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In my season preview, I had identified the maturation of Aaron Brooks as the single most critical personnel development theme for the year.
Let’s take a look at some of the numbers.
HoopData.com provides an assortment of terrific and convenient stats, including shooting and assist data based on distance. In this post, I want to graphically present this data for the Rockets, and compare it to players across the league. HoopData distinguishes shots/assists at the rim, not at the rim but inside of 10 feet, between 10 and 15 feet, between 16 and 23 feet (long twos), and three-pointers. Because what I am interested in here is depicting both shot distribution and efficiency, I have accounted for the extra point awarded on a made three-pointer by multiplying the “made”, “assisted”, and “assists” rates for threes by 1.5. Thus, a player who attempts 6 threes a game and makes 33% of them will be shown in these graphs to have “made” 3 of them (because, effectively, the efficiency is equivalent to having made half of 6 two-point attempts). I hope this adjustment does not cause any confusion. One other note: in the charts below the blue color corresponds to misses, the red color corresponds to unassisted makes, the green color corresponds to assisted makes, and the yellow line corresponds to assists to teammates.
I will be a guest tonight on 1460’s The Sports Lounge. I should be on following the Rockets game sometime at 11. You can listen live here or download the podcast following the broadcast.
9:00 AM – Updated analysis and implications.
Joey Dorsey played the first significant minutes of his career tonight and had a personal coming-out party. The forward was huge for Houston, grabbing 12 boards (6 offensive) in his 18 minutes. Dorsey was everywhere defensively, rotating quickly to close out on Memphis’ guards and using his bruising frame to bother the Grizzlies’ skilled bigs. Perhaps of greater importance, Joey was competent offensively, scoring 7 points and looking comfortable in numerous pick&roll situations, giving hope that his overall court presence may be palatable in the net result.
Joey Dorsey is important and not your average 12th man – to date, he is the sole blemish on Daryl Morey’s managerial track record.
If you’ve watched Rockets television broadcasts this year, you’ve probably heard this line frequently. The Rockets don’t block shots, they draw charges. Below, we see where the Rockets fall with respect to the rest of the league in blocked shots and drawing offensive fouls (per 100 possessions):
Histogram for blocks per 100 possessions.
Histogram for drawn charges per 100 poss (from HoopData.com)
Kyle Lowry leads the team in drawing offensive fouls (and is second in the league), but most of the fouls he draws are from illegal screens away from the basket. Last year, the Rockets drew about 2 offensive fouls per 100 possessions and had a block rate of 4.6, which would put them in the middle of the pack in both categories this year.
A reader wrote this morning:
Here’s a thought, but it may not be feasible. How about a general discussion forum or “sticky” post at the top for topics that may not relate to any posts on the first page?
The thought hadn’t occurred to me. I shudder to think of last week’s experiment – I really think that format watered down the overall quality of the blog and veered away from the feel I have in mind for Red94. At the same time, I do realize there are relevant topics for discussion which I don’t cover. Ideally, I would like to implement news links to the sidebar for easy access but haven’t yet found an efficient means. For the time being, I think a forum should suffice. You can access it from the navbar at the top-right of the page. Feel free to post news links or discuss any basketball related topics.
I apologize for not having any substantive ‘feature pieces’ in some time as I am currently working on something. Thankfully, Durvasa has carried the load for me in my hiatus.
Thanks for reading and all feedback and suggestions are welcome. And of course, if last week taught us anything, this is all subject to change upon whim.
TeamRankings.com is a website I came across recently that provides some team statistics that are difficult to find elsewhere. The nice thing about it is it also allows you to view the statistics at a specified date. Rockets fastbreak points, in particular, were of interest to me. Here’s a quick look at our fastbreak points per game over the course of the season:
The red line shows fast break points per game over the last 3 games, the blue line is fastbreak points per game since the beginning of the season, and the green line is our fast break points last year (at 8.2, we were dead last by a significant amount). Currently, we are ranked 8th in the league in fastbreak points, which is great though during the first month and a half of the season we were top 5. As you can see from the chart above, there was a lull in a fastbreaking for much of the first half of January. But the Rockets have picked it up during the 6-game homestand.
This one was pretty uneventful. Aaron Brooks and Carl Landry led the way with 24 points each while Monta Ellis finished with 34 for the Warriors, but only 7 in the second half. While Golden State was able to make it close at one point, the Rockets were never really threatened.
My greatest fear came to fruition last night with my internet going out midway through the 3rd quarter. The funny thing is that I had predicted this would happen prior to the Portland game as I had been having problems with the connection for some time. I’m publishing this post from a wifi spot, so yeah…hopefully all of this is resolved by tommorrow night.
Sorry to those of you wondering why I suddenly disappeared last night.
Let me get to a couple of notes I made after I bowed out from the live-blog.
Using the statistical +/- model described at the excellent basketball-reference.com blog here and here, and data provided by dougstats.com, I calculated boxscore ratings for all NBA players who have played at least 500 minutes this season. Statistical +/- is not a +/- rating in the conventional sense, in that is not based directly on how many points the team scores over the opponent with the player on the floor. Rather, it uses indicators in the traditional boxscore stats (such as minutes/g, points/min, reb/min, etc.) to estimate a player’s +/- impact per 100 possessions. The particular formula described in the links above was arrived at using 7 years worth of NBA data. It is not a fool-proof way of rating a player’s impact, and I don’t think such a system exists. But it serves as an alternative to PER, or NBA EFF, or whatever other method you like to use to assess a player’s worth based on his individual stats. Like any statistical basketball rating system, it should be treated as a supplement to actually watching the players perform.
Here is a list of the top players so far this season based on this statistical +/- model:
Just a quick look at Ariza’s scoring efficiency (in terms of true shooting%) over the course of this season:
The red line represents league average true shooting% (about 54%). It is rare indeed when Ariza is able to match this number; he has done it only 9 times this season.
I live-blogged this game. It was pretty enjoyable for me, so I will see how it is received before I determine whether I continue in this format. Your feedback is much appreciated.
per is a measure of per-minute production
I wanted to see how Carl compared to some of the top power forwards in the league.
click to enlarge
Courtesy of basketball-reference, I thought this was interesting. These are the head-to-head numbers for Brooks and Billups. When Rafer was still around, a big part of the argument against Brooks was that he wouldn’t fare well against bigger point guards like Billups.
“When was the last game Chauncey hasn’t been huge?” Karl said. “Talk about an All-Star push. The numbers he’s been putting up, and the leadership both offensively and defensively orchestrating the team has been incredible.”
However, one place where Billups has not flourished is Houston. He’s averaged 12.1 points in 14 games there, shooting 38.4 percent from the field.
via Nuggets-Rockets Preview – Jan. 26, 2010 – NBA – CBSSports.com.
Those numbers are very surprising considering the popular sentiment that our point guards have been defensive liabilities for some time.
Coach Rick Adelman said the changes to his Rockets rotation, with Trevor Ariza coming out of the game in the first quarter of Monday’s Atlanta game and not playing at all in the fourth, were particular to the matchup with the Hawks, and not necessarily an ongoing change.
“I think he’s just lost a little bit of confidence,” Adelman said. “Every player is different in how he gets through it. We’ve had a number of guys struggle recently, be up and down. Trevor has to play with more aggression and be more positive.
“With Trevor, there are so many ways he can help us win. It’s not just shooting the ball. He can be a very good rebounder. He can be active defensively. He can be a facilitator with the ball. There’s other ways to do it and not put so much pressure that you have to score.
“I believe in giving a person a chance and you have to stick with him.”
via Rockets notes: Adelman stays patient with Ariza | NBA Basketball | Chron.com – Houston Chronicle.
By “he can be a facilitator with the ball”, unless Rick means just bringing it up and handing it off to Aaron Brooks, I would have to say I am pretty confused…
Courtesy of 82games, we take another look at the Rockets’ top five-man floor units. The second column, Off, gives each unit’s points per possession. It comes as no surprise that Lowry, Budinger, and Landry are all part of the team’s top two offensive units, thus far.
After beating the Spurs, this was a very difficult loss for the Rockets, especially with the Bulls playing without the injured Joakim Noah.
Brad Miller turned back the clock for 25 points, grabbing a critical rebound late that sealed the Rockets’ fate.
I was a guest on The NBA Breakdown earlier today with Audley Stephenson. If you missed the show, you can catch my segment right here.
At the time of this writing, we are at the half-way mark of the 2009-2010 NBA season. It would now be appropriate to revisit the observations and assertions I had made in November regarding Trevor Ariza.
Through Monday’s games, Ariza is now averaging 15.9ppg on 38% shooting (31% from 3), 5.6 rebounds per game, 3.7 assists per game, and 1.8 steals per game.
It was yet another ugly win for the Houston Rockets. The Rockets again got off to a rocky start, trailing 21-27 after 9 minutes. The starters generally executed the offense well in these opening minutes, but the defense struggled. Scola, in particular, had difficulty staying in front of Mbah a Moute on his drives from the corner and contesting his outside shot. On offense, Scola scored effectively in the post against Bogut.
A reader writes:
I was under the impression that if we passed on Cook and Tmac, the 26 million reduction in salaries would give us room for a max level offer. When I look at the Lackers [sic] 83 million payroll this year, makes me wonder how they made the numbers work………Can’t we exceed the cap if ownership is willing?
Let’s work through this step by step. We will assume the best-case-scenario at each stop to demonstrate that even if taking the most optimistic forecast, simply allowing the contracts of Tracy McGrady and Brian Cook to expire will not allow the Rockets to offer someone a max level contract this summer.
This post is an addendum to ‘An Explanation of the Houston Rockets’ Salary Cap Situation.’
What does BRI entail?
The Rockets shot 49% from the floor but were pretty much out of this one by the second quarter. Dwayne Wade had 37 for the Heat while the Rockets were led by Luis Scola and Chase Budinger who each chipped in 17 points.
It looked like the Rockets would cruise to an easy win early on as Luis Scola was on fire to open up, utilizing a variety of right-handed post moves. Things went south though and the Heat never looked back.
