TheSecretWeapon wrote:I'd be open to seeing your research on this, but I don't this is correct. If you don't have anything, I can take a look next week. There will be some correlation between individual offensive rating and team offensive rating, of course -- team offensive rating is the combined offensive rating of the individual players. But, there are many cases where individual player performance is quite different from their team's.
Equating offensive rating with defensive rating makes no sense. The issues with drtg are well established, in part because of the explicit inclusion of team drtg in the equation. Your thoughts on ortg being so heavily affected by teammates that it can't be used to compare players on different teams is a new one to me.
As for letting Beal walk...there are means to replace him. The Wizards could sign another player with some of the money they chose not to pay Beal. He's been decidedly average for four years. Average players aren't typically all that difficult to replace.
Just to be clear: Beal will almost certainly get the max from the Wizards. But it won't be because he's indispensable on the court, but rather because they've made him indispensable with their marketing. As a player, he's replaceable. As a part of their marketing strategy, he's pretty close to essential.
I don't have anything, and to be honest, take a look if you want, and I'd be open to be proven wrong, but even if you don't, I do see value in ortg. My analysis is purely anecdotal, and as such I openly admit that I could easily be vulnerable to sample size bias and only noticing the examples that fit my observation and ignoring the rest, but there is admittedly a lot of noise here, even moreso than with other stats. How the team does and the role a player is asked to play (particularly its importance to the offense) matters. Did Lamarcus Aldridge have a bounceback season this year, or did he go from a team with a 108 ortg to a team with a 110 ortg? Aldridge is a part of the equation in both instances, but there is noise there that is tough to separate when almost half of Aldridge's "improvement" is covered by the difference in the respective team offenses. It's one thing to point out the points scored by a player given 100 possessions, but 100 possessions aren't always created equal. It's far better than drtg in that respect, but I still see a lot of noise, although if it's just me seeing things, well... I certainly wouldn't rule it out. I just find it hard, even in Beal's case, to completely rationalize away the fact that he had a career high TS% this season and it's tied with his career worst TS% season for his highest ever ortg. It's useful, but there is still a context to be had there.
I use ortg quite a bit, but whenever I use it, I like to also have a barrage of other stats around it to support it, and when they don't really support it, I start asking questions. I mean, in one breath Tontoz is writing off ortg for Wall specifically and then applying to Beal on the other hand like a death sentence. They both play for the same team and actually play similar roles with Beal taking a lot of the secondary ballhandling duties for better or worse (mostly worse) this season. I will grant that I've seen less noise on primary initiator roles for ortg - guys who have a bit more control over their own fate, and in that respect, things are a lot more negative for Beal this season, but they're also pretty negative for Wall, too.
As for replacing Beal, there are absolutely ways to replace him. I don't doubt that or a second. My point was more that those same options aren't really lessened by paying Beal. Another question is, how do those means help the Wizards longer term? Just because a team of underrated castoffs on bargain contracts has never won a title doesn't mean it won't happen at some point. The problem isn't so much Beal as it is the Wizards' inability to exploit other means of finding talent, specifically the draft and younger free agents, but you don't have to let Beal walk to exploit those. Beal for the max to the Wizards isn't nearly the anchor it gets made out to be and really isn't any more outlandish than the likes of Batum for the max to the Hornets, or Derozan for the max to the Raptors, or whoever gives Harrison Barnes the max. They aren't value contracts, but you will always have some value contracts and some non-value contracts on an NBA roster and it's really worthwhile to use both and quite often it's the lesser of two evils if you wind up spending in free agency (one of the worst ways to try and accumulate talent beyond scraping towards a ~.500 team) to try and replace that talent.
My own personal assessment of Beal is that he will eventually peak somewhere in the Afflalo to West Matthews pre-injury spectrum to Danny Green range of SGs, but it will take a bit of patience to get there and any team who gets him there will have to be able to overlook paying a max to a non-superstar for a certain period of time. His going so highly in the draft really helped him, but the free agency period helps him even more. In 4 years or so, when he's out of his athletic prime and moving into his veteran prime, that's the contract that matters, and honestly, that's what the Wizards should be aiming for rather than trying to load up on veterans to "win now" anyway. You can absolutely win while trying to continuously build, but the second you stop building or keep hitting the reset button is when you plateau or worse. I think a few teams have figured this out, with the Spurs being the pre-eminent franchise in that regard. The second the Wizards do draft a better SG than Beal, even at the max, they could offload him for something in return pretty easily with injuries always being the caveat.
