PC Board OT Thread Take 4 [No Politics]

[Goudelock]

Does anybody know around what time period the Pick and Roll, became a central part of American basketball?

Tried googling but couldn't find anything that detailed the history of it.

The 1970s Knicks are the first team I can think of who utilized the PnR at a high rate (in the NBA).

[CumberlandPosey]

Original Celtics invented many of the modern plays.the Pivot play for example as well as give and go plays.when it became possible to actually utilize controlled dribbling plays the roll plays evolved further.old rens used it as well as globies and i read about it from the old gears superteam.all very rudimentary of Course.when plays became even more controlled during the sixties the pick and roll became a staple.infos all in pro surroundings as i have no good grip what happened in amateur leagues such as collegiate conferences.

[Goudelock]

Nothing on basketball twitter annoys me more than seeing Jamal Crawford videos where people are like "If U watch the games, u know Crawford can still cook."

I'm like "If you watched the games and not just 2 minute highlight videos from 2013, you'd know he's finished. The man was barely getting minutes last year for the worst team in the NBA." If Crawford didn't have his 51 point game to end 2019, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

[limbo]

Crawford has been overrated his entire career. There was like a stretch from 2010 to 2015 where he was a decent offensive player if your team needed a plug and play scorer, but before and after that he's been cheeks. Especially in the last few seasons, there's no reason to play this guy at 36,37,38 years old over just allocating those 20 minutes to someone younger with some potential.

And he should return his 6th Man of the Year awards as well... 2010 should go to Manu, 2014 should go to Markieff Morris and the absolutely egregious one he received in 2016 should go to Collison.

[HeartBreakKid]

Saying Jamal Crawford was decent for 6 years is a stretch.

Jamal Crawford is pretty much the perfect example on why strategy/team building in sports builds and evolves so slowly, too much personal bias and jock mindset - Jamal Crawford pretty much fits the mold on what a player would overrate and players often have executive roles in sports franchises (Doc Rivers giving Crawford his most relevant/longest tenure and then often cited as the worst GM in the league is the perfect example).

I think Crawford maybe had a good year or 2 in Atlanta. Outside of that, he has pretty much always been a bad player, and should be closer to a 9th man than a 6th man.

[limbo]

Saying Jamal Crawford was decent for 6 years is a stretch.

Jamal Crawford is pretty much the perfect example on why strategy/team building in sports builds and evolves so slowly, too much personal bias and jock mindset - Jamal Crawford pretty much fits the mold on what a player would overrate and players often have executive roles in sports franchises (Doc Rivers giving Crawford his most relevant/longest tenure and then often cited as the worst GM in the league is the perfect example).

I think Crawford maybe had a good year or 2 in Atlanta. Outside of that, he has pretty much always been a bad player, and should be closer to a 9th man than a 6th man.

Nah, the dude definitely had value offensively in his prime. He was a key member on the 2010 Hawks which were the 2nd best offense in the league that season with a core of Bibby/Crawford/Joe Johnson/Josh Smith/Horford and not much else from the bench...

Idk, if he is closer to a 9th man or 6th man, that's mostly down to what the rest of the bench looks like and how the overall team is constructed, but if your team lacks good offensive players or just an extra scoring punch then he's definitely not a bad player to have on your team.

[Texas Chuck]

" If Crawford didn't have his 51 point game to end 2019, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

One of my favorite parts of Dirk's last home game was him getting on the mic after the game and joking about Crawford overshadowing his big night.


Look Crawford was never a great player, never efficient, whatever. But that guy is going to be 68 years old in a gym somewhere with 20-year-old dudes putting buckets on them and its going to be great. I have some real respect for a dude who just loves basketball and will play until nobody will let him get run anywhere on earth.

[Clyde Frazier]

" If Crawford didn't have his 51 point game to end 2019, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

One of my favorite parts of Dirk's last home game was him getting on the mic after the game and joking about Crawford overshadowing his big night.


Look Crawford was never a great player, never efficient, whatever. But that guy is going to be 68 years old in a gym somewhere with 20-year-old dudes putting buckets on them and its going to be great. I have some real respect for a dude who just loves basketball and will play until nobody will let him get run anywhere on earth.

Yep, i'm fine with people calling him overrated (because by a certain segment he definitely is), but he's easily one of my favorite NBA "people" in the league. Partially one of the reasons he stayed in the league as long as he did. Everyone seems to love him. He also has an appreciation for all aspects of the game and its history. He has a great future as a coach if that's what he wants to do.

[Clyde Frazier]

--

Finally hit me this must be someone who changed their user name lol... hope you're doing well man!

[It's PockyCandy if anyone else was wondering]

[Goudelock]

" If Crawford didn't have his 51 point game to end 2019, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

One of my favorite parts of Dirk's last home game was him getting on the mic after the game and joking about Crawford overshadowing his big night.


Look Crawford was never a great player, never efficient, whatever. But that guy is going to be 68 years old in a gym somewhere with 20-year-old dudes putting buckets on them and its going to be great. I have some real respect for a dude who just loves basketball and will play until nobody will let him get run anywhere on earth.

Yep, i'm fine with people calling him overrated (because by a certain segment he definitely is), but he's easily one of my favorite NBA "people" in the league. Partially one of the reasons he stayed in the league as long as he did. Everyone seems to love him. He also has an appreciation for all aspects of the game and its history. He has a great future as a coach if that's what he wants to do.

I'd also like to clarify that Jamal Crawford is easily in my top 5 when it comes to my favorite players to watch. I loved seeing that guy put up buckets for the Hawks. But I also can understand that my childhood favorites eventually get old and lose their ability to be NBA players. I feel like a large portion of Twitter users would sign and then run out a lineup of Igoudala, Crawford, Vince Carter, Lamar Odom, and whoever was the flashy 5 in the early 2010s/late 00's if they could be a GM of a team.

And yup, I changed my username. I had to pay tribute to my favorite player of all time.

[Clyde Frazier]

Read on Twitter

Even for the NFL... How is this real?

[bondom34]

Read on Twitter

[Owly]

Saying Jamal Crawford was decent for 6 years is a stretch.

Jamal Crawford is pretty much the perfect example on why strategy/team building in sports builds and evolves so slowly, too much personal bias and jock mindset - Jamal Crawford pretty much fits the mold on what a player would overrate and players often have executive roles in sports franchises (Doc Rivers giving Crawford his most relevant/longest tenure and then often cited as the worst GM in the league is the perfect example).

I think Crawford maybe had a good year or 2 in Atlanta. Outside of that, he has pretty much always been a bad player, and should be closer to a 9th man than a 6th man.

Nah, the dude definitely had value offensively in his prime. He was a key member on the 2010 Hawks which were the 2nd best offense in the league that season with a core of Bibby/Crawford/Joe Johnson/Josh Smith/Horford and not much else from the bench...

Idk, if he is closer to a 9th man or 6th man, that's mostly down to what the rest of the bench looks like and how the overall team is constructed, but if your team lacks good offensive players or just an extra scoring punch then he's definitely not a bad player to have on your team.

The problem is he typically negated that offensive value with his defensive (anti-)value (see the dark blue line here https://www.cleaningtheglass.com/stats/player/747/onoff#tab-team_efficiency or https://sites.google.com/site/rapmstats/97-14-rapm-2).

On-off and RAPM doesn't see him as a (net) "key" to the 4.43 SRS Hawks. PI RAPM does give him credit as a very good offensive player as does cleaning the glass but across the board (RAPM and on-off) he's a very slight net negative.

Can such a player have value to a real contender, well I'm not sure that skillset scales well to a good team but let's park that ... could Crawford, probably not because he was probably getting overpaid (haven't looked to closely at yearly figures and not super egregiously at a glance, and scoring has typically been overpaid for).

So did he have value ... at his best (if non-starter) a little though imo scaling poorly to good teams. Did he provide value? Per the above regarding salary, I'd say no.

Saying Jamal Crawford was decent for 6 years is a stretch.

Depends on whether you take limbo's "decent offensive player" to mean decent net player due to value provided on offense or decent value provided on offense (without comment on defensive [li]ability).

Also what conceptual range you figure "decent" to mean.

[Texas Chuck]

Read on Twitter

Even for the NFL... How is this real?

They definitely have a real problem on their hands, but ugh this is not the way to solve it. One of the issues is their ownership makeup is quite different from the NBA's. A lot more old-school family type ownership groups and a lot more politically conservative owners with a lot of power--see Jones and Kraft their two biggest power brokers.

NBA has a lot more young, more progressive thinkers involved and they have done a much better job empowering their players who can then grow into some of these jobs.

But this is a terrible, terrible idea.

[Dr Positivity]

If there was same proportion of black coaches as black people in the US, there'd be like 3? I don't see the issue.

[HeartBreakKid]

If there was same proportion of black coaches as black people in the US, there'd be like 3? I don't see the issue.

Shouldn't it be proportionate to the amount of black football players? Otherwise, there should be a lot more black coaches in the NHL

[E-Balla]

Read on Twitter

Even for the NFL... How is this real?

They definitely have a real problem on their hands, but ugh this is not the way to solve it. One of the issues is their ownership makeup is quite different from the NBA's. A lot more old-school family type ownership groups and a lot more politically conservative owners with a lot of power--see Jones and Kraft their two biggest power brokers.

NBA has a lot more young, more progressive thinkers involved and they have done a much better job empowering their players who can then grow into some of these jobs.

But this is a terrible, terrible idea.

What alternative ideas could you think of? I had the same idea when I saw it but at he end of the day but the only fix is for them to just stop being racist but how do you enforce that if you're the NFL.

Screw it throw a draft pick to owners, make the tangible effects of searching for coaches of all races a little more tangible. I honestly don't think it'll make much of a difference but still, the league has ran backwards in that respect since I've been watching.

[Dr Positivity]

If there was same proportion of black coaches as black people in the US, there'd be like 3? I don't see the issue.

Shouldn't it be proportionate to the amount of black football players? Otherwise, there should be a lot more black coaches in the NHL

While that's fair, football is as popular a sport to play or watch with white people as black people, they just aren't as good at it as they're not as athletic. Therefore there's plenty of white football fans to dream of being scouts or coaches. There's not as many black hockey players cause the culturally they don't like the sport as much (in addition to Canada being 3% black) which would also make for less who grow up to be coaches. Otherwise there would be lots of black players who can skate faster than anyone.

[HeartBreakKid]

If there was same proportion of black coaches as black people in the US, there'd be like 3? I don't see the issue.

Shouldn't it be proportionate to the amount of black football players? Otherwise, there should be a lot more black coaches in the NHL

While that's fair, football is as popular a sport to play or watch with white people as black people, they just aren't as good at it as they're not as athletic. Therefore there's plenty of white football fans to dream of being scouts or coaches. There's not as many black hockey players cause the culturally they don't like the sport as much (in addition to Canada being 3% black) which would also make for less who grow up to be coaches. Otherwise there would be lots of black players who can skate faster than anyone.

I mean sure, that is the literal reason why the NHL doesn't have a lot of black people in it in general. But I am saying - you cannot say that because black people make up 10% of America that there being 3 head coaches seems right - demographically speaking.

More than 10% of the NFL is black, and more than 10% of high level NCAA football is black as well. Head coaches are former football players. So you can't just compare the number of coaches to the general demographics of USA. Ratio isn't the same.

[Doctor MJ]

If there was same proportion of black coaches as black people in the US, there'd be like 3? I don't see the issue.

Shouldn't it be proportionate to the amount of black football players? Otherwise, there should be a lot more black coaches in the NHL

So there's an ugly truth here that is hard to talk about. I'm going to talk about it, but I do want people to realize up front that I don't believe in any significant difference in mental ability based on actual differences in genes. I'm not saying that out of assertion that there could not be, I just think so much of this stuff is about societal background.

The starting assumption is that playing a sport is necessary to coach/GM the sport. Leaving aside rare exceptions to the rule, there is a question:

How good do you have to be as a player to be a good coach/GM?

I think what we're finding is that it's generally a handicap if you don't play on the college (or the equivalent) level. I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that if you played age 18-22, you generally got to play for a serious coach, and you were devoted to that sport in a way that most high school players are not.

How beneficial is it to play beyond college? I mean, in the NFL, I don't think it's ever been seen as necessary and in fact playing a long NFL career gets in the way of you working your way up the ranks learning the trade of coaching.

So then, if we look at the proportion of college players - in all divisions - who are black or white, it's probably going to be more white dominant than in the pros, right? That's part of the issue here when we think that the proportion of NFL players to coaches/GMs should be the same.

But of course that's not the ugly part. The ugly part is the idea that the really smart guys are disproportionately white. Where does that come from? Racial bias is part of it, and that's ugly by definition, but the truly nasty thing here is that in general your average black student growing up is not as supported as your average white student, and thus you're probably more likely to be prepared analytically to be "the smart guy" if you're a white kid that comes from a more privileged background.

I'll take in a related but perhaps unexpected direction: I teach at a strong high school magnet. It's dominated by Asian-American kids. It's not the case, in my opinion, that Asian-American kids are smarter than the average white kid (or any other kid), but they are prepared to excel in highly rigorous academics in a way that your average white kid is not. (The contrast between my experience growing up as a middle class white kid who would become a first generation college student compared to what my students experience with their parents is astonishing, and while there are things I worry about with these kids, there's zero doubt that it's an advantage in terms of not just GPA/SATs but discipline and work ethic.)

Last I'll pivot to basketball because I think the really ugly truth here is that basketball may see a more dramatic shift away from black coaches/GMs than football. Because the tendency to reach for NBA players as head coaches is WAY stronger than in the NFL, and analytics is transforming the game of basketball so thoroughly now. The people in basketball are more progressive than in football and in general want non-whites to succeed as coach/GM more than folks in the NFL (which has a lot of pro-Trump white people)...but the truth is that someone like Mark Jackson shouldn't be given a head coaching job without paying his dues and diligently learning from others, and as more franchises realize this, this is going to kill the short cut the NBA had which allowed a more diverse space.

Once a more general form on intellectual tools are necessary for managing athletes, the focus on getting the best athletes to make it work naturally goes down, and makes the potential for a race gap even worse.

2 last notes:

1. I can't imagine an actual hire-an-African-American, get a higher draft pick policy having the desired effect. Leaving aside the specifics, Affirmative Action has driven a lot of white people crazy, and this will bring more of that. (Tangent: I always shake my head at this because if you get rid of Affirmative Action and really try to go by GPA/SAT, you're going to see my Asian-American students take over Harvard and nativist folks will like that even less.)

2. I can't tell you how glad I am that Masai Ujiri is killing it like he is. One guy succeeding doesn't make "everything okay", but racist tendencies get STFU when you have examples that make clear things could be otherwise.