First off, anybody still think that we would’ve won the title last year if we would’ve dealt for Shaq at the deadline?
Anyone?
….
Didn’t think so.
OK, with that out of the way, let’s get down to business. Like everyone else who reads this blog, I’ve been dismayed by the Cavs’ abysmal performance thus far this season. Friend and frequent reader Holland emailed Mike and I today to shed some metric light onto how the squad has played in games 1 and 2 (remember, 0.1 is average in the Wins Per 48 metric):
WP48
LeBron .365
Shaq .018
Mo -.075
Delonte N/A
Varejao -.125
Z -.021
Parker -.068
Moon .177
Boobie -.068
Hickson -.337
By the numbers, this tiny sample of WP48 just quantifies what we already knew from watching the games: the Cavs are not playing good basketball right now. But being able to remember how many shots you took at the bar last night does not make you any less hung over.
However, the interesting element comes in when you try to interpret how these metrics intersect with the actual dynamics of the game. This is a tricky grey zone that tends to divide basketball fans. On one side, you have hardcore stat heads who argue that the numbers explain everything, and that if you’re paying attention to those, you can know basically everything about a game without watching it.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the old school purists who believe that the only function of stats (especially advanced metrics like PER, WP48, adjusted +/-, and others) is to create jobs for a bunch of nerds who love sports but were never good enough to play or savvy enough to ‘scout’ insights based on game footage.
The middle zone is the area where Mike and I live these days. We both believe that there are advanced metrics out there that can be used to better understand the game and value both players and teams in a next-generation manner. (I’d say we’re trying to think “outside the box,” but like Bret Michaels, I don’t live in the box, and I don’t live in the next box outside that either, so it’s a moot point.)
That said, we also believe that it’s important to look at how these different metrics actually show up in the game, or how more traditionally accepted factors like personnel rotations and floor spacing lead to the results in those metrics. For instance, it’s one thing to say that the Cavs lost to the Raptors because - with the exception of Bron and Jamario - their players all had dismal WP48 ratings. But WHY did they have such dismal ratings? Sure, one big reason is that they shot poorly from the floor. But WHY did they shoot poorly from the floor? What needed to happen differently on the floor to lead to a different outcome?
Without looking back at the exact numbers, I can tell you that there’s a dramatic difference between the way almost all of the players rated these first two games and how they rated over the course of last season as a whole. The “chicken or the egg” question at hand is, did they have bad games because of a natural trough in the cycle of performance, or for a specific reason that could be coached up?
The strict stat-heads will essentially throw out the question, as Holland did, by arguing that these normally very productive players had a couple of off-games. Over the long run, the always-dependable law of averages (regression toward the mean) will kick in and right the ship. At their core, the players are too good to fail.
However, the flip side of the argument is that there are specific things that can happen on the court to turn productive players into shadowy, troll-like versions of the ones we expect to see. If the system is flawed — either by failure to execute the game plan, or problematic personnel rotations that make the game plan impossible — then the quality of the players has to suffer. In other words, the system takes the player’s ability to produce and either sets him up to succeed or fail.
While I’ve earned a greater appreciation for metrics or aggregate stats over the past few months, I personally subscribe to the latter theory.
For instance, there’s a big difference between Wednesday night’s game against Toronto and, say, the game the Cavs played against the Clippers last winter. In the latter case, the Cavs were more or less running like a well-programmed robot. They were getting the open looks they wanted. The plays were working to perfection…except that for three quarters, no one on the Cavs’ roster seemed able to hit a shot, whereas the Clippers were playing like some maniac had their families tied up in the locker room and wired to detonate if they lost the game.
By contrast, the Cavs that showed up in Toronto on Wednesday night looked utterly discombobulated. At any given time, there were 2 or 3 guys bunched into the same area of the floor like they had been hemmed in by an electric fence. Ball movement was non-existent, and the vast majority of offensive sets seemed to end in Anthony Parker furthering his Sasha Pavlovic impression by ineptly trying to create off the dribble with an up-fake followed by a contested 17-foot fadeaway.
This was not a few guys having an off-night. This was (and is) a structural problem capable of negating the talent of the players. “Time” and “a chance to jell” are not viable answers, either. To use an analogy, if a hungry coyote started living in the garage of my apartment, I might over time be able to figure out its tendencies enough that I could increase my chances of not being mangled every time I wanted to get in my car. However, no amount of time would change the fact that there is a f***ing coyote living in my garage.
Until A) Coldstone and his staff are able to find substitution patterns that work, and B) certain new cogs in the system either learn to fulfill the roles they’ve been assigned (see: Shaq plodding to an area and covering his nuts does not equal an effective screen on a particular man) or get benched/traded, we are going to continue to see disconcerting numbers in every category. Traditional stats, advanced metrics, and most importantly, the ‘win’ column.
We know that Coldstone, Ferry, and the players are all aware of the problem. We’ll see if Friday night against Minnesota starts to turn the tide.
-T
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