GT: Washington Wizards @ Brooklyn - Wednesday, 2/8/17 7:30pm LeVert will play

[Pistolpete1947]

well hopefully Lin will be on another team by then, so you won't have to worry about it.

If you're hoping for Lin and Brook being on another team then you're hoping for 0-82 next season.

caus 9-73 is much better?.... and at least if they are gone it frees up center for someone who can defend and PG for a proven nba starter

Yeah like Whitehead.

[Prokorov]

If you're hoping for Lin and Brook being on another team then you're hoping for 0-82 next season.

caus 9-73 is much better?.... and at least if they are gone it frees up center for someone who can defend and PG for a proven nba starter

Yeah like Whitehead.

love him as a backup.

Hard to do worse with 33 Million then a Pg/C duo that has you worse then tanking teams trying to lose.

[Pistolpete1947]

Baiting.

[Roy Tarpley]

Very early in the season when I thought the Nets could win 32 games, I wanted to see the starters playing 30+ minutes per game, which would still allow young folks like Levert and Whitehead to get 15-18 minutes per game.

When Lin got injured the second time, it was basically a lost season, so might as well give tons of minutes to RHJ, Levert, Whitehead, and even CMC. I'm also intrigued by the Booker at C experiment.

[NyCeEvO]

The second we move Lopez and Bogs this team will instantly become better. They are far too often the focus on offense.

The NEEDS to be in LeVert's hands to end the game.

I bet you everything I own we are worse without Lopez.

I get people being critical of him and thinking he's no better than average, but acting like he is an "addition-by-subtraction" player on a team filled with d-leaguers is beyond unfair.

Id take that bet.... especially since we cant really get any worse. with brook we are the worst team in the league by a wide margin and the worst defensive team in the league.

I think this is over the top. Of course, we can get worse. There's a difference between losing games by 10 and losing games by 20.

Without Lin, this team is the least talented in the league. This would still be the case if we switched Brook with any player in the league except for the top 10-12 players.

Id be shocked if this team isnt better with a versatile defensive role playing center. you can easily replace scoring. we score just as much/efficiently with lopez out of the lineup as is. but the massive uptick we would see in defense would impact us much more then any offense we lose from brook.

I do think a versatile defensive role playing center would help us a lot.

However, the "we score just as much/efficiently with Lopez out of the lineup as is" isn't the same as us not having Lopez on the team at all and the opposing team only has to be concerned with stopping everyone else.

I've got a few big problems with Lopez on offense (he still posts up from anywhere when he should only be posting up 5-10 feet away from the basket, he doesn't seal his man properly, and his dumpoff passes for wings coming around to get the ball from him are dangerous).

Yet despite those flaws, he's still the only player who teams will at least think about double-teaming. Brook has improved as a passer but our guys aren't often in position to catch and release when they receive the ball. Dinwiddie and Whitehead aren't killers from 3. Bogs is the most respectable 3pt shooter and even he is off somewhat regularly. The supporting cast is very hit or miss, and it's usually the latter.

Even with Lopez's issues, there are several stretches per game where we look to him as the stabilizing force on offense because he'll go out and get 6 straight at a clip. Yes, we'd all love for him to be more aggressive and attack more frequently but having one player who can alleviate the burden of scoring consistently from his teammates shoulders until they can get it going again is not something that can be replaced easily. In an attempt to compensate, we'll jack up more 3s at a higher rate but there's no reason to believe that our shots would fall at the same percentages because there would be absolutely no need for the opposition to hesitate about jamming us at the 3pt line since they know we have no consistent interior scoring and no mid-range.

Guys who force mismatches have the potential to wreck havoc on the defense, forcing them to collapse, which can lead to more open shots for our wing guys.

Who knows...maybe trading Brook would light a fire under some players and they come out playing with more energy and asserting themselves knowing that they can no longer rest on Brook to score. But that's just a guess and it's something that we don't have much basis to believe would occur. At least when Joe Johnson left, we had younger replacement wings who felt the pressure and took it upon themselves to do better. Unless Hamilton decides to just go super hard as a 3pt shooter, we don't have anyone behind Brook who can provide that stabilizing tough on offense.

(Idk what happened to Brook's 3pt shot, but he'd be more valuable if that returned.)

[NyCeEvO]

Except we need his 20 points every night.

And that is indeed the dilemma with Brook. We need his offense because no one (maybe outside of Levert) knows how to consistently create possessions of value.

At the same time, there are some valid reasons to question his overall value to team defense.

I honestly think that if we traded Brook Lopez, so much would change about this team that we'd either be surprised at the lack of drop off of production or surprised at how much worse we become.

I don't think there's really a middle ground, because Brook does so many things on the court (both positive and negative) that are hard to capture as well as positive things off the court that it's tough to know the total impact of removing him from our context.

i honestly dont think his 20 points are all that critical. its a small sample but when he sits we dont miss his scoring at all from a statistical perspective.

id love to see what this team could do with a Nogera/capella/noel/Turner type. more stops, more rebounds, more transition. a big part of the issue is when brook sits hamilton is just as bad defensively with all the same flaws. i think booker tonight showed a glipse of how we look defensively with an athletic, versatile, defensive minded center.

Get me a gaurd who can score for brook and draft/sign a defensive role big

Well, I was talking about whether Brook's 20pts can easily replaced from within and that we'd still be able to maintain offensive efficacy without his presence. That's a dubious assertion to me because even if Lopez is on the bench, teams still think about the fact that they will have to deal with him at some point of the game.

If we're removing Lopez from the roster and we're expected to improve overall I can see in theory how we can improve defensively over 48 minutes although there's still some unknown factors. I definitely think we'd struggle more on offense unless we end up putting guys in better spots and they become better shooters.


Addition by subtraction was what we did with Joe Johnson by waiving him. That actually worked to a certain degree. Trading Lopez for pieces is not "addition by subtraction" since we're actually getting something in return. If we're getting an athletic defensive big as well as a decent scoring guard, then yes, I can see how we'd improve.

[Rainyy]

Marks/Atkinson/ownership have done an elite job so far.

How can you possibly say Atkinson has done an elite job?

-He's horribly misusing the players and his "system" is a poor fit for the roster.

-The system itself is incredibly reliant on pace, and looks uninventive in the halfcourt. The PnR is underutilized.

- The argument that "it worked for the Hawks!" is dumb on two levels. First, a system is designed to maximize a specific roster so a system "working" for one roster does not universally make it a good system. Second, despite all the talks of how great the Hawks' offensive system is, they've been a middle-low tier offensive team the last two seasons. Even during their 60-win season, when they had a relative advantage that over half the league were still running isolation crap, they weren't even Top 5 in the NBA in offense.

- His minutes distributions have been puzzling. Way too many minutes for Foye, for instance.

Don't really see what he is doing well.

[Rainyy]

I bet you everything I own we are worse without Lopez.

The Nets are 9-44 with him. If this is what your idea of them being "better" with Lopez than without, I'll drive Brook to the airport myself if New Orleans really wants to trade for him

i dont know we could be 7-46 without lopez. how would we deal with that?

This is the same faulty reasoning that leads people to arguing "we can't criticize the coach because due to our lack of talent, we're terrible regardless of what he does."

It's a clear conflation of 'relative' with 'absolute'. We would be a worse team without Lopez. Since we already win so few games, the hit on our win-loss might seem inconsequential, but it doesn't make the statement untrue. Margin of victory/defeat, that is our points scored and given up per possession, would get worse.

[Rainyy]

with brook we are the worst team in the league by a wide margin and the worst defensive team in the league.

I get you're not trying to be precise here and this is partly for dramatic effect, but I am wondering on what basis you keep calling us the "worst defensive team in the league?"

Judged by defensive rating (e.g. points scored against us per 100 possessions), the Nets are currently 27th in the NBA in defense, not last. In fact, the Nets have never been last in team defensive rating with Lopez on the team.

I also think you're being unfair in ignoring our pace.

1.We play at the league's fastest pace BY A LARGE MARGIN. Can you at least concede that this might have some adverse effect on our defense?

2. Relatedly, and perhaps just as importantly, we are among the worst shooting teams in the league, and are dead last in turnovers AND offensive rebounding rate.

If you play at the league's fastest pace, miss on a ton of your shots, don't grab any offensive rebounds, and have very high turnovers, don't you think that is going to hurt the defense? The other team can run so easily when they get countless long rebounds off of our missed threes and our guards turnovers.

In light of the above, I think it's rather obvious that OFFENSE, not defense, has been the Nets biggest issue this season.
Defense gets all the attention on this board because it comports with (1) the desire to constantly bash Lopez for his defense; and (2) The desire, due to "coach fatigue," to apologize for Atkinson and his "beautiful" offensive system.

But, just to remind you guys, we are 28th ranked in ORTG, a worse relative rank than our DRTG. And, on top of that, ORTG, as it almost always does, experiences a higher standard deviation than DRTG, meaning the margin between us and other teams in our offense performance is substantially greater than in regards to the defense. If we were to improve our DRTG by 0.7, we would be tied with the Knicks at 23rd.

And then when you further consider that playing at a frenetic pace is supposed to benefit offense at arguably the tradeoff of playing defense, you have to scrutinize the offense even harder.

you can easily replace scoring.

Ah, the Tyson Chandler "Fallacy" - the a priori bias towards low usage bigs who play defense. You know I hate this one.

No, scoring cannot be easily replaced. It's why every year we see that there is a much higher standard deviation on the offensive end than the defensive end. And, as such, offense is historically the most correlated aspect of the game with winning. Treating half the game like a constant is so damaging to basketball analysis.

I know you can and should draw a distinction between Brook Lopez and James Harden, but just like there's a drop off between those players offensive value, there's a drop off between some like Lopez and Noel. I don't think it's as simple as redistributing the field goal attempts and saying efficiency will stay the same.

I kind of want to see us trade for some very limited offensive center just so that you can see how well he performs in a lineup of Dinwidde-Foye-RHJ-Booker. Who is going to magically pick up the scoring burden in that scenario? You essentially have two bigs who defenses can cheat off. Defenses can just pack the middle of the paint.

You realizing Lopez drawing help defenders off-the-ball is often one of the reasons guards are able to penetrate as easily as they do (the other reason being our fast pace)?

You're absolutely going to see a less efficient offense in that case.

You can also cite that the team is similar offensively when Lopez is on/off the bench. I would personally like to see the relevant numbers on that one, but assuming they are accurate/paint that picture, I think it's ridiculous you don't look at Atkinson's rotations.

Last I checked a week or so ago, our best offensive three-man lineup was LeVert-RHJ-Lopez. Do you know how many minutes those guys played together since December 7th (I think) when LeVert game back. 81 minutes. 81 measly minutes. To put that in perspective, that was about ~10% of the total amount of minutes Lopez had played since that date.

And, if you look further at 2 and 3-man lineups, you'll see a pattern of Foye and Booker showing up in our worse offensive lineups. Yet, Lopez gets to play with these offensively limited. clowns.

My guess is you are punishing Lopez for Atkinson's failures - namely the coach not starting/playing his best players. For the past month, our bench didn't look better because Lopez was out of the game. It looked better because it didn't have terrible guards like Dinwidde/Kilpatrick/Foye destroying ball movement. The bench got the system guys like IW, LeVert, RHJ, and Acy (who I think should all be starters).

[GA2016]

with brook we are the worst team in the league by a wide margin and the worst defensive team in the league.

I get you're not trying to be precise here and this is partly for dramatic effect, but I am wondering on what basis you keep calling us the "worst defensive team in the league?"

Judged by defensive rating (e.g. points scored against us per 100 possessions), the Nets are currently 27th in the NBA in defense, not last. In fact, the Nets have never been last in team defensive rating with Lopez on the team.

I also think you're being dishonest in ignoring our pace.

1.We play at the league's fastest pace BY A LARGE MARGIN. Can you at least concede that this might have some adverse effect on our defense?

2. Relatedly, and perhaps just as importantly, we are among the worst shooting teams in the league, and are dead last in turnovers AND offensive rebounding rate.

If you play at the league's fastest pace, miss on a ton of your shots, don't grab any offensive rebounds, and have very high turnovers, don't you think that is going to hurt the defense? The other team can run so easily when they get countless long rebounds off of our missed threes and our guards turnovers.

In light of the above, I think it's rather obvious that OFFENSE, not defense, has been the Nets biggest issue this season.
Defense gets all the attention on this board because it comports with (1) the desire to constantly bash Lopez for his defense; and (2) The desire, due to "coach fatigue," to apologize for Atkinson and his "beautiful" offensive system.

But, just to remind you guys, we are 28th ranked in ORTG, a worse relative rank than our DRTG. And, on top of that, ORTG, as it almost always does, experiences a higher standard deviation than DRTG, meaning the margin between us and other teams in our offense performance is substantially greater than in regards to the defense. If we were to improve our DRTG by 0.7, we would be tied with the Knicks at 23rd.

And then when you further consider that playing at a frenetic pace is supposed to benefit offense at arguably the tradeoff of playing defense, you have to scrutinize the offense even harder.

you can easily replace scoring.

Ah, the Tyson Chandler fallacy, the worst narrative in sports. I was hoping you'd stop with this one after I wrote a long post. Oh well.

No, scoring cannot be easily replaced. It's why every year we see that there is a much higher standard deviation on the offensive end than the defensive end. And, as such, offense is historically the most correlated aspect of the game with winning.

Treating half the game like a constant is so damaging to basketball analysis. It creates this massive a priori bias against scoring bigs.

I kind of want to see us trade for some very limited offensive center just so that you can see how well he performs in a lineup of Dinwidde-Foye-RHJ-Booker. Who is going to magically pick up the scoring burden in that scenario? You essentially have two bigs who defenses can cheat off. Defenses can just pack the middle of the paint.

You realizing Lopez drawing help defenders off-the-ball is often one of the reasons guards are able to penetrate as easily as they do (the other reason being our fast pace)?

You're absolutely going to see a less efficient offense in that case.

You can also cite that the team is similar offensively when Lopez is on/off the bench. I would personally like to see the relevant numbers on that one, but assuming they are accurate/paint that picture, I think it's ridiculous you don't look at Atkinson's rotations.

Last I checked a week or so ago, our best offensive three-man lineup was LeVert-RHJ-Lopez. Do you know how many minutes those guys played together since December 7th (I think) when LeVert game back. 81 minutes. 81 measly minutes. To put that in perspective, that was about ~10% of the total amount of minutes Lopez had played since that date.

And, if you look further at 2 and 3-man lineups, you'll see a pattern of Foye and Booker showing up in our worse offensive lineups. Yet, Lopez gets to play with these offensively limited. clowns.

My guess is you are punishing Lopez for Atkinson's failures - namely the coach not starting/playing his best players. For the past month, our bench didn't look better because Lopez was out of the game. It looked better because it didn't have terrible guards like Dinwidde/Kilpatrick/Foye destroying ball movement. The bench got the system guys like IW, LeVert, RHJ, and Acy (who I think should all be starters).

Nice post. Your view makes a lot of sense. Personally I do not think AK masters at the motion offense. Just look at the game when the nets played with the 3rd string Spurs. The difference is so obvious that talent could not be the only explanation when we were playing against their 3rd strings.

[Paradise]

The Spurs have been running that system for nearly 7 Years. We just started running it. Not a comparable situation.


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[Rainyy]

The Spurs have been running that system for nearly 7 Years. We just started running it. Not a comparable situation.

And in 7 years, Atkinson could very well be the best coach in the NBA and I will be singing his praises. But right now I believe he's struggling so I'll call it how I see it.

What I think is unreasonable is saying he should be fired. I think he's one of the highest potential coaches in the NBA.

[MrDollarBills]

They weren't playing a healthy Lin over 30 minutes so I don't have much confidence even when they have more talented players things will change much. Only way they will change is if they get fired or a lot of people start screaming.

Some day you will be screaming.

well hopefully Lin will be on another team by then, so you won't have to worry about it.

If you're hoping for Lin and Brook being on another team then you're hoping for 0-82 next season.

Nah I actually i want Lin to stay, i was just busting your chops

[MrDollarBills]

I don't think Kenny is above reproach. I'm just not holding his feet to the fire because this roster is trash. I was livid over his decision to let Bojan defend Jimmy Butler in the final moments of the game where we had the Bulls on the ropes and lost on a last 2nd jumper. He's not been perfect and is learning in his own right. But the idea that some other coach can do better with this roster is pretty ridiculous (to me). This team is ass. Lopez is a good offensive player, hurts us defensively. Booker is a serviceable rotation player. Bojan I think so as well. But both bench guys. Everyone else is an inexperienced kid, or marginal NBA talent that would be end of bench players on a better team. There's no perfect system or best line up to use here. the team is actually doing better than most people can see if they actually watch the games like we do here, because the Nets compete for the most part and then fall apart when talent and experience trump everything in the last 5-8 minutes of a game.

[Yit]

Tracking players performance vs Wizards 8 Feb 2017

By GCP
Lopez - 38
Bogda - 35
RHJ - 32
Booker - 30
CLV - 16
Kilpat - 13
Harris - 11
Foye - 9
Whitehead - 8
Hamilton - 6
Dinwiddie - 4

Best offensive effort = Booker (10), best defensive effort = Lopez (10)

Opponents GCP
B.Bea - 51
J.Wal - 44
O.Por - 39
M.Gor - 35
J.Smi - 32
T.Bur - 10
T.Sat - 8
I.Mah - 7
K.Oub - 1

Best 5 players average comparisons Nets (30) vs Wizards (40).

[Prokorov]

And in 7 years, Atkinson could very well be the best coach in the NBA and I will be singing his praises. But right now I believe he's struggling so I'll call it how I see it.

What I think is unreasonable is saying he should be fired. I think he's one of the highest potential coaches in the NBA.

no system works when you have bottom 5 talent and are coaching for the players you will have not the ones you currently have.

we KNOW the system works as we are top 5 in the league in points added due to shot selection.

Read on Twitter

we know the goal coming in was to build the infrastructure and develop. once we get players who fit the system things will improve dramatically. you can see the results night in.... WIDE open threes, TONS of points in the paint, HIGH free throw rate. and thats with scrubs and starting 4 bench players and a rotation of dleaguers.

when its knock down shooters getting those wide open shots, and legint starters getting those paint touches and open lanes, things are going to skyrocket.

What atkinson has done is nothing short of remarkable. and elite job to hone players skills, develop them, move them towards modern tendencies. in a half season he has the offensive system generating elite shots.

remove the delaguers, non drafted/late drafted guys and career bench players and the turnovers go away and the shooting % goes up.

Issue is defense. we 2 way players and we need bigs who defend. its not tough to find better offensive players. its hard not to top d-league rookies who are turnover machines. its tougher to find bigs who defend or shooters who also defend as both are at a premium.

but replace lopez and get 2 way guys at G/F and this team is back to making the playoffs. easier said then done though as no one wants to give up anything for brook and so far no 2-way wings have wanted to take our money.

Marks has work to do with the roster, but from a system/coaching/anaylyics/infrastucture standpoint its been ab absolutely remarkable job