But what are their chances really? How do they compare to teams like the Spurs, Heat, Thunder, Clippers, or Pacers? To find out, I looked at the projections from three reputable sources: Vegas Futures, Hollinger Playoff Odds, and Sports Club Stats.

According to these sources, only 4-6 teams are more likely to win the 2014 NBA Title than the Rockets. That’s the good news. The bad? The Rockets’ actual chances are about 4-6%.

Put another way, the Rockets are about as likely to win this year’s championship as Dwight Howard is to sink a half-court shot. That’s the plain and painful truth.

The chart below shows the estimated championship probabilities from the three aforementioned sources (Vegas Futures, Hollinger Playoff Odds, and Sports Club Stats). As you can see, the championship is very likely to be awarded to one of five teams: San Antonio, Miami, Oklahoma City, LA Clippers, or Indiana. The Rockets are next in line, but effectively out of reach.

The bottom line: The Rockets have a very good team, good enough to challenge the best teams in the league, but in all likelihood not good enough to win 4 out of 7 games in four straight series.

The post How realistic is a Houston Rockets championship? appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

To say that Harden’s first four years were on par with the greatest players in history isn’t necessarily impressive if a lot of other, non-superstar players had similarly good starts. 3,071 players have entered the league in the past 50 years, so even if only a small percentage of those players ended up having superstar careers, you’d still expect that hundreds of players would have at least started their career on par with the superstars. (Consider that hundreds of those 3,071 players went on to be All Stars and 61 have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame.) But when I looked at the data, here’s what I found: Of all players in the past 50 years, there are only 12-17 who started their career as well or better than James Harden. Namely, there are 12 players who played as well or better at ages 22 and 23: LeBron James, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, Chris Paul, Dwight Howard, Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Durant, Tracy McGrady, Andrei Kirilenko, Chris Bosh, Kevin Love, and Bob McAdoo. And there are 17 players who played as well or better in their third and fourth season: LeBron James, David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, Chris Paul, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dwight Howard, Dwyane Wade, Dirk Nowitzki, Charles Barkley, Manu Ginobili, Larry Bird, Kevin Durant, Andrei Kirilenko, Kevin Love, and Bill Walton.

Now your brows should really be furrowed. Could it possibly be true that the start to Harden’s career was that good, this being a guy who was once the third best player on his team, who spent the first few years of his career playing behind Thabo Sefolosha? I’ll defend the finding in a minute, but first I’ll briefly explain how I arrived at it.

I have a database of all players in NBA history, which I painstakingly built using pages from Basketball Reference. I merged onto this database RAPM data (available from here), which a lot of people consider the best performance metric because, unlike most of its competitors, it includes a good measure of defense. I primarily used RAPM in my analysis, but RAPM data only go back to the 1990-91 season, so I included two other decent metrics: PER and WS/48. Both metrics are available from Basketball Reference and both have fairly convoluted calculations (you can read about WS/48’s calculation here), but essentially they aggregate traditional box score statistics into a single measure of performance. To normalize the metrics, I calculated how many standard deviations above or below average every player was for every season of their career. Then I averaged the normalized metrics, giving the most weight to RAPM. Finally, I limited the sample to players who entered the league since 1963 (so 50 years of data) and seasons in which they played at least 500 minutes, and counted how many players had a better start than Harden, and those are the results you see above.

It’s reasonable to wonder whether some fishy statistical manipulation is producing these incredible results. Here’s the only way I know how to defend its validity: Look for yourself! Browse Basketball Reference and see if you can find other players who had a better start than Harden. You might be able to find a few who came close, but not many, and certainly not many non-superstars.

Of course past performance is no guarantee of future performance, and there is cause for concern with the way Harden’s performance has slipped this season, but what these results imply is that the Rockets could very well have one of the future all-time greats on their roster. (Actually two, if you count Howard, but I’m pessimistic that he will ever return to pre-back-surgery form, as explained here and here.) It cannot be understated how significant this is for the Rockets because history has shown that unless a team has at least one of the all-time greats playing in his prime, they are extremely unlikely to win a championship or even make the Finals. Luckily for the Rockets, Harden is still young and probably won’t start playing his best ball until the next year or two.

The bottom line: Given Harden’s likely trajectory (and the Rockets’ financial flexibility, whip smart GM, and excellent center), there are few, if any, teams that are likely to have more success than the Rockets over the next 5 years.

(P.S. – I am beginning to understand why Bill Simmons was and continues to be so emotional about the Harden trade [what he calls “the Harden Disaster”]. It’s frightening to imagine what that Oklahoma City team could have been.)

The post There have been 3,071 NBA players over the past 50 years. Guess how many had a better start than James Harden. appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

Dwight Howard hasn’t played close to that level since his back surgery 635 days ago (for evidence, see here, here, or here), so I would be willing to bet that the Rockets will never win a championship if Dwight Howard is their best player. (That’s not to say he won’t be extremely valuable and important to the cause, just that he probably won’t be the primary contributor to a Rockets’ championship.)

James Harden is a different story. He’s clearly not top-3 level yet, but the data I looked at last week gave me optimism that he could get there before long, so this week I am taking it a step further and directly comparing Harden’s young career to the all-time greats.

The dashed gray line in the chart above represents the following players: LeBron James, David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Shaquille O’Neal, Chris Paul, Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Dwight Howard, Dwyane Wade, Magic Johnson, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki, Charles Barkley, Manu Ginobili, Larry Bird, John Stockton, Hakeem Olajuwon, Karl Malone, Kevin Durant, and Tracy McGrady. According to the method I used, those are the players with the best statistical careers over the past 50 years. (My method in brief: I looked at how many standard deviations above average the players were for each year of their career based on RAPM, PER, and WS/48, where RAPM is given the most weight. Of all players who entered the league after 1963, the players listed above are the only ones who were more than 2 standard deviations above average over their whole career.)

The Really Good News: The first four years of James Harden’s career were on par with the best players in NBA history. That’s a fact. Not some blogger’s opinion. People are severely underestimating James Harden. (That is some blogger’s opinion.)

The Not-So-Good News: Harden’s numbers have fallen this year. Whereas the all-time greats were about 3 standard deviations above average at his age, Harden has “only” been about 1.5 standard deviations above average this year. Here are some possible reasons for the decline:

• Harden has (or had) a nagging injury. (We know he did for at least the first part of the year.)
• Harden has been overconfident with shot selection and/or playing too much heroball.
• Opponents are learning how to guard Harden.
• Harden has struggled to mesh with Howard.

All of those reasons are pretty harmless from a long-term perspective. They are fixable. But here’s another potential reason for the decline, and unfortunately this might be the likeliest one:

• Harden was playing above his head the past couple of seasons and has regressed to his normal level this season.

Let’s hope for the sake of the Rockets’ future that Harden’s relatively poor performance this season is an aberration and that his spectacular performance the past couple of seasons is the norm, not the reverse.

The bottom line is that Harden could very well become one of the all-time greats, thus making the Rockets a legitimate contender, but his relatively poor performance this season downgrades my optimism to the “cautious” variety at best.

The post James Harden compared to the best players in NBA history (it’s much closer than you think) appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

(Reminder: Game Score is a statistic invented by John Hollinger and available from Basketball-Reference that aggregates all of a player’s box-score statistics into a single performance metric.)

There are two really encouraging things about this chart:

1) The trend. Look at how dramatically upward that thing climbs! James Harden has been getting better his entire career and there’s no reason to expect he’ll stop now.
2) The heights he reached last season. For perspective, LeBron, Durant, and CP3 are collectively averaging a Game Score of 21.8 this season. Last season, Harden played at or above that level for exactly one-third of the year.

These data convince me that not only could Harden reach the stratospheric level of the league’s best few players, but that it’s actually pretty plausible given the trajectory of his career.

One concern for many Rockets fans is Harden’s defense. While it’s a valid concern, I think it’s more than a little overblown. I have been manually tallying good and bad defensive plays for every game I’ve watched this season, and Harden has been below average but not as bad as some of the Rockets’ guards. And a lot of his below averageness can be attributed to his remarkably atrocious first game against the Clippers, which was far and away the most bizarrely bad defensive performance I have personally witnessed. Take away that game and he has been close to an average defender.

A bigger concern for me is Harden’s intangibles. Is he a good leader? Is he even a good teammate? I have no idea how Harden interacts with his teammates in practice or on the plane, but from what I see during games, it doesn’t look good. How many times do you see Harden celebrating for things his teammates have done rather than for things he has done? How many times do you hear him complimenting his teammates in interviews when not asked directly? One of my favorite moments from this season was when LeBron angrily confronted Chalmers during a timeout and then 20 seconds later called over to him, looked him in the eye, and said, “My bad, I was wrong.” Is Harden the type of guy who can say, “My bad, I was wrong”?

The bottom line is that I’m optimistic Harden can become one of the league’s best few players, but I’m not optimistic that he can take the next step, which is to be the type of guy whose teammates want to chew through walls for him.

The post Some stats that hint at just how good James Harden could become appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

It cannot be understated how significant it would for the Rockets’ future if Dwight Howard were to return to pre-back-surgery form. I wholeheartedly believe that, if it happened, the Rockets would leap from the fifth or sixth best team in the West to the title favorite.

Dwight’s recent spurt of production had our own Michael Pina and Rahat Huq wondering aloud last week whether Dwight is a top-5 player again. They came up with only three players they would rather have than Dwight over the next three years: LeBron, Durant, and Anthony Davis.

{Pause to digest.}

Is it really happening? Is Dwight really BACK? Or at least well on his way?

You can draw your own conclusions from the chart, but it seems pretty clear to me that the answer is no. While it’s true that Dwight has been great over the past few weeks, he has not been stratospherically great like pre-back-surgery Dwight and like LeBron, Kevin Durant, and Chris Paul today.

On the positive side, the chart shows that Dwight has improved considerably since last season, and maybe he will keep improving. Maybe by the end of the season we will be able to confidently say that Dwight Howard is fully healthy and playing at the level of LeBron and Durant. (I’m sorry to say that I seriously doubt it.)

Despite my doubts, I’m optimistic that the Rockets will significantly improve over the next year or two regardless of whether Dwight returns to pre-back-surgery form. There are a number of other things that could go right for the Rockets. For example:

• James Harden could reach the stratospheric level that Dwight Howard once played at. (Remember: he’s still very young.)
• Terrence Jones, Chandler Parsons, and/or Jeremy Lin could develop into legitimate all-stars. (Remember: they’re still very young.)
• Perhaps most plausibly, Daryl Morey could acquire another all-star or maybe even a stratospheric-level star through trades or free agency. (Remember: Daryl Morey is awesome.)

The bottom line is that while I have serious doubts about Dwight’s back, I have even bigger doubts that the Rockets won’t soon become much better than the fifth or sixth best team in the West.

The post Dwight Howard’s career in one chart (and what it means for the Rockets’ fortunes) appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

In order to help you identify my delusions, I have laid out my premises below.

• Dwight Howard’s back surgery looks like it could be one of the most dramatic turning points in NBA history. Prior to his back surgery, Dwight Howard was indisputably one of the best two or three players in the league, and now he’s maybe one of the top 30. To put that in perspective (using ESPN’s NBA Rank), that would be like Kevin Durant or Chris Paul dropping to the level of Pau Gasol or Damian Lillard.
• If Dwight Howard is still not fully recovered from his back surgery 606 days later – and Dwight himself said he isn’t in this radio show yesterday – then it looks unlikely that he will ever return to his former self.
• I worry that Howard could suffer another major injury at any moment, rendering his contract a giant sinkhole in the Rockets’ flexibility. Asik, on the other hand, seems surprisingly stout for a big man, and it wouldn’t be contractual doom even if he were to go down.
• Asik is currently one of the top 40 players in the league, and that’s being conservative. I believe he’s not far behind Joakim Noah or Roy Hibbert, and in fact in RAPM they were dead even last year.
• Layups and corner threes are the most efficient shots in basketball, and the Rockets will get more of those shots with Asik rather than Howard simply because Howard demands post touches, which are less than efficient, to put it delicately.
• Asik will likely improve at a faster rate than Howard simply because he’s a little younger and a lot less experienced. (Also, rumor is that Asik is a much more of a gym rat than Howard, but I have no evidence to support that claim.)
• Asik is likely to age much more gracefully than Howard simply because his game relies much less on athleticism.

Even if you’re not convinced that Asik could be as valuable as Howard over the next 5 years (I’m not convinced myself), you might at least agree that the difference is not awfully large. And if it isn’t, then you have to wonder why the Rockets aren’t also considering trade options for Howard.

Think of it this way. We know that the Rockets cannot get much in return for Asik (sorry, Millsap, Young, and Verejao, but in my book you don’t count as “much”), but presumably the Rockets could get quite a bit in return for Howard. Like, say, Kevin Love? And wouldn’t Asik + Love be a much more devastating front court than post-surgery Howard + your choice of Millsap, Young, or Verejao?

Of course Howard for Love isn’t going to happen, I’m just dabbling in hypotheticals as sports fans do. I’m curious to hear other opinions on this.

The post Serious question: Will Dwight Howard be more valuable than Omer Asik over the next 5 years? appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

The chart above was produced using data from an excellent site called Sports Club Stats. The site predicts playoff seeding by simulating the rest of the NBA season millions of times. You can read about how the simulations work here, but I’ll give the gist. The simulations take into account performance to date, strength of schedule, performance of other teams in the division/conference, home vs. away, difficulty of the remaining schedule, and league tie breaker rules. Pretty much the only thing the simulations don’t account for are unpredictable things such as Derrick-Rose-like injuries, trades, or lineup changes.

The detailed results of the simulations allow us to make specific statements like the following:

• To be more likely than not to make the playoffs out of the Western Conference, the Rockets need to win at least 43 games.
  • 92% is the current estimated probability that the Rockets will win at least 43 games.
• To comfortably earn a playoff spot (i.e., to have a >99% chance), the Rockets need to win at least 46 games.
  • 73% is the current estimated probability that the Rockets will win at least 46 games.
• To be more likely than not to earn one of the top 4 seeds, the Rockets need to win at least 49 games.
  • Estimated 43% chance.
• To comfortably earn one of the top 4 seeds, the Rockets need to win at least 53 games.
  • Estimated 11% chance.
• To be more likely than not to earn the top seed in the West, the Rockets need to win at least 54 games.
  • Estimated 7% chance.
• To have a >90% chance at earning the top seed in the West, the Rockets need to win at least 58 games.
  • Estimated 0.5% chance.
• To have a >99% chance at earning the top seed in the West, the Rockets need to win at least 61 games.
  • Estimated 0.04% chance.

Putting it all together graphically looks like this:

Overall, the Rockets are currently estimated to have a 47% chance of earning one of the top four seeds and a 22% chance of earning one of the top two seeds.

I know people will question the small sample size – and it’s true that the estimates will become more precise as the season gets further along – but you’d be surprised at how clear of a picture you can get after 19 games of an NBA season. (MLB and NHL are a different story because their games are much more random.) If you don’t believe me, have a look at previous seasons (which are available in the sidebar of the NBA page). Teams have hot streaks and cold streaks, but it’s not often that you see an NBA team’s outlook dramatically change after 19 games.

(Note: John Hollinger estimates playoff probabilities in a similar way [shown here; explained here] but I prefer the Sports Club Stats estimates because (1) my buddy Ken runs the site, so I’m biased, and (2) the estimates are much more detailed [e.g., showing expected seed and changes over time] and are derived from much larger simulations.)

The post The Stats Say: Even in the loaded West, the Rockets look fairly likely to earn a high playoff seed appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

But that assumes that Dwight would continue to have the same number of free-throw attempts.  In reality, if Dwight managed to consistently shoot 75% from the line, Hack-a-Dwight would no longer be a viable strategy for opponents and they would no longer find it so attractive to tackle Dwight during every post move, so his FT attempts would probably drop by more than half. And that makes all the difference because free throw attempts are more valuable than they at first seem.

With the exception of wide open lay ups and wide open corner threes, free throws are the most efficient play in basketball. Even though he’s one of the worst free-throw shooters in NBA history, a Dwight Howard trip to the line tends to be more efficient than an average Rocket offensive possession. So far this season, the Rockets are scoring 1.05 points per possession, and 1.06 points when Dwight goes to the line, and that’s not even considering And-1 opportunities and the potential for offensive rebounds. Plus, the more Dwight gets sent to the line, the more effective the Rockets will be on defense since there will be fewer transition opportunities for the other team. And the more Dwight gets fouled, the more likely the opponent’s best players are to get themselves in foul trouble.

Here’s the simplest way of putting it. Improving Dwight’s free-throw percentage would have two conflicting effects: (1) on the positive side, it would make Dwight’s trips to the line more efficient, (2) on the negative side, it would reduce his total number of trips to the line (and thereby reduce overall efficiency and reduce the likelihood of getting the other team in foul trouble). To estimate which effect outweighs the other, we have to make some assumptions. Here are the main assumptions I made:

• Dwight’s FT attempts would gradually decline as his FT% increased, with the steepest decline happening at a FT% around 60-65% (because that’s roughly when teams would not longer find Hack-A-Dwight worthwhile). If his FT% improved all the way to 75%, his free-throw attempts would drop from 11.6 to 4.6 per game.
• On an ordinary possession, the Rockets are expected to score 1.05 points and give up 1.013 points to their opponent. (source)
• After a Dwight free throw, the Rockets’ opponents will score at a rate 10% worse than normal since the Rockets have time to set up their defense.
• If a player misses the back end of a free throw, his team has a 14% chance of grabbing the offensive rebound. (source)
• 11% of Dwight’s free throw attempts are And-1 opportunities. (source)
• If Dwight improved his FT% to 75%, Rockets’ opponents would be in foul trouble less often, which means that in about 25% of all possessions, the Rockets would be 5% worse on offense and 5% worse on defense.

Using those assumptions, I made some convoluted calculations to arrive at these estimates:

These estimates should be treated with at least several grains of salt since they rely on so many assumptions, some of which have no basis in the data at all. The important and interesting point is not the precise estimates but rather the idea that improving Dwight’s FT% may paradoxically hurt the team.

I’ll preempt one criticism: No, this does not mean that James Harden should work on missing more free throws. Harden draws fouls without his opponents wanting to or trying to, so he would probably make a fairly constant number of trips to the line regardless of his FT%. Dwight Howard is a different story.

The gist of this quick and dirty analysis is that, all things considered, sending Dwight to the line is more likely to help rather than hurt the Rockets, so improving his FT% could hurt the team if it meant that he would be sent to the line much less often.

(By the way, there’s another, more indirect way that improving his FT% could hurt the Rockets. The time Dwight spends trying to improve his FT% is not being spent improving other aspects of his game which could help the team more.)

——

Somewhat related: Contrary to what has been said, Dwight Howard’s FT% is not and has never been significantly better on the road than at home. But there have been two statistically significant and fairly dramatic drops in his total FT%: the first after his rookie year (presumably when he gained more strength), and the second around the time of his back surgery. The charts below show his FT% by age with 90% confidence intervals.

The post The Stats Say: Dwight Howard’s woeful free-throw shooting might actually be benefiting the Rockets appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

I have been tallying on paper what most fans informally tally in their minds: how often each player is making good and bad plays. (So geeky, I know.) I loosely define “good plays” as offensive plays that result in a high percentage attempt (e.g., passing to a shooter in the corner for an open three, even if he misses) or defensive plays that prevent the opponent from having a high percentage attempt (e.g., closing out quickly and challenging a shooter, even if he makes it). “Bad plays” are just the opposite. I also give tallies for particularly good/bad rebounds or loose ball plays. I have kept tallies for every game except the first. You can view the raw data in a Google spreadsheet here.

The advantage of these stats over box score stats is that they give a much more complete picture of performance, especially on the defensive end. There are so many things that the box score overlooks, e.g., effectively challenging a shot, forcing a ball handler into the strength of the defense, or making a great pass that the receiver fumbles out of bounds. All these important things are captured with my tallies.

The disadvantage of these stats is that they’re more subjective and squishy. Some good plays and bad plays aren’t easily noticeable (e.g., Dwight’s mere presence may create extra spacing for Rocket shooters), and it’s sometimes – but not as often as you’d think – hard to assign individual blame on defensive breakdowns. I assign credits and blames as objectively as humanly possible, but I certainly have my biases. For example, even I don’t trust my own tallies on Asik because I have a hard time accepting that the man has ever done anything wrong.

Back to Jeremy Lin. According to my tallies, Lin has been only slightly below Harden in terms of the rate of good offensive plays, and after adding up all “credits” and subtracting all “blames,” Lin comes out looking slightly better, as shown below.

(Data objectivity note: I neither particularly like nor dislike Lin as a player or person, so I don’t think my judgment is clouded in this case like it is in the Asik case. If anything, I might be underestimating Lin in comparison to Harden, because I happen to really like Harden.)

Harden hasn’t been fully healthy and has been on a bit of a cold streak, so I don’t expect this trend to continue, but I find it extremely encouraging that Lin has been playing at what we can fairly call Max-Contract level. I don’t think it would be crazy to predict that he will be the Rockets’ third superstar this season because I have no reason to believe he can’t or won’t continue at this pace. His major weaknesses from last year – shooting, defense, and left-handedness – all seem to have magically evaporated over the summer. What’s to stop him now?

——

Two other brief notes related to these data (but unrelated to Jeremy Lin):

Pessimism: Dwight Howard is clearly not back to his dominant self. According to my tallies, in terms of both defense and rebounding – where Dwight makes his money – he has been just average, which means that he has been awful.

Optimism: According to my tallies, against the Raptors Monday night, Terrence Jones had not only a good game, not only the best defensive and rebounding game of the night, not only one of the best games of his young career, but the best game of any Rocket so far this season, and by a non-trivial margin. I don’t believe there is another player on the Rockets’ roster who could’ve defended Rudy Gay nearly as well as Jones did. Not even Asik. He was remarkable.

——

P.S. – We could test just how objective (or not) these tallies are if we have multiple people recording them. I encourage you to try it for a game or two. If you send your data to me via a Google spreadsheet  (justinwehr@gmail.com) in the same format as I have mine, I will do a reliability test and report back the results.

The post The Stats Say: Jeremy Lin has been playing like he might be worth a $15 million salary appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

What’s funny is that before Monday’s game I was considering devoting a post to complimenting Harden’s defense, and for good reason. I have kept a tally of credits and blames for every Rocket during four of the five games this season, and until Monday night, Harden looked to be doing some nice things defensively. He was earning more defensive credits per minute than any other Rocket save Asik and Casspi. These credits and blames are very subjective, of course, but Harden seemed to be doing a good job of challenging shots, quickly closing out, and/or forcing ball handlers to go into the strength of the defense or to go to their non-preferred hand.

So then what happened Monday night?

I don’t have a clue.

It’s one of the most bizarrely bad performances I have witnessed. I might have blamed it on not wanting to chase Redick around screens, but his defense was equally as non-existent against Dudley.

For what it’s worth, last night against Portland, I tallied “only” nine Harden defensive flubs, which gave him a much more tolerable flub rate of one per 4.5 minutes. I also credited him with five excellent defensive plays. So maybe the Clippers game was just an anomaly. Let’s hope.

The post Just how atrocious was James Harden’s defense against the Clippers? appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

If Dwight Howard is healthy, his stats aren’t yet showing it. According to PER and WS/48, Houston is so far getting the L.A. version of Dwight (actually: slightly worse) rather than the Orlando version of Dwight.

(Note: his stats improved modestly after the Portland game, but are still around L.A.-level. You can always view the latest data here.)

Maybe it’s just early. Maybe Dwight is just working out the kinks with new teammates and a new system. Maybe one more game like the 17-point, 26-rebound outburst will bump up his stats to Orlando-level.

On the other hand, maybe he really isn’t healthy. Maybe he never will be. Consider this quote from Kevin McHale in the same article:

Last July, when we got him, he was not healthy. When we did a physical after we signed him, I sat down with our training staff and they were all like, ‘Oh boy.’ He had a huge discrepancy in his strength in his right leg and his left leg. His glutes and his hamstrings were really weak and his flexibility was completely … funky.

McHale’s intention with this quote was to emphasize how much Dwight’s health has improved over the past four months, but count me skeptical. If Dwight’s health was that bad 440 days after his herniated disc surgery, can we really expect him to be back to normal now, a summer later? If Dwight’s health was that bad 440 days after surgery, can we expect Dwight to ever return to his normal, superhuman self, or is the L.A. version of Dwight the new normal?

Bill Simmons, our greatest NBA historian, is adamant that once big men start breaking down, they don’t get better. And this is not just one of his pet theories: it might be his most frequently stated claim, and he states it with unnerving conviction and solemnity. I would gladly dig into the data to test the hypothesis if only it were stated in a testable way. (I don’t know what it means for a player to “start breaking down.”) Simmons provided some of his own statistical evidence here (see ‘Reality No. 5’), but it isn’t awfully convincing. For what it’s worth, the godfather of NBA geekery, Wayne Winston, briefly stated a similar argument here (begins around the 6-minute mark) when discussing his predictions for the 2013-14 Rockets.

Theories aside, there’s also the eyeball test. I watched games two, three, and four very closely, and I was not seeing what looked like a healthy Dwight. I was seeing a Dwight who was trailing far behind in transition, who was dawdling under the basket on both ends of the floor (even getting multiple defensive three-second violations), and who was getting caught by the rim on dunk attempts. I was seeing a Dwight who was rarely leaving his feet to grab rebounds or challenge shots, and who seemed reluctant to even raise his arms. (Note: this post was drafted before the Portland game, and I thought Dwight looked a bit better and more athletic in that game.)

Important reminder: The L.A. version of Dwight is still extremely valuable and probably worth max dollars. The L.A. version of Dwight is still one of the best two or three centers in the league. With the L.A. version of Dwight, the Rockets can contend.

Just imagine what they could do with the Orlando version of Dwight.

The post The Stats Say: Dwight Howard is not yet back to his normal self appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

If you were Leslie Alexander, you might answer these difficult and important questions by hiring several Ivy League PhDs and/or a traveling contingent of professional scouts. But you are not Leslie Alexander, and so you are stuck with me and my spreadsheet. I looked at all NBA players in the past 50 years who started their career similarly to the young/inexperienced Rockets (where “similarly” is based on age and performance [as measured mostly by RAPM but also by PER and WS/48]) and used that information to estimate how successful of a career each of the young Rockets may have. Results are below. If interested, see the footnote for more detail on the methods.*

Quick hits:

• I threw in Thomas Robinson just for fun. A lot of people are still high on him, but I think both Sacramento and Houston were smart to sell high. While it’s still possible that he will end up being a good NBA player, it’s pretty unusual that a 21-to-23-year-old rookie who performs that poorly ends up being any good, so a team is probably better off rolling the dice on another rookie, especially if that team’s front office has a recent streak of Parsons-, Beverley-, and Smith-like gems.
• Unfortunately what I just said about Thomas Robinson can also be said of Donatas Motiejunas.
• Motiejunas and Terrence Jones are often spoken of as if it’s a toss up as to who is better, but, statistically, Terrence Jones wins by a mile. If you go only by his box score statistics (PER and WS/48), then you would not be out of line to predict that Jones’s future includes All-Star appearances or Hall of Fame inductions since so few rookies post a PER above 17 or a WS/48 above .125. His RAPM, however, tells a different story. This conflict may mean nothing other than that we’ve got a small-sample-size problem (Jones played only 276 minutes). I will be very curious to see how he performs this season.
• Greg Smith is rarely thought of as having career prospects on the level of Jeremy Lin and Chandler Parsons, but RAPM, PER, and WS/48 suggest that’s where he belongs.
• Why does Patrick Beverley’s contract not get mentioned alongside Chandler Parsons’s as one of the best-value contracts in the league? And why does Patrick Beverley not get mentioned alongside Alaska as one of the best thefts from Russia?
• Based on the estimates shown above, there is a 58% chance that at least one of the seven young Rockets will have a Hall-of-Fame-level career (38% if you exclude Asik).
• DO NOT TRADE OMER ASIK!
• I’m extremely impressed by Morey et al.’s ability to find good, young players from a haystack of really bad ones. The chart above would look even more impressive if I compared each player’s expectations to the expectations for the draft pick they were selected with (where applicable).

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*Here’s a brief example of how the results were calculated: Based on a weighted average of RAPM, WS/48, and PER (where RAPM is weighted highest), Donatas Motiejunas’s rookie season was about 1 standard deviation below NBA historical average, so I looked at all NBA players since the 1962-63 season who performed similarly badly in their rookie season (between 0.75 and 1.25 standard deviations below average) at around the same age (21-23) and then counted how many ended up having a “successful” career. The numbers in the chart are the percentage of these players who fell into one of four categories of career success. I defined the categories based on career RAPM, career PER, and total number of seasons played. Rather than explaining the convoluted definitions, it will be easier just to show summary statistics for each of the four categories:

I don’t want to bore you (or me) with the details of all the little analytical decisions I made along the way, but if you have questions feel free to ask.

The post The Stats Say: Some young Rockets are likely to have a very successful NBA career (and some are not) appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

There were two juicy datasets crying out for comparison:

1. ESPN’s/TrueHoop’s NBA Rank offers a fascinating window into public perception. Every active NBA player is rated on a 0-to-10 scale of the player’s expected “overall level of play for the upcoming season.” The ratings are submitted by ESPN’s Forecast Panel, which currently includes 215 commentators, analysts, geeks, and writers/bloggers (including our own Rahat Huq and Michael Pina).
2. Jeremias Engelmann’s RAPM statistic offers an objective measure of every player’s overall value. There are other measures that do the same (e.g., PER, WP48), but they are based on box score statistics and so don’t account for a player’s defensive contributions nearly as well as RAPM. RAPM takes the simple +/- statistic and then does some fancy Bayesian stuff in order to isolate the contribution of an individual player from the contributions of his teammates and the quality of his opponents, thus giving a hopefully-unbiased picture of the degree to which a player is helping or hurting his team when he is on the court.

The full set of results is shown in the table below and the two highlighted columns are presented in the chart above. It looks like NBA Rank does a generally good job but misses pretty badly on several Rockets (assuming we can trust RAPM as an unbiased measure). Most interesting to me is Omer Asik’s severe undervaluation. This post is intended for results rather than discussion but I hope to pick up this topic in a later post.

Note on the methods: To make the two sets of statistics comparable, I had to create the “RAPM rating.” I did this by ranking every player based on their RAPM from last season and then I pulled the corresponding rating from NBA Rank. For example, James Harden’s RAPM ranked 13^th in the league, so I looked at the 13^th ranked player according to NBA Rank (Paul George) and assigned Harden that rating (8.39). It isn’t a perfect method, but it at least gives an interesting comparison.

One frustrating thing about NBA Rank is that it flattens out the wildly varying talent pool. For example, based on the NBA Rank ratings you might assume that LeBron is about 10-15% more valuable than James Harden or Dwight Howard. The chart below is a sobering reminder of how untrue that is (or at least was last year).

All this talk about players’ rank and value seems to be missing one important thing: dollars. I think the definition of a player’s true value is how much they would be paid in the open market if we lived in a perfect universe where general managers knew everything and did not act stupidly. Actual salaries aren’t a very good indicator of true value because (1) general managers do act stupidly (see Joe Johnson’s contract) and (2) we don’t have a truly open market with rookie contracts, veteran minimums, salary caps, and other constraints imposed by the owners and NBPA.

The chart below shows my estimates of the Rockets’ true value (i.e., “deserved salary”) compared to their current actual salary. (Note that Jeremy Lin and Omer Asik are scheduled to make $5M this year and $15 next year, so I took the average of the two.) To estimate deserved salaries, I first plotted actual salaries by last year’s RAPM and then drew a best-fit exponential line through the data. I then fiddled with the equation so that it estimated that Dwight Howard was paid exactly fairly. That’s just an assumption I was making to get reasonable-looking estimates.

While Howard and Harden might each be worth about $18-$21 million per year in the open market, when the same deserved-salary equation is applied to LeBron, he is estimated to earn/deserve $90 million per year(!). That might be an overestimate, but then again it might not. Chris Paul and Kevin Durant are estimated to earn/deserve $49 million and $46 million, respectively. Even if those are overestimates, it goes to show just how wildly varied are the differences in talent level and value among even the league’s top several players.

There are many implications and so many directions I could go with this, but I will hold my tongue for now.

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Endogeneity aside, there is some compelling evidence to support the theory. In the article referenced above, the author made a list of the 117 all-time greatest NBA players based on MVP votes and All-NBA votes and several other criteria, and then counted how often teams in the Finals or conference finals had one of these 117 players. Here I’m handpicking results:

Every single NBA champion has been led by one of the 117 superstars on this list, and so has all but one of the losers in the NBA Finals. (The exception? The 2000 Pacers.) 107 of the 116 Finals teams had at least a qualifying silver medal superstar, i.e., basically an all-time top 60 player. Even eighty percent of the 116 teams that lost in the conference finals were led by one of the 117 superstars.

If the Superstar Theory is true (and it appears to be), then there are only four to six current teams with realistic title hopes. That’s because, according to the author’s criteria, there are only 13 and a half active superstars in their prime (shown below; bold indicates under age 35; please note: I say 13.5 superstars rather than 14.5 because I refuse to count Amar’e).

Platinum Medal: LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan

Gold Medal: Kevin Durant, Dwight Howard, Chris Paul, Kevin Garnett, Dirk Nowitzki

Silver Medal: Dwyane Wade, Steve Nash, Derrick Rose, Amar’e Stoudemire, Blake Griffin

Bronze Medal: Rajon Rondo, Carmelo Anthony, Russell Westbrook, Tony Parker, Kevin Love, Manu Ginobili, Chauncey Billups, Paul Pierce, Paul George

Honorable Mention: James Harden (3.8 points, barely missing bronze status; seems likely by 2014 unless injured) 

These superstars are spread across 9 teams, with 4 of those teams having more than one superstar, with one of those teams being the Houston Rockets. So unless you have doubts as to the bona-fide-ness of Harden’s superstardom or the herniation of Dwight’s discs, then the Rockets can safely be declared contenders. But they have formidable competition in the Thunder, Clippers, and LeBrons (and maybe also the Spurs and Bulls). So the next logical question is how long their championship window might last.

Barring catastrophic injuries or other McGrady/Yao-like events, I estimate that Howard and Harden should be “superstar” enough for the Rockets to be within title-sniffing distance for at least 5 years and maybe as many as 9. That’s based on the rate that the average Hall-of-Famer ages:

Applying those age curves to Howard and Harden yields these projections:

And then lining up those age projections with the corresponding year yields this:

So if Harden and Howard age at a normal rate and continue producing at the supra-hall-of-fame level they have been, then the Rockets could be contenders through the end of the decade. But even though the window appears large-ish, Harden and Howard will likely never have a better chance than the one they have over the next couple of years. Their peak is, or should be, right now.

It’s probably a good time to remind you that it’s very hard to predict the future and that these simple projections could be way off. For example, while my estimates assume that both players’ performance will decline at a normal rate, many people expect Dwight’s performance to decline faster than average due to his reliance on his athleticism (and his reliance on back surgeries) and Harden’s performance to decline slower than average due to what-he-must-be-tired-of-hearing-called his “craftiness.” I have reasons to believe that both assumptions are mostly wrong, but even if the Rockets get a Laker-quality, rapidly-declining version of Dwight, I’d estimate that the Rockets should still be good enough for several years of title sniffing.

The critical question, I think, is not one of aging but rather one of competition. I’m confident that the Rockets can be top tier through the end of the decade, but I’m not confident that they can win four out of seven playoff games against the Thunder, Clippers, or LeBrons. At present, all of those teams appear to have more starmuscle than the Rockets, and, except for Miami, that starmuscle doesn’t appear to be significantly weakening anytime in the next few years. But that’s a topic to be continued in next Wednesday’s post.

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• Will anyone in the West come close to challenging the Rockets for the top seed?
• Will the Rockets be the best team in the NBA? Better even than the LeBrons?
• Will the Rockets be the best team in recent NBA memory?

And, most uncomfortably, …

• Will the Rockets challenge the NBA record of 72 wins set by Michael Jordan’s 1995-96 Bulls?

Gasp. I went there. Or more accurately, Arturo’s statistics went there. And his statistics are as good of an objective measure as you are going to find. He uses David Berri’s WP48 measure, which does some complicated manipulations of simple box score statistics to produce a single measure of player efficiency. WP48 is both predictive and stable across time, thus satisfying two crucial performance-metric criteria which many of its competitors do not. Arturo adjusts the WP48 metrics for the players’ age and expected minutes per game, and then sums these adjusted estimates across all players to get win predictions for each team. (I’m simplifying a bit, but that’s the gist.) The table below shows the resulting predictions. (Note that these are updated predictions that Arturo shared with me over email, so they are slightly different than the ones at the link above.)

How to interpret this: Even if the Rockets have a “bad” season, they will still likely finish in the top four or five in the NBA. If, on the other hand, they have a very good season, they may win as many games as any team in NBA history.

I will pause to give you time to gulp.

When such brazen predictions are laid before us, the natural reaction is to hunt for holes to poke. That’s why David Berri has a 6,400-word FAQ page to address all your hole-poking queries. It turns out WP48 can be accused of many things, but being poorly thought out is not one of them. Nevertheless, the first maxim of statistics is that statistics never tell the whole story, and I can think of several factors that might be skewing the Rockets’ statistics. But brace for more gulping because the factors suggest that the predictions might be underestimating the Rockets.

• Factor 1. The WP48 measure, like nearly any available measure, does not adequately account for a player’s defense. +3 for the Rockets because they have the most important defensive position manned by a three-time Defensive POY and by Omer Asik, whose defense I do not have enough superlatives to describe. (In my nerdier fantasies I envision discovering a way to measure Omer’s off-ball defense.)
• Factor 2. The predictions are sensitive to the allocation of minutes, and it’s very hard to predict how that allocation will shake out due to injuries and player dynamics and baffling coaching decisions. +2 for the Rockets because Arutro’s model assumes that Omer will be limited to 18 minutes a game when in fact if the towers can function as twins, he may be seeing closer to 30 min/g.
• Factor 3. The predictions treat players as independent parts, but the first lesson of team sports is that the whole can sometimes be much greater or much less than the sum of its parts. +1 for the Rockets because smart money says that the pairing of Harden and Howard – historically two of the league’s most efficient players, particularly in the pick and roll – will yield even greater individual efficiency, at least if Howard is willing to engage in heaping helpings of pick n’ roll.

Let me reiterate: Arturo’s WP48-based predictions suggest that this year’s Rockets may be historically great and my logic suggests that his model may be underestimating them. I feel enormously uneasy about this whole thing. They can’t really be that good, can they? No team without Michael Jordan can be that good. So then where/how is the model overvaluing the Rockets? Arturo graciously provides the data and assumptions for all to see, so if you’re feeling uneasy like I am, go snoop around for yourself. He also shared with me these detailed projections:

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Postscript — Arturo had these interesting comments after reading a draft of this post:

I have Asik in a sixth man role similar to what he did in Chicago and the role Gortat played with Dwight in Orlando. Given the amount of perimeter shooting on this Rockets team, it should be dead easy to play D12 in the post with Asik just outside the post ready for putbacks and rebounds, two shooters in the corners and a shooter/slasher at the top of the key. If I can figure this out, Daryl’s guys most likely have too.

The Rockets have done an extremely good job of building a deep roster of good young players. Even with injury, the second and third tier guys are all serviceable NBA players. This is a team built for the grind that is the regular season.

The best case scenario for the Rockets is the return of pre back surgery Dwight. If that happens, they will destroy people. Keep in mind that the Magic won 52, 59, 59, and 52 games in their last four seasons with a healthy Dwight.

The post The Stats Say: This year’s Houston Rockets may be historically great appeared first on Red94 | Houston Rockets news and musings.

On ESPN’s “First Take” Thursday, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar praised Dwight Howard’s athleticism and charisma before calmly dropping the he-can’t-play-basketball bomb. The criticism was as brutal and as cutting as anything ever spoken in a voice with which one normally narrates children’s books. You can listen to it here. The meat of the criticism is that Dwight does not have what it takes (basketball IQ, a go-to move, Kobe work ethic) to be a “dominant” player. The geek in me wishes he would’ve phrased the criticism in a bit more precise terms so that we could have something resembling a testable hypothesis. Instead, I’m left fumbling with my spreadsheet of career statistics, creating charts in an attempt to put this whole “dominance” thing in perspective…

Here’s the thing: If “dominant” means that you need to be as good as Kareem or better, then there have been exactly three players who have dominated: Kareem, LeBron James, and Michael Jordan. (I’m using career PER, WS48, and WS between the ages of 23 and 33 to make that judgment.) But let’s be more generous. Let’s say that you “only” need to be as good as the average hall of famer to qualify as dominant. By those standards, Dwight safely dominates. Here’s a list of the only players to have a higher PER than Dwight between the ages of 23 and 33: LeBron, MJ, Kareem, Shaq, Wilt, David Robinson, Dwyane Wade, Chris Paul, Charles Barkley, Bob Pettit, Tim Duncan, George Mikan, Hakeem Olajuwon, Dirk Nowitzki, Kevin Garnett, Magic Johnson, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, Julius Erving, and Oscar Robertson. If Dwight returns to pre-back surgery Dwight, he could plausibly leapfrog half of that list in no time. By any reasonable estimation, Dwight dominates.

The bottom line is that Kareem is one of only about a dozen living individuals with a statistical resume big enough to be able to say that Dwight is somehow sub-dominant.

P.S. – You really should read Henry Abbott’s excellent post on the matter.

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