As for the Cavaliers point guard situation, I commend the brass for apparently thinking outside the box. They seem to have decided to abandon traditional positional philosophy and focus more on collections of skills and matchups on the floor at any given moment. They obviously feel that they have enough players who can handle the ball (read: Lebron, occassionally Hughes) even when their true point, Snow, is not on the floor (which is likely to be more often this season). The drafting of Shannon Brown and the aquisition of Wesley gives them something they did not have last year: a viable DEFENSIVE replacement for Snow. They always knew they could have Lebron or Hughes handle the ball for extended stretches, but when Snow was off the floor the team was very vulnerable defensively against quicker backcourts.

Perhaps the now fitter Damon Jones will be able to log more time on the floor with Hughes handling the ball, but I think Jones will again be the odd man out more often than not. He will be used in very specific situations when his long distance abilities are needed (think Steve Kerr).

Of course, we shouldn’t give the Cavs too much credit for adopting this outlook — what choice did they have? The free agent market at the point position has been sparse for two seasons running and for at least one more to come. The 2006 draft was deep at the point position, but without standouts (not that they would have gotten a hypothetical standout with the 25th pick anyway). This leaves the trade market, which, barring a blockbuster deal, wouldn’t be likely to land us a significant improvement. And we haven’t even mentioned our impossible cap situation yet, have we?

Randall

I think it’s incorrect to think about player productivity in terms of “true effectiveness”. Everything is relative. The difficultly with basketball for statheads is that the game is extremely hard to break down on an indivudual level. It’s not like baseball. About the only aspect of basketball that is truly independent of team influence is free throws. Beyond that teammates and tempo and everything else influences how productive a player is. Take Steve Nash as an example.

WP only explains about 70% of future performance. This is pretty good.

Today I calculated the WP of every player in the 2006 NBA playoffs. Without getting too far into detail, there are a few (likely small) adjustments that could/should further be made, but as is the average error is about 1 win (not great but not bad). With this in hand I can tell you that if you were to go by the productivity of each team, Dallas should have beaten Miami. For Miami Dwayne Wade was outstanding, accounting for nearly half of the team’s wins. Shaq was good and so was Posey. After that there ain’t much. Haslem declined from his production in the regular season, Walker was far worse in the playoffs than in the regular season, and that’s that. One great player, two good players, the rest various degrees of junky.

Dallas, however, had one extremely great player, Dirk, one very good player in Howard, and a slew of good players who made small but meaningful contributions (Dampier, Diop, Howard, Griffin). Given their stats I would have thought Dallas beat Miami.

As for Detroit…Detroit was not very good. Ben Wallace was above average. McDysess was pretty good. But everyone else was at best average and in a few cases far below average. Richard Hamilton, for instance, actually had a negative WP, and Billups was just above the threshold (about .2 WP).

Miami beat Detroit, then, by simply being better–there difference between Miami and Detroit isn’t close enough to lead me to believe that Miami got lucky–and then got lucky against Dallas.

Caveat: This analysis is entirely based on WP, and my WP for the playoffs might need a little adjustment. Also, I was out of the country in June and didn’t seem a moment of the NBA Finals, so I can’t really speak to the actual games, only the numbers.

I guess my point is what if a style of basketball is never played because a player is incapable of playing it (ex: the Heat didn’t run a transition offense because Damon Jones couldn’t push the ball in transition). Aren’t you then left without a metric to determine his true effectiveness relative to how other different styled point guards (and their teammates) would perform on the team?

When the offense ran through Walker it meant (i have no data backing this up except casual observation which might be in fact incorrect) he took higher percentage shots and drove to the basket more, as opposed to taking three point shots off of Wade’s penetration or O’Neils posting up. As a complimentary player he was at times awful but he had a fearlessness that previous 3rd wheels eddie Jones and Jamal Mashburn never had.

Would WP have predicted Miami wins in the Dallas or Detroit series? If not, why not and what happened? I guess if I hadn’t had this Heat experience I would be more accepting of this metric.

If you have a player who’s good at fast breaks and not good in the half court but all his coach plays is a plodding half court game, the player won’t produce many wins for his team. Does this mean that player is incapable of producing wins? No. But it does mean he’s not a good fit for his team (or rather, the style is team plays).

You are right: Antoine Walker was not very productive in the regular season. His scoring efficiency (pts/shot) was just below average for forwards (1.07 vs 1.05). He took a lot of threes. Fortunately, he made a fair number. His effective field goal percentage was .512, or about average for the Heat. When you say that Walker was brought in to score in bunches for the Heat when Wade or Shaq were unable to play (fouls, injury, rest) what makes you think that Walker was able to summon some greater talent that enabled him to score at a more prolific rate than he usually scored at? I don’t have Walker’s stats for when either Wade or Shaq was not in the game, but my strong guess is that it’s the same as his season totals. Walker may be able to score in bunches, but he’s just as likely to go cold for long periods of times. When he goes cold for long stretches he’s really hurting his team. If you’d have put an average-shooting forward on the court in place of Walker he’d have been more productive scoring than Walker across the entire season.

I find it hard to believe that Walker was able to score at specific times of the game. If it were late in the game and the Heat were down by six and Walker scored 13 points in the final six minutes and the Heat won this would be a good example of what you are talking about, right? But there is a compelling argument to be made that the Heat never would have been down by six late in the game if Walker were a better shooter during the previous 3.8 quarters.

This is the same argument I counter with against those who will watch David Ortiz go 0-4 in a close game, stranding four runners on base and hitting into a double play, and then, in the bottom of the ninth, hit a game-winning homer, and call it clutch. A big reason why Ortiz was in a position to get a ‘clutch’ hit was because he wasn’t able to get a clutch hit at any other moment of the game, and had Ortiz blown the game open in the fourth inning with a hit when the bases were loaded he would have better served his team (less bullpen fatigue, for one).

Anyway.

WP does not value the regular season too much in that the WP I’m reporting are based on regular season stats. If the Heat dial it down with a month to go in the season and win only 52 games instead of 60 then this will be reflected in WP. WP has a reasonably small error. All WP does is tie individual statistics (and a small team adjustment) to wins. If Dwayne Wade decides that he’s not dialing it down his WP will increase, but if everyone else on the Heat crap out over the last month their stats will drop. The aggregate WP for the Heat, however, will still be very close to the actual WP. That’s all WP is a measure of. It can’t tap into some well of inner talent each player has an quantify it. If players don’t try to win then their WP will be low irrespective of how talented they are.

PJ Brown was fairly productive last season, producing about 4.6 wins. I don’t have his WP for 94-94. He’s still a below-average center, but he’s not a stiff. There is reason to believe that he can help Chicago next season.

I’ll give you another reason I don’t think these numbers tell us too much — antoine walker. Mind you,I hate his game. I want to choke him when I watch him play for his awful shot selection, the way he dribbles with his head down, etc. I’m not familar with his WP but I’d venture to say during the regular season it was pretty bad. But Walker wasn’t brought to Miami to play an all around efficent game. The only reason he was brought here was, when Shaq and Wade weren’t being super prodcutive or were in foul trouble, he needed to be able to score in bunches. This was something the Heat missed when it had Eddie Jones, who was a better all around player in the regular season but could never get a basket when he had to in crunch time. In the NBA playoffs when needed Walker produced this scoring, not necessarily in quantity but in quality at specific moments in the game. Is Antoine Walker better then Eddie Jones. Nope. Could the Heat have won with Eddie instead of Antoinne. I don’t think so.

Also, I wonder if WP values the regular season too much. Most of the Heat barely gave a shit during the season. The team that beat Detroit, NJ and Dallas did not resemble the reguar season team. So if your goal is to build a playoff ready team, can regular season stats tell us much?
In other words, Peja Stojkaovic might have good WP but any Sacramento or Lakers fan can tell ya he can’t find the rim in a tight playoff game. I’d rather take my chances with Al Harrington, who hasn’t proven a thing, then Peja who we know all too well what he can do.

One last ?: What was PJ Brown’s WP for 94-96 on Miami. I always thought he was a great player. He set screens, rebounded offensively. I’m not sure what he has left in the tank but I think if he has anything left he will help Chicago.

I don’t mean to suggest in my analysis that Damon Jones is a good PG–he isn’t. The average point guard last season was considerably more productive than Damon Jones. But there is hope that Jones will improve next season. If he regresses back to average in assists and rebounds he’ll help the Cavs a fair amount, mostly because he’ll be more productive but also because there is no other viable option at this point. He’s not ideal (for some of the reasons you suggest), but he’s what the Cavs have right now and there is reason to think that he won’t be as bad as last season.

I understand what you are saying about Jason Williams, but I think it’s important to point out that how good of a fit a player is with a team will be reflected in his Wins Produced. There are a few players with transcendent talent–LBJ, KG, Kobe, etc–who will be highly productive players no matter which team they play for. But most players fall into the category of a Jason Williams–well-suited for some teams, poorly-suited for others.

How is one to judge how suited a player is for a team other than through statistics? Without relying on statistics we get into the troublesome ‘arbitrary algorithms’ that we all use on occassion to critique players. If Jason Williams is well-suited for this Heat team, then it should be apparent in his statistics. His Wins Produced for 2005-06 (4.6) is the result of a lot of what he does on the court (assists, steals, turnovers, points, free throws, etc). Jason Williams, of course, is not some sort of inherent 4.6 WP player. If he played for a Larry Brown team I’d imagine his WP would drop. But he plays for a Pat Reilly team that benefits from playing a style that meshes with Williams’s skills. I don’t know how talented Williams actually is–it’s probably all relative. But WP captures this. I don’t see how it tells only half the story.

To return to Damon Jones…I’m not as familiar with Jones as you, having only watched him closely in one season. But I trust that you are right when you say that a weakness of his is the transition game. I don’t expect to see Jones as the captain of the Cavs’ open-court game. But I don’t think this will be a problem. If Larry Hughes is good at anything it’s playing a slashing, fast-paced game. He’s not a good jump shooter. With LeBron I think these are two people well-suited to guiding the team in transition. Whether Jones can guide the team in the half-court will ultimately decide whether he remains a Cav. The half-court is where LeBron is best when he doesn’t constantly have the ball (unless it’s late in the shot clock). When LeBron brings the ball up the court in quarters 1-3 the offense stagnates. Running a half-court offense is not James’s strength. If Jones (or Snow or Gibson) can be the guy providing the lubricant for the half-court offense in the first three quarters then the Cavs will be fine…Or so I hope.

Damon Jones was a disaster for Miami. Yes, he hit open jump shots off of Shaq’s double team but that’s about all he did. He was unable to dribble without turning his back to the basket. He literally was the only point guard in the NBA who could not execute a fast break running forwards. This is why Riley let him go and never really made him a serious offer. While he might be effective in a certain type of offense, he will be unable to assist the Cavs if they wish to play a more up-tempo game, which seems like the style which most explots Varejo’s athleticism and LBJ’s all around game.

Jason Williams (the white one, not the one on the motorcycle or the one with the guns) might be a below average point guard and he might not be a good fit on 23 of the 30 teams in the league, but he was able to effectively give the Heat an uptempo style which complimented Wade’s game and improved the Heat’s versatility on offense. Their ability to play transition basketball as opposed to a more plodding Jones-led style was a big reason why they were able to finally beat the Pistons.

I really think these numbers from Berra are insightful but only tell half the story.