The above is a link to this year’s Adjusted +/- stats on the Cavaliers, from Basketball Value. I thought it would be worth checking out, given Andy, Boobie, and Mo’s inactive status for tonight’s game against Chicago.
As you can see, in the one year numbers - which are noisy - Andy, Boobie, and Sessions are the only good things going.
Even though I missed tonight’s game, I still feel qualified to comment on one critical aspect of the loss.
Two Cavs players suffered injuries of varying intensity during the game: Mo Williams and Andy Varejao. Mo suffered a right adductor (groin) strain, and Andy suffered some bruised ribs. Mo had to leave the game for good in the third quarter, but Varejao returned with a compression shirt and continued to play.
I’ve read three different recaps of the game, and in each one, Mo’s injury is treated as the devastating one.
This is exactly backwards.
We here at Mesa have been champions of Anderson for as long as the blog has been running. Instead of a “role player,” as seems to be the conventional label for him, we have seen the second best player on the team in the LeBron era.
Like many other NBA players, Andy simply doesn’t get the credit he deserves because he’s not a scorer. However, he does a host of other things that collectively add up to much more than the value of someone who puts up 16-20 points per game. Above all, he’s a fierce defender—John Hollinger declared him the best defensive 4 in the league in his 2009-10 All Defense Team selection column just a few months ago. This is true not only on an individual level, but from a team standpoint as well. He has been without a doubt the bedrock of the defense for the past several years.
In addition, Andy is an aggressive rebounder (as we all know) and one of the league’s best finishers at the rim (69% last season, 75% so far in 2010-11).
By contrast, Mo is almost strictly a scorer—and this season especially, not even a very good one. In his 4 games thus far, he’s shooting a dismal 36.2% FG and an even grimmer 14.3% 3FG.
For only the second time in his career, he is also under 80% from the free throw line. However, credit where credit is due: Mo is getting to the line 7.9 times per 36 minutes this season. His previous high? 3.0 FTA per 36.
Admittedly, Mo’s shooting numbers would almost undoubtedly head back toward his career averages as the season continued. But even if they did, there’s one simple element to this equation that we can’t forget: the Cavs have other players comparable to (or potentially better than) Mo Williams. Daniel Gibson has been as productive or more productive than Mo all season, and if Ramon Sessions can find his bearings and return to his Bucks form, extended minutes for him will be arguably the best thing that could happen to this team’s win percentage.
On the other hand, the Cavs have no players who can make up for an injured Andy—unless Samardo Samuels becomes the steal of this year’s rookie class. Obviously Anderson isn’t damaged as badly as Mo, since he went back in the game after his rib bruising. But being able to stay on the floor and being healthy are two very different things. If Andy’s production drops off significantly (tonight: only 8 points, 5 rebounds, 2 steals, and a -11 in 35 minutes), the Cavs will be hurt far worse by that than by any number of missed minutes by Mo.
Hopefully this won’t be an issue the Cavs have to deal with. If it is, you can bet that their record will suffer. In that case, though, let’s at least make sure that we can all correctly point to the real source of the problem on the injury tip.
-T
Talk about a no-win situation.
As you may have heard by now, Mo Williams was the subject of a what has become a controversial article by Yahoo! Sports’s Marc J. Spears. In it, Mo describes being so depressed and confused by LeBron’s departure that this summer he honestly considered retiring from basketball. At age 27. With 3 years and $26.3MM left on his current contract.
Since the article came out, Mo has been the subject of more attention—and more ridicule—than I expected. So much so that he felt compelled today to declare that he had been misquoted and taken out of context by Spears. In short, Mo decided he needed to call Spears a liar to try to regain some level of respect.
In my opinion, this is a really unfortunate turn for everyone who cares about sports and what’s happening in the minds of the people who play and coach them.
Today all athletes—even those at the college level (and in some cases I’m sure, the high school level)—take media training. The main objective is to scrub their potential interview responses of anything that could be seen as offensive or ignorant.
I understand this, especially in light of the unprecedented reach of new media. Nobody wants to look or sound like a jackass when there are contracts and endorsements at stake. Even if it ends up robbing us of interview like this, one of my favorite of all time.
Do I like losing them? Absolutely not. Do I understand the logic? Definitely.
However, the public reaction to Mo reveals that there’s also a more unfortunate side to this practice. Mo is being crucified for allowing himself to be honest while in the public eye. But his honesty didn’t involve bigotry, ignorance, vulgarity, arrogance, or immaturity. In fact, the Spears interview showed that he has a thoughtfulness, a self-awareness, a mental and emotional depth that most of us never knew or (likely) expected.
In a word, Mo became interesting and relatable.
For granting the public this look inside his head, he was treated like an outcast on an elementary school playground.
You can bet that every pro basketball, football, and baseball player (since, let’s be honest, those are the only sports that are going to get enough run for this to matter) has taken notice—and then declared, “Man, I gotta make sure not to do what THAT guy did.”
In short, it’s going to be a rarer and rarer occurrence to hear an athlete say anything beyond the pre-scripted talking points we’re all so tired of hearing.
“No, this game isn’t more meaningful to us. We just wanted to get a win.”
“I don’t worry about that kind of thing. I just focus on knowing the game plan, going out and executing.”
“We know they’re a great team, but we believe in ourselves and know that if we work hard and play as a team we’ll be all right.”
Blah.
Blah.
Blah.
Good thing “the fans” and the pundits have been so hard on Mo.
There’s a great irony in all of this: namely, as the average person’s access to pro athletes and coaches continues to increase via 24/7 sports coverage, Twitter, blogs, etc., there will be less and less actual content of interest out there to find. Press conferences and interviews will be the equivalent of those stuffed animals that randomly spew one of a set number of phrases every time you pull a string.
In many cases, we’re already there.
So even if it makes me look like some kind of pussy, I wish Mo had stood by his comments. More importantly, I wish the reaction to those comments hadn’t been so negative.
Most of all, I hope that a few months from now, when everyone starts complaining again about what hollow role models pro athletes are, how all they do is talk about contracts and championships, how—with a precious few exceptions—every interview is basically the same, I wish everyone would look back at this Mo Williams incident and realize exactly why we’ve reached that point.
There’s a lot of blame to go around. But I for one can point almost none of it at the athletes themselves. And more than any emotions Mo expressed, THAT is the saddest thing about this entire incident.
-T
I don’t like to do this, but I have nothing substantial on my mind - at least not sports-related - to write about tonight, so I’m going to go with the potluck / grab bag approach on a couple of small items.
First off is the “stunning” Antawn Jamison interview in which he declares that, in retrospect, the Cavs’ team chemistry wasn’t as good as they thought it was.
This is not at all surprising to me.
No, my opinion has nothing to do with the Cavs’ team chemistry itself - but it does have everything to do with the Cavs’ perception of their own team chemistry after they lost a series in the playoffs.
Chemistry is a dubious thing to measure, and I’m not entirely convinced that it has any effect on the outcome of a game. Smart basketball decisions and successful plays win games; getting along with your teammates at dinner does not. It shouldn’t be shocking that good teams always claim to have great chemistry and bad teams do not. In the Boston series, the Cavs were a bad team. It’s no wonder Jamison would now think that the chemistry was flawed.
Second on my list of topics is the flood of predictions I’ve been reading about the NFL. Here’s the thing … unless you’re in the coaches’ room and know exactly how a team is going to utilize its players in a variety of schemes against a variety of opponents, you have no idea what is going to happen. Even the coaches themselves don’t have a complete concept of what will happen because their opponents are spending every waking minute hiding their real strategies. Throw the importance of and unpredictability of the injury problem in to the mix, as Tim so astutely pointed out yesterday, and nobody can really predict much of anything.
I understand why websites and talk shows feel the need to make predictions - what else can they do when they have to talk endlessly about everything to fill up airtime and create blog traffic? - but the amount of time and energy that is spent on arguments that, by nature, can’t be resolved at the point they are occurring (how do you win an argument about the future?) is probably beginning to have a negative effect on the U.S. economy.
Third, I had a quick thought after listening to Tony Grossi’s podcast on Cleveland.com earlier today. Dan Labbe, the host of the podcast, made reference to the Browns winning games by controlling the ball…
Now, if you remember any of my posts from last year’s NFL season, I absolutely despise terminology like controlling the ball and managing the game. Statistics like time of possession are completely worthless. Who cares how long an offense holds the ball? All that really matters is whether they score points or not. The only way controlling the ball could lead directly to a victory is if, let’s just say, the game is tied at the half. The Browns get the ball to start the third quarter and then institute a 29 minute drive. They score a touchdown, go up 7 points, and then the opponent doesn’t have enough time to go the length of the field in an attempt to tie the game.
When was the last time you saw a 29 minute drive?
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Fourth and finally, I wanted to comment on Shaq’s recent complaint about Mo Williams taking too many shots last season. Shaq made a point of saying how happy he was to be on a team - the Celtics - where guys didn’t worry about shots … before proceeding to bitch about how many field goal attempts he got with the Cavs.
Aside from pointing out the hypocrisy that was inherent in Shaq’s comments, I thought we should take a look at the actual numbers.
Per 40 minutes last year, Shaq took 14.9 shots.
Per 40 minutes last year, Williams took 14.5 shots.
That’s right, Mo actually took less shots than Shaq on a per minute basis.
Shaq’s complaining then stems from his inability to understand rudimentary statistics. If another player averages 34.2 minutes per game (Mo) and you average only 23.4 minutes (Shaq), you’re probably going to have less shots per game than the other guy. That doesn’t mean you’re actually taking less shots in the time that you’re on the floor.
Shaq’s comments then are really just another example of why a class like “how to understand and interpret statistics” should be taught in high schools all over the country.
Having said that, Mo’s eFG% (2’s + 3’s) was 53.5% and Shaq’s was 56.6% so maybe Shaq could have gotten a couple more looks.
And thus ends tonight’s grab bag of thoughts. Come back next time to grab again.
This morning, I woke up to read a draft rumors article from Woj of Yahoo! Sports, saying that the Portland Trailblazers were showing a “strong interest” in Mo Williams.
How did I feel when I read this?
Encouraged.
Now let’s compare how I felt this morning with how I felt the day I saw on the bottom of the ESPN crawl in my apartment that Williams had been traveled to the Cavaliers by the Milwaukee Bucks two summers ago…
Beyond enthusiastic. I called DAD. We talked excitedly. It was a great trade, as anyone who had seen Williams torch the Cavaliers during the regular season would attest. My enthusiasm was only supported by the 82 games that eventually followed. The Cavs finished with the best record of the LeBron era, and the best record in the entire NBA…
And then things changed. What? How could my enthusiasm for Williams being traded to the Cavaliers transform into encouragement that the Cavaliers might trade him away?
A couple things. First, and most importantly, I got a lot smarter about basketball. I came to understand that Delonte West and Ben Wallace were both probably more important to the Cavs success in the 2008-2009 season than Mo Williams was. Secondly, Williams shit on the money in the entire ‘09 playoffs and for much of the 2010 playoffs. I also looked at his adjusted +/- stats and watched him play defense. I laughed about past expressions of disgust over the fact that Williams didn’t get on the All Star team immediately in ‘09 and never in ‘10 (although it was never me who was disgusted).
What then is the lesson here?
Well, the big lesson is to get smart and trust the data. A couple games against one opponent don’t make a career, or a season, or even a playoff series. The second lesson is that life is fickle. So are our long distance relationships with the players that we root for. I don’t dislike Mo Williams as a player or a person, even though he does talk about what he eats for dinner a lot on Twitter and seems to complain when people won’t give him free clothes. I love it when he makes shots. I hate when he gives up a blow by or goes 0-10,000. While I try to take the good with the bad, in the case of Williams, I’ve decided that there is far more bad than there is good. To paraphrase ESPN journalist Tom Haberstroh, it is an indisputable fact that the Cavs were 3.1 points better this year when Williams was not on the floor. The question is why? Is it Mo? Is it who Mo was playing with? Personally, I think it’s Mo. He’s a poor defender and a streaky shooter. That combination does not end well.
Ultimately, the brief love affair I had with Mo Williams (pause) is probably a good example of why fans are called fans. Sports are emotional. Fans are called fans because they are “fanatics.” Someone came up with that term long ago and it was appropriate. (And likely shortened so that it was accepted by the actual fanatics - who wants to be known as a fanatic? I sure as hell don’t.) These swings of emotions we go through as supporters of, and rooters for, our favorite teams are why we can’t get upset with players when they skip town for more money or say things like “it’s a business.”
Why?
Because we may actually be just as unloyal as they are.
