Since we didn’t really address it when the trade to Minnesota happened Monday, I felt that I needed to jot down a belated goodbye note to Delonte.
In many ways, Delonte is an embodiment of what we here at Mesa keep writing about: sports and the athletes who play them are much more complex than most people understand. The man is struggling with a serious mental disorder—one for which there is no real “cure,” only imperfect treatments that can take a variety of twists and turns. Further, both the disorder and parts of the treatments directly conflict with the lifestyle and requirements of an NBA player. A consistent routine can’t realistically be established when you’re traveling for 41 or more games a year; the spotlight is no place for a person with these difficulties, especially when it comes with a battery of reporters; and even some of the medications in play have significant physical side effects, such as decreased energy levels, drowsiness, and the potential for weight gain.
Despite all that, it’s an incredible credit to Delonte that he was such an important part of the Cavs’ success between his acquisition at the trade deadline in 2007 and his unfortunate legal problems at the end of summer 2009. I for one will never forget the sight of Delonte (6’-4”, 180 lb) battling Hedo Turkoglu (6’-10”, 220 lb) all over the perimeter during the 2009 Eastern Conference Finals while LeBron was content to stay on Rafer Alston. The fact that he’s even managed to make it to the NBA at all is an incredible achievement, and part of me will always wonder how much different this past Cavs’ season could’ve been with West starting at 2 instead of Anthony Parker.
Despite all this, I think many NBA fans fail to see Delonte as anything more than a joke or a disappointment. That evaluation is way, way, way off. I think it’s largely a symptom of the way that professional athletes are viewed in our culture: not as men and women with real lives and real problems, but as characters put on our TVs and blogs and newspapers for our entertainment—and worse, our judgment. For instance, many fans don’t want to acknowledge that a good NBA team can appear to “slack off” or have difficulty when playing a game on Christmas day because those players all have the same kind of holiday/family stress we all deal with; they just have to work throughout it. Many fans don’t want to hear excuses about injury or illness when a player turns in a sub-par performance, despite how willing those fans would be to use that same excuse if they had a bad day at their own job.
In short, too many fans demand that because our pro athletes are being paid super money, they should be superhuman. Delonte can, in many ways, be seen as the emblem of just how absurd that idea is.
Since I keep getting asked by my friends about this preposterous affair Delonte is alleged to have had with LeBron’s mother, I feel like the best parting gift I can give to my man D-West is this: a complete breakdown of what utter crap that rumor was, via Deadspin. Beyond basketball, it’s a sobering lesson in how easy it can be to crucify someone via the internet based on nothing but smoke, mirrors, and a few well-placed emails.
So from all of us at Mesa, here’s to you, Red. I hope you can somehow manage to put the chaos of the past year behind you, emerge from your private struggles, and return to your 2008-9 form on the court. Honestly, even if it happens in Miami, I can’t be mad at you for it. Just do us all a favor and make LeBron actually guard someone.
I was on the verge of writing another column for tonight, one that may have been more fun, when Minnesota Timberwolves GM David Kahn and Cleveland Cavaliers GM Chris Grant burned the phone lines down to the ground, finally, and finished a deal that had been obvious to just about everyone once it became clear that “Razor” Ramon Sessions was on the trading black.
Razor and Ryan Hollins … welcome to Cleveland.
Delonte West, we will miss you deeply. Sebastian Telfair, we hardly got to know you.
I could definitely write a long column about my appreciation for Delonte’s game, especially as I witnessed it during the 2008-9 season. I’m not going to do that, however, because I want to keep our focus on the Cavaliers on the future instead of the past.
From the Cavs’ perspective, this trade accomplishes two very important things. Number one, Sessions gives the team another creator on offense. Number two, Hollins - at 7’0” - is a center. The Cavs had either zero or one of those prior to this trade, depending on where and how Byron Scott decides to play Anderson Varejao.
Telfair’s contract expires at the end of this coming season, at $2.7M, and Delonte is owed only $500K if waived before August 3rd (as numerous other media outlets have undoubtedly already reported).
Sessions is owed $12.3M through the 2013 season. Hollins is owed $4.8M over the next two years.
In other words, for Minnesota, this was a salary dump.
(For some reason, Kahn also felt compelled to give a 2nd round pick to the Cavaliers in 2013 as well.)
As uncomfortable as I feel about the notion of Cleveland now having Milwaukee’s backcourt, circa 2007 - an irrational feeling that isn’t based on anything - I’m positive about the deal overall. Sessions did not have a very good season last year, playing in Kurt Rambis’s forced attempt at the triangle offense, but he was pretty damn good the year before he became a free agent.
Sessions isn’t a very good shooter - 51.3% TS, .3 3PA per 36 min at 18% - and is only about average in turnovers when compared with other point guards. His advanced stats, on the other hand, have been above average, especially in the aforementioned pre-free agent year, with a PER of 17.6, a WP48 of .201, and a 2 year Adjusted +/- of +1.86.
I can’t remember seeing Hollins play enough to make any kind of accurate assessment of his game. Last season, he played 16.8 minutes per game and was not even close to good by any statistical measures (11.0 PER, -.147 WP48, and a -7.91 APM).
Well, at least Hollins is a body.
Sessions is 24-years-old. Hollins is 26.
Despite the depressing nature of Hollins’s career production so far, I still believe this deal makes the Cavaliers a better team. As much as I want to believe the good Delonte is still out there and will come back one day, his situation in Cleveland was probably too strained for it to make sense to keep him in town. Good Delonte is a better player than Razor Ramon, but good Delonte may not exist anymore, and none of us will ever know what kind of stresses his mental health had on the team behind closed doors.
If we accept then that Delonte had to either be traded or released, the Cavs basically got Sessions, Hollins, and another asset - a 2nd Round Pick in 2013 - for Telfair.
It’s hard to argue with that trade, even if it may not change life in Cleveland dramatically.
So far Chris Grant and Dan Gilbert have to be applauded for not irrationally trying to jump start the post-LeBron era for the sake of making a splash, to the long term detriment of the organization. We’ll see what happens next.
The above is a link to the blog at Basketball Reference, where Neil Paine put a post up on Tuesday looking at how the 1994 Chicago Bulls won 55 games without Michael Jordan, only 2 less than they did in 1993 when they still had Jordan.
Paine notes that an earlier statistical analysis he did suggested that the Cavs, without LeBron James, would win 20-25 less games - if James were replaced with an average player. By the end of the article, he backtracks a little, openly wondering if James’s legacy will be further tainted if the Cavs win a bunch of games this year, which would imply that his supporting cast wasn’t as bad as the pervasive opinion seems to believe it was.
In the post, Paine shows that the ‘94 Bulls were able to survive intact because of some luck but also, predominately, because of their defense, which actually improved the year that Jordan left. A lot of this had to do with Scottie Pippen absolutely locking down on the perimeter, with a 96.9 DRtg. By contrast, the Cavs’ best perimeter defender last year was LeBron (102 DRtg).
What does this all mean then for the Cavs moving forward in the 2010-11 season? Well, it highlights a couple of things. One is it explains Byron Scott’s emphasis on defense. If the Cavs end up being a top 5 defensive team like he has said he wants them to be, they will have leaped at least 2 spots in the defensive standings. It also suggests why the Cavs have pursued Matt Barnes, who last year had a DRtg of 103. With or without James, the Cavs needed better perimeter defenders, and Barnes might be a decent start.
On the flip side of things, the Cavs will also need to sustain an at least average offense if they hope to stay above 50 wins. As we’ve pointed out repeatedly in the past, this Cavaliers team was entirely built around LeBron, with complimentary pieces that would enable James to utilize his superhuman talents. The merits of this approach can be debated - they certainly have been - but I understand why the Cavs did what they did. Do you really help your team by taking the ball out of James’s hands?
The Bulls found a suitable number one, high usage option in Pippen to keep their offense hovering around the average mark. At the moment, without any additional roster moves, it looks like the Cavs are going to have to hope that Mo Williams can fill that role. Mo’s career usage rate is at 22.6%. Pippen’s rose from 23.9 to 27.1 in 1994. As multiple studies have shown, efficiency decreases as usage increases, so if Mo takes more shots and finishes more plays his efficiency will likely go down slightly.
Promisingly, Pippen’s ORtg before 1994 peaked at 114. It was 108 in his first year without Jordan. Mo’s ORtg has been as high as 115 playing with LeBron but was a respectable 111 in his final year with Milwaukee.
The other player most analysts and apparently the team itself will look to in order to fill the usage gap left by the leaving of LeBron is JJ Hickson. Glitch’s usage rate last year was only 18.9. Most of those plays, anyone who watched about 10 games can tell you, came as a result of feeds from LeBron. Whether Mo - or a new point guard - will be able to create some of those same shots for JJ is something we’ll find out over the course of the year. Hopefully, Glitch will also improve his ability to create his own shot off the dribble, while also taking and hitting more catch and shoot jumpers.
Ultimately, Paine’s post and my cursory analysis would seem to suggest that the Cavs have a real shot of winning 50+ games next year. This will be bad for my hopes of being able to buy courtside season tickets for the 2011-12 campaign, as well as for the franchise’s hopes of getting a new star player via the draft, but it’ll also make LeBron look kind of worse and be good for the economy of the city of Cleveland.
This is my least favorite part of the year from a sporting standpoint.
Not only are the NBA playoffs long gone, but the exciting aspect of free agency is in the rear view miror, too. Regular season baseball holds no draw whatsoever for me (at least, as an Indians’ fan). Football season is still two months off.
In fact, I was in a sports bar on Saturday night and the only coverage running on TV was of the British Open and Summer League basketball. Yikes.
I bring this up because, in a way, it highlights the state of the average Cleveland fan. With LeBron gone, many seem to think, what the hell do we do now?
Now, as I’ve written recently, practically everyone is underestimating the quality of the Cavs’ roster James left behind. They’ve already been written off as, if not a lottery team, certainly a team that won’t so much as sniff the 8th seed in the East. I disagree with this, but perception is reality.
Despite a recent surge, the Indians are still an ocean away from competing in the Central division. Carlos Santana has added some small bit of intrigue, but facts are facts. The Tribe is 12.5 games behind the White Sox, with both the Twins and Tigers only 1.5 games out of first themselves. It’s not impossible the team could get back into the race, but at this point it seems unlikely.
This leaves the Browns.
Energized by Mike Holmgren’s presence, some notable (if dubious) off-season moves, and a hold-over effect from the 4-game winning streak on which they rode out the 2009 season, the Browns have become the city’s undisputed sports focal point.
That said, no one (fans or pundits) seems to believe the 2010 Browns will be better than .500, and even that may be a near-miracle.
For now, though, they are once again the great hope.
This raises a semi-interesting question about expectation.
In my opinion, the Browns have enjoyed somewhat of an irrational golden age in the court of public opinion for the past several years. You can tell me that attendance was dramatically down this past season. That’s true. You could tell me that Browns fans have had no lack of venom to spew about the team, the coaching staff, the organization as a whole. That’s true too.
But I would argue that it’s also true that while in or near season, they’ve still dominated the sports discussion in the city.
More importantly, they’ve done this despite the fact that, by any measure, they have sucked all but two years since the franchise reboot.
Since that time, the burden of being THE team in Cleveland expected to win has seldom been on them. The Indians won at least 90 games per season from 1999-2001. The Cavs lucked into LeBron James in the summer of 2003. Appropriately enough, the Browns went 9-7 and made the playoffs in 2002.
Obviously, the Cavs weren’t expected to immediately shoot into title contention after the 2003 draft. But the mere hope and excitement around having the home-town phenom on OUR team, for once, may have been enough to keep people satisfied for a time—especially when the Cavs won 18 more games in 2003-4, barely missed the playoffs the season after, and then grew into a perennial playoff team and seeming powerhouse until, oh, about two weeks ago.
During that time, Clevelanders could look to the Browns as a favored son, partially because the hope for winning could be largely satisfied by someone else. In the years immediately after the Browns’ return, it was the Indians. Since 2003, it’s largely been the Cavs.
Now, though, the spotlight has squarely turned back to Berea.
Some historical perspective comes into play here, too. Since the Cavs completed the pro triumvirate in Cleveland with their inaugural 1970 season, there have only been 5 years out of a possible 40 where multiple of the city’s franchises have been competitive at once.
The only time that all three have been simultaneously good was 1994. The ‘93-94 Cavs got into the playoffs on a 47-35 record, but lost in the opening round; the ‘94 Browns went 11-5 and were hammered by the Steelers in the Divisional round of the post-season; and the ‘94 Indians were 66-47 when the lock-out crashed the rest of the season.
Aside from that magical year, the Cavs and Browns were both playoff teams in 1989 & 1990. The Cavs and Tribe were both playoff teams in 1985 & 1998.
That’s it.
The point? Almost invariably, there has only ever been one of the three teams “worth” following, i.e. if you define value in terms of the expectation that the team can truly compete week after week.
With James gone and the Cavs likely to embark on a longer-term rebuilding process, the weight falls once again on the shoulders of Randy Lerner’s team. I suspect this has already magnified the intensity of the pressure the organization feels.
They can no longer be the puppy that everyone loves, despite that it keeps whizzing on the carpet. For the first time in a long time, they are going to be expected to produce for the city.
Starting in about two months, we’ll all find out whether they’ve righted the ship just in time to shoulder the load. If not, it could be a long year for any Cleveland fan who isn’t willing to take the long view.
After a discussion with WP48 expert Holland, I realized that I semi-botched my projection of the Cavs’ team performance this upcoming season. I wanted to take some time tonight to correct the analysis.
For those of you actually interested in advanced statistics, the main error involves some of the nuances of WP48. The purest form of the metric involves position adjustments. For example, a point guard’s WP48 performance isn’t weighted in exactly the same way as a center’s. Without adjusting, the metric heavily favors big men because they’re so much more likely to, say, get rebounds and shoot a higher percentage, as well as much less likely to turn the ball over (all important components of the entire scheme).
My source for WP48 was Basketball Reference, which is still a fantastic resource for advanced stats. However, if anyone out there wants to use it, keep in mind that the WP48 figures they give appear to be unadjusted.
OK, with the explanation out of the way, here are the adjusted WP48 totals for the roster hold-overs from last season. I kept all of the other parameters the same as in the original post.
Varejao = .181 WP48 x 36mpg x 82 games = 11.1 wins
Mo = .116 WP48 x 36mpg x 82 games = 7.1 wins
Moon = .191 WP48 x 36mpg x 82 games = 11.7 wins
Hickson = .123 WP48 x 20 mpg x 82 games = 4.2 wins
Gibson = .042 WP48 x 9 mpg x 82 games = 0.6 wins
Jamison = .194 WP48 x 36 mpg x 82 games = 11.9 wins
Parker = .081 WP48 x 36 mpg x 82 games = 5.0 wins
Powe = .000 WP48 x 9 mpg x 82 games = 0 wins
Green = .074 WP48 x 9 mpg x 82 games = 1.1 wins
Jawad = -.069 WP48 x 9 mpg x 82 games = -1.1 wins
Telfair = .020 WP48 x 4 mpg x 82 games = 0.1 wins
TOTAL PROJECTED WINS PRODUCED BY 2010-11 CAVS: 52 wins
So after adjusting for position, WP48 actually projects the Cavs to win one additional game beyond what the unadjusted numbers projected. This is mostly due to dramatically increased ratings for Moon and Jamison. Their gains more than offset significantly lower ratings for players like Mo, Gibson, Parker, Powe, and Jawad.
The other error I made in Monday’s post had to do with the expected error involved in the calculation.
I said at the time that WP48 predicted win totals to about 80% accuracy. I undershot. It’s actually (allegedly) accurate to within 94%. The error range is about +/- 1.5 games. Essentially, what this means is that the 2010-11 Cavs have a 94% chance of winning somewhere between 50.5 and 53.5 games.
Let me repeat that: if no changes are made to the current roster, and the rotation looks something like what I’ve outlined above, the Cavs allegedly have a 94% chance to win at least 50 games in their first season without LeBron. That’s +20 wins higher than what even the most optimistic sports pundit (that I’ve seen, anyway) has predicted for the team next season.
Of course, if Byron Scott chooses to start Jawad at 3 over Moon, this entire projection goes out the window. And I might, too. (Though I live on the first story, so the effect would probably be pretty muted.) But for now, things are definitely looking up.
Now, as I noted in my original post on this topic, I still think we’re running a significant risk in these projections if we only look at the numbers from last season. (Unfortunately, I don’t have adjusted career WP48 numbers.)
One of the points where I split with the WP48 philosophy has to do with synergy, for lack of a better term. The WP48 system assumes that player production is an inherent trait determined by the player’s skill level. In other words, he will produce roughly the same over time regardless of who the other 4 men on the court next to him are, not to mention who the 5 defending him are.
I, on the other hand, believe that a player’s teammates have a significant effect on what he’s capable of doing. For example, a spot-up 3-point shooter gets much better looks if he’s playing with someone on the front line who demands a double-team. Theoretically, he should be more open for his shots and should drain a higher percentage. I would argue that Mo Williams has been a great example of this. In his 2 seasons with the Cavs, he’s shot 43.6% 3P and 42.9% 3P, respectively. In the previous 4 seasons in which he’d played significant minutes with Milwaukee, his career high from beyond the arc was 38.5%. That’s a 4.5-5% uptick since starting next to LeBron.
This will be one of the elements to keep your eye on this coming season. Can the Cavs players find a way to do what they did with LeBron? As Mike pointed out, their current roster has a very low number of guys capable of creating shots for themselves. We’ll see how that affects things, along with the new up-tempo system Scott is already implementing in the Vegas Summer League. (Side note: WP48 disregards pace, so in theory this shouldn’t affect the projected win total. I remain skeptical on this point, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
That said, if things proceed as I expect, I still plan on checking into the over/under on Cleveland’s win total for 2010-11 if I’m in Vegas before the season starts.
All right, I think this is the last numbers-centric post I’m doing for a little while. Pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-psychology, and pseudo-humor back next week.
