fam3381 wrote:Why would anyone want one of the OKC PFs over Landry?
I like Landry better than any of those guys as well.
The thing with Landry is that he scores off the charts in both PER and using the Winscore metrics. This will be another great test of the Winscore metric, because the Bucks are clearly adding a guy who according to the formulas should really help this team.
For reference, his PER right now is 18.5 and was 21 last season. Here's a Hollinger excerpt:
2007-08 season: I get asked a lot of questions about PER, and last year most of them involved Landry. He had the highest PER among rookies and for much of the end of last season was ahead of players like Tim Duncan and Dirk Nowitzki. Which of course, led to emails and messages saying, "I can't believe you think Carl Landry is better than Tim Duncan."
Of course he isn't better. The disconnect here is that PER can only measure how somebody played, not how somebody is. If that's too abstract, an example from another sport might help. Let's say you had a baseball player, a utility infielder, who hit .375 in 150 at-bats. Would you conclude he was having a fantastic year? Of course you would. But would you conclude he was a better hitter than Ichiro because he had a higher batting average? Of course not.
That's kind of what happened with Landry. He didn't play a lot minutes (709), but saw just enough to clear the threshold for the PER leaderboard. And in those minutes, he played fantastic, amazingly well, which is what PER caught on to.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves. He was a second-round draft pick who didn't exactly blow up in his four years at Purdue, so his season was almost certainly an outlier.
Best shooting percentage on inside shots, 2007-08
Player Team FG FGA Pct.
Carl Landry Hou 117 181 64.6
Andrew Bynum LAL 189 294 64.3
Erick Dampier Dal 178 277 64.3
Fabricio Oberto SA 170 270 63.0
Jamario Moon Tor 153 244 62.7
Min. 100 shots. Source: NBA.com/hotspots
And what an outlier it was. Landry lead the league in shooting percentage on inside shots at 64.6 percent, and converted an even higher rate (69.6 percent) in the immediate basket area. Not only that but he had the lowest turnover ratio of any power forward, so he was insanely efficient with the possessions he used. Throw in the fact that he was second at his position in offensive rebound rate, and it's easy to see why his PER was so high.
But let's not take that any further just yet. We can say that for 709 minutes Landry played great, but that doesn't necessarily mean he's a great player.
Scouting report: Landry's stellar stats obscure the real reason the Rockets liked him so much -- he's a tough-as-nails interior defender. He moves his feet on defense and is capable of picking up guards on switches, and he has the size to guard power forwards on the block and help out on the glass. Though he's a bit short for center, he can fill in there as well.
Offensively, he's mostly a below-the-rim finisher, but was very effective converting around the basket last season. He doesn't have a perimeter game and isn't a low-post scorer, and one has to expect some regression to the mean in his shooting percentage.......
