RealGM Top 100 List #40

[trex_8063]

fwiw, I must have much more impact on my sophomore highschool team's success than I thought, lot of parallels to Reggie Miller (I mentioned I wore his number in HS, right?). I came across the stat-sheet from my sophomore year highschool team:

I was the team's 3rd-leading scorer at 12.2 ppg: the 2nd-leading scorer barely ahead at 12.3, leading scorer avg 14.3 ppg. Although there's an interesting tid-bit wrt my scoring average, as I started out the season off the bench in sort of a 6th-man role, averaging 8.7 ppg in the first 9 games. Then one of our starting guards broke his wrist, so I became a starter. In the final 8 games during which I was a starter, I led the team in scoring with 16.1 ppg (these were just 32-minute games, btw).

Anyway, the big parallel to Reggie is that I was a highly efficient 3-pt specialist and excellent FT-shooter; did my damage primarily in an off-ball manner. Didn't really have much handles, on-ball scoring confidence, limited post-up game or iso skills. Pity, as I would develop those things later in life (nearer age 30 and beyond) thru on-going practice, becoming more confident emulating other skills, pick-up games, men's leagues, etc.

**Anyway, my TS% for the whole season that year was---get this!---69.9% .

So that's my shameless brag for today.

fwiw, arguments in these last few threads have made me much higher on Reggie than I was previously. I'm still comfortable sticking with Pierce in this run-off. But at this point I'd tend to rank Reggie in the immediate vicinity, too.

[ElGee]

My attempt to "normalize" their rebounding -- a method that involved looking for a "team tendency" of OREB strategy by accounting for individual outliers -- gave the Celtics about 2 points of ORtg points. The 2008 Celtics were +2.7 and the 2009 team +2.2.

Would you mind explaining in greater depth how you did this? I'm highly curious as to the methodology applied here.

Well, I never published it so I don't exactly consider it rigorous.IIRC, the general approach was:

-look at OREB% by "position" on a team (PG, wings, bigs)
-remove the top OREB% at each team for position (intended to remove individual outliers)
-take the average per position for that team
-do this for every team
-this creates a ranking of all 30 teams of "OREB strategy." (Confounded slightly by teams who are individually filled with great O rebounders.)
-calculate the number of extra possessions a team is generating by their "OREB strategy" relative to league average (for a team who doesn't hit the offensive glass, this will be negative)
-add (or subtract) the expected value of those extra possessions to a team's ORtg

So in other words, I was trying to isolate a team's OREB strategy independent of individually brilliant rebounders like Reggie Evans, normalize it and then create an "adjusted" offensive and defensive rating (because the strategy is a tradeoff between offensive and defense). The results were that teams that hit the glass hard -- Dallas in 2012 -- added about 2.5 points of offensive, and teams that got back on D -- Boston and Chicago -- lost about 2.5 to almost 3 points off ORTG.

If you're wondering why not just look at some combination of TOV% and TS%, it's because both eFG% and free throw rate (FTR) could be impacted by OREB strategy. And of course, some players are just good offensive rebounders which is how they impart value individually. While an eFG% and TOV% only ORtg approximates what I did well (r=0.88) the misses can be significant (e.g. Memphis would be a +0.5 offense with the OREB adjustment, but a -4.8 offense based just on eFG% and TOV%).

There are a few ramifications of all this when it comes to OREB:

(1) If we normalize the playing field by isolating a crash/get-back strategy, teams who crash the offensive glass hard aren't quite as "good" as ORTG paints them out to be, and teams who always get back on defense aren't quite as good as DRTG makes them out to be. The degree of this seems to be about 2-3 points at the edges.

(2) It's important to keep OREB% in mind in general when talking about team-building and offensive efficacy. It's one of the reasons I value Rodman and Chandler (and others) as offensive players -- because individually skilled offensive rebounders contribute in a super-portable way: the skill is basically never redundant with the scorers (or the first wave of attack) and then perhaps becomes more valuable as the offense improves because scrambling defenses are more vulnerable to offensive rebounds.

Thus, when considering skillsets, portability, team-building, etc. it's important to understand where we are on the scale independent of a team's transition defense strategy when evaluating what kind of offenses players have been the "1st option" on, "2nd option," etc.

[lorak]

RAPM is a process that makes it so that 1 "point" of value in its results is no longer the same thing as 1 point on the scoreboard. So I did 2 things:

1) I made a "normalized" or "SD" version of it that presents a value based on how many standard deviations above average a player is, under the assumption that actual variance through the league doesn't change very much.

2) I made a "scaled" version which took the standard deviation from an APM study (which doesn't have the same issue)

What issue and what APM study?

[Jaivl]

If I recall correctly...

What issue

He's telling you. "RAPM is a process that makes it so that 1 "point" of value in its results is no longer the same thing as 1 point on the scoreboard".

and what APM study?

Illardi's 6 year study.

[penbeast0]

Wow, Reggie sneaks into the runoff after the deadline then just plain demolishes Pierce.

Paul Pierce (4) - trex_8063, Quotatious, Basketballefan, SactoKingsFan

Reggie Miller (8) - Doctor MJ, john248, fpliii, e-Balla, penbeast0, notanoob, JordansBulls, ronnymac2

[D Nice]

My attempt to "normalize" their rebounding -- a method that involved looking for a "team tendency" of OREB strategy by accounting for individual outliers -- gave the Celtics about 2 points of ORtg points. The 2008 Celtics were +2.7 and the 2009 team +2.2.

Would you mind explaining in greater depth how you did this? I'm highly curious as to the methodology applied here.

Spoiler:

Well, I never published it so I don't exactly consider it rigorous.IIRC, the general approach was:

-look at OREB% by "position" on a team (PG, wings, bigs)
-remove the top OREB% at each team for position (intended to remove individual outliers)
-take the average per position for that team
-do this for every team
-this creates a ranking of all 30 teams of "OREB strategy." (Confounded slightly by teams who are individually filled with great O rebounders.)
-calculate the number of extra possessions a team is generating by their "OREB strategy" relative to league average (for a team who doesn't hit the offensive glass, this will be negative)
-add (or subtract) the expected value of those extra possessions to a team's ORtg

So in other words, I was trying to isolate a team's OREB strategy independent of individually brilliant rebounders like Reggie Evans, normalize it and then create an "adjusted" offensive and defensive rating (because the strategy is a tradeoff between offensive and defense). The results were that teams that hit the glass hard -- Dallas in 2012 -- added about 2.5 points of offensive, and teams that got back on D -- Boston and Chicago -- lost about 2.5 to almost 3 points off ORTG.

If you're wondering why not just look at some combination of TOV% and TS%, it's because both eFG% and free throw rate (FTR) could be impacted by OREB strategy. And of course, some players are just good offensive rebounders which is how they impart value individually. While an eFG% and TOV% only ORtg approximates what I did well (r=0.88) the misses can be significant (e.g. Memphis would be a +0.5 offense with the OREB adjustment, but a -4.8 offense based just on eFG% and TOV%)

.

Kill stuff Elgee, as always, thanks for getting back to me. Only tweak I might suggest is using [team 2nd chance points/team offensive rebounds] instead of team ORTG for the expected value calculation (unless of course we don't have access to this data, in which case never-mind) as I think put-backs cause PPS to be accrued at a higher rate on 2nd shot opportunities than a standard possession.