I was out at a bar watching tonight’s game, so I could write a critique of it, but that would be pretty worthless, especially since the Cavs won by 23. Suffice it to say, Cleveland decimated the Wizards.
Henry Abbott wrote a great column about +/- today that went over some of the same points I covered in my +/- breakdown. In the article, Abbott goes into an extended story about Andre Miller, who apparently tried to combat the Blazers inability to get back in transition to defend a quicker Memphis Grizzlies team by crashing the offensive glass.
This seems like a smart strategy - and it probably was - but Abbott goes on to test the effectiveness of it by comparing the +/- while Miller was on the floor with that of the much faster Jerryd Bayless. In short, Bayless’s +/- was better.
As Abbott says, and I’ve said previously, +/- is a noisy stat. There’s a lot of possible reasons while Miller’s +/- was worse than Bayless’s, but the discrepancy is something to at least consider when discussing strategy, in this case the value of sending your guards to the offensive glass versus telling them to retreat into transition ‘d’ the second a shot goes up.
This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot after I wrote my post about the rebounding of the Cavaliers so far this season. When considering why the Cavs would be so good at defensive rebounding and so bad at offensive rebounding, I came to one conclusion - the coaches must emphasize transition defense over offensive rebounding.
Why would this be? Tonight, actually, the Cavs rebounded very well offensively, at a rate of 30.0 (26.68 is the league average). But this isn’t usually the case (25.11 is the Cavs season average).
What I suspect is that the Cavs’ coaching staff feels transition defense translates more directly into winning than getting offensive rebounds does. Looking at the teams with the highest Offensive Rebound Rate in the NBA, we find the following teams:
Memphis, Detroit, Chicago, Sacramento, and Philadelphia are the top five.
Somewhat counter to this, however, is what the Cavs stat guy Dan Rosenbaum (who created statistical +/-) says about the correlation between offensive rebounds and offensive efficiency:
“As expected, offensive rebounds predict offensive effectiveness and defensive rebounds predict defensive effectiveness. Note, however, that the offensive rebounds appear to be more important.”
Two things: Rosenbaum wrote that over four and a half years ago, just before he was hired by the Cavs, and secondly, it goes to show that stats don’t always tell the whole story.
What I’m guessing is that the Cavs are essentially making a trade-off - we’ll allow our offensive efficiency to decrease if it enables us to increase our defensive efficiency by a larger amount, the result being an overall gain in point differential.
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing so far this season.
Cavs are 8th in offense and 4th in defense. Their point differential - the only thing that really matters - is 6.47 (currently third in the NBA).
Not exactly +23 like the Cavs were tonight, but I think they’ll take it.
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