroit News.

In a shocking turn of events, I don’t agree with the consensus.

Let’s dig into the numbers for the positives and negatives of Villanueva’s return to the Pistons’ rotation.

On the upside, Charlie scored 13 points, committed only 2 fouls, and only turned it over once. His shot selection was also not horrible (although he was a little shot happy). He converted 4 of his 5 shots at the rim, didn’t take any long two’s, and took the rest of his shots from deep.

And even though he’s not a defensive powerhouse, my eyeballs said he played competent defense by Charlie standards, and he had one steal. Patrick Hayes at PistonPowered agrees. I trust Patrick’s read on this sort of thing, so let’s say that Charlie V played decent defense.

Beyond that, though, things start to get ugly. (Hat Tip to www.hoopdata.com for their excellent advanced box scores and http://www.nerdnumbers.com for the WP splits that follow)

The most productive scorers in the NBA tend to score a lot at the rim, at the free throw line (because they’re attacking the rim), and from behind the arc. Charlie did only one of those things yesterday, and failed completely at the other two.

 Charlie was very good at the rim, converting 4 of 5; however, all of his makes at the rim (and in total, actually) were assisted, indicating that Charlie wasn’t attacking the basket himself. As a result, Charlie didn’t get fouled while shooting and didn’t get to the free throw line.

Charlie took 6 shots from three, meaning 11 of his shot 15 shot attempts came from the best places on the floor for him to shoot. Unfortunately, he only converted 1 three-point shot. So in spite of taking 11 shots right where you’d want him to shoot, he only managed 13 points on 15 total shots. That’s bad for every position, but especially power forward.

To make matters worse, Charlie just kept shooting. He was a black hole on offense, using 36.3% of the Pistons’ possessions while he was on the floor. That number beats everyone else on the team by a wide margin, with the exception of Stuckey (35%), who carried the Pistons’ offense on his back; no one else on the team besides Knight surpassed using 20% of the team’s possessions while on the floor.

The net result of all this shooting and missing is 0.64 points scored per possession used. Only Maxiell and Prince posted worse.

Then, there’s the lack of rebounding in a game where the Pistons were handled on the glass. I can understand the lack of offensive rebounding to a point, given how much Charlie plays on the perimeter. Not that I like or prefer it, just understand it. (Actually, if Frank decides to continue playing Charlie at the 4, Jonas Jerebko makes a much better pairing at the 3 than Prince or Wilkins because of his superior offensive rebounding ability).

But the failure to contribute more to the team’s defensive rebounding is inexcusable. Only Damien Wilkins (18 minutes, SF) and Ben Wallace (11 minutes, C) grabbed fewer defensive boards than Villanueva.

Furthermore, it’s difficult to perceive any improvement to team offense, which is Frank’s explicit reasoning for playing Villanueva – to improve the team’s offense by stretching the floor. The Pistons managed only 94 points through four quarters and over time, and their offensive efficiency was a paltry 89.5

And while we’re at it, let’s talk defense. Thanks to NerdNumbers, we have Wins Produced game splits, and while this isn’t a direct measure of Charlie’s defense, the Pistons allowed solid production from the Bulls’ power forwards, who produced at a rate of 0.253 wins per 48 minutes.

From the perspective of my favorite all-in-one box score derived metric, Charlie Villanueva produced -0.274 wins per 48 minutes, or -0.11 wins.

Yikes.

To reiterate, I support Coach Frank’s decision to give Villanueva an extended look. It’s the best thing for everyone, and frankly, Lawrence is absolutely right – the Pistons need to be evaluating what they have, and it’s hard to evaluate a player when he’s glued to the bench. 

But let’s not pretend that the performance from Charlie Villanueva was anything different than what we’ve seen time and again in his tenure as a Piston. It wasn’t. 

Wins Produced Splits Visualized

UPDATE: Post is up on Detroit Bad Boys. Link here.

A full post with comments will be posted to www.detroitbadboys.com. Please feel free to join the conversation there when it’s live. I will link the post here as soon as it’s live.

The splits presented here are from the beginning of the season to the end of March. I will create updated charts at the end of the season.

Season totals below.

Props to The NBA Geek and Nerd Numbers for the data. Note that I’ve adjusted Austin Daye’s numbers in the season totals to reflect him playing at SF, while the NBA Geek has him slated at PF.

Quick Hitter: Maybe Your Problem Isn’t with Wins Produced

Yesterday, Tom Liston, of Raptors Republic, said a lot of things about Wins Produced, most of them critical. You can find his full comments here.

Most of his criticisms have been addressed repeteadly throughout the Wages of Wins Network. What follows isn’t necessarily a direct critique of Tom’s post, but that post was the provocation.

When people present counterarguments to Wins Produced like Tom does here, it makes me think that their problem isn’t with Wins Produced, but rather, with the way the game of basketball itself is actually designed.

It’s not that Wins Produced overvalues rebounds and/or efficient scoring and/or etc., etc. Wins Produced simply observes something that is true about the game of basketball: getting rebounds, making shots, stealing possession from the other team, all of those actions produce wins.

In other words, people who present these arguments don’t actually have a problem with Wins Produced; instead, they have a fundamental misunderstanding about what constitutes winning basketball. Instead of addressing that misunderstanding, they attack the metric that simply observes what’s true about the nature of the game.

Lawrence Frank is not the Answer

Back in June, I argued that John Kuester was not problem with the Detroit Pistons. Despite the fact that he handled plenty of things poorly, the roster that he inherited simply wasn’t strong enough to compete.

Nevertheless, Kuester was fired, a new coaching staff was hired, but little else changed. 

Unfortunately, Lawrence Frank has not been the answer Pistons fans have hoped for.

After losing to Boston tonight, the Pistons have lost three consecutive games by a combined total of 39 (!!) points. And frankly, that understates how poorly the team has performed. 

From here, things don’t get any easier. Of the Pistons next 19 games (through January, 2012), the Pistons are likely to be significant underdogs in all but 4 – Charlotte, Minnesota, and Milwaukee (twice) – and they will likely be slight underdogs in those games as well. 

It is very possible that the 2011-2012 could threaten Lawrence Frank’s own New Jersey Nets for the worst start in NBA history. 

There is little Lawrence Frank can do to avoid that. 

No discredit to Frank intended, however. He seems like a fine head coach who manages his players and himself very well. The problem with the Pistons is not that Frank and/or the rest of the coaching staff is insufficient.

The problem is that this collection of players simply doesn’t have what it takes to be a winning basketball team.

And nothing short of a wholesale roster overhaul is going to fix that. 

No hard feelings, Larry. I don’t think this is your fault at all.