Bill Walton: Don't Trade Noah For Anthony

[FirstTimer]

Off topic: Where the hell has Fed been?

 

[Lefty]

Hiding. He doesn't have the "patience" (or psychosis, whatever) that I do. :dunno:

 

[zack54attack]

Bringing a Noah-Melo debate into CCS is like a black person showing up to a KKK rally...


It never ends well..

 

[Scoot26]

Bringing a Noah-Melo debate into CCS is like a black person showing up to a KKK rally...


It never ends well..

People just need to respect that some people want Melo and some people want to keep Noah. There are cases for both (despite what a few posters here say), and while this is a forum and debate is welcomed, there's no reason to shout and call each other "retards" or "idiots" for their opinions.

 

[Lefty]

People just need to respect that some people want Melo and some people want to keep Noah. There are cases for both (despite what a few posters here say), and while this is a forum and debate is welcomed, there's no reason to shout and call each other "retards" or "idiots" for their opinions.

Except, you know, when people are being Special person and/or idiotic in making their point or dispelling others.

 

[Scoot26]

Except, you know, when people are being Special person and/or idiotic in making their point or dispelling others.

Keep it to yourself..you seem to be able to talk just fine using your stat formula's and other reasoning...no need for the derogatoriness.

It's not like anyone is claiming we should keep James Johnson and not trade him for Carmelo Anthony..

 

[Lefty]

Not the same, but similar, to be sure. And if someone is being overly Special person, they'll hear about it from me, that's just the way things are.

 

[Diddy1122]

Hey, it's not my fault you're Special person and say Special person things.

Wow, what an incredible retort. How many hours did you piss away trying to come up with that one? My 4yr old niece could do better.

 

[Lefty]

Wow, what an incredible retort. How many hours did you piss away trying to come up with that one? My 4yr old niece could do better.

Ok, chief.

 

[Shakes]

my point is that when that workload goes down (to the level of the guys you listed), his efficiency can be reasonably expected to go up

I've trimmed the rest because this seems to be the key point we disagree on, not because I'm trying to cherry pick.

I'd say that the relationship between usage and efficiency is one of the big unsolved problem in advanced basketball stats (capturing individual defensive contribution being the other). So I don't think simply assuming his efficiency would go up on the Bulls is a reasonable expectation at all. You're going to have to give me a compelling argument as to the mechanism by which you think his efficiency would go up for me to buy it. If anything my gut feel is that his efficiency may even go down on the Bulls, as he'd be paired with a player that is a worse fit for his game (Billups' outside shooting seems a stronger pairing than another guy who also wants the ball to drive with it).

I'd also be interested to hear why you assume it'd be Carmelo's usage that goes down, and not Rose's. It was certainly Iverson, not Carmelo, that took the bigger hit in usage when they teamed up.

 

[Capt. Serious]

Lefty, take a deep breath & relax. No need to get your panties in a bunch.

 

[pinkizdead]

you know basketball doesn't always lend itself to statistical analysis. I'm not sure why certain people are so very high on them.

 

[Shakes]

you know basketball doesn't always lend itself to statistical analysis. I'm not sure why certain people are so very high on them.

I disagree, it lends itself well to statistical analysis most of the time, it's just that too often we fall back on the statistics part without the analysis part. FWIW I'm guilty of that myself at times, not pointing the finger at anyone else.

 

[X]

To completely end this piss-fest...why don't we wait to see how we do w/ Boozer over a 2-4 week stretch before we decide whether or not we need Melo? He'll still be available.

 

[Lefty]

I'd say that the relationship between usage and efficiency is one of the big unsolved problem in advanced basketball stats (capturing individual defensive contribution being the other). So I don't think simply assuming his efficiency would go up on the Bulls is a reasonable expectation at all. You're going to have to give me a compelling argument as to the mechanism by which you think his efficiency would go up for me to buy it. If anything my gut feel is that his efficiency may even go down on the Bulls, as he'd be paired with a player that is a worse fit for his game (Billups' outside shooting seems a stronger pairing than another guy who also wants the ball to drive with it).

Ok....

Count The Basket

One can infer that generally, when players in a lineup are forced to increase their usage, their efficiency decreases, and when players are forced to decrease their usage, their efficiency increases.

In general, for every 1% that a lineup has to increase its usage, it’s efficiency decreases by 0.25 points per 100 possessions, and vice versa.

...

If a 1% increase in a lineup’s summed usage results in a drop of 0.25 points per 100 possessions, what does this translate to in terms of individual usage and individual efficiency? We can translate this pretty simply by multiplying 0.25 by five, which suggests that for each 1% a player increases his usage, his efficiency drops by 1.25 points per 100 possessions. For example, suppose we had a lineup of of five players all with a %TmPoss of 0.19 and an ORtg of 100 (for this example I’m going to use points per 100 possessions for ORtg). As the lineup increased its usage five percentage points from 0.95 to 1.00, we would expect its ORtg to drop from 100 to 98.75 (a drop of 5*0.25). This could be accomplished by each player’s usage increasing to 0.20 and each player’s efficiency dropping to 98.75. Thus on the player level, a 1% increase in usage would result in a decrease of 1.25 points produced per 100 possessions.

This ratio of +1% player usage to -1.25 player ORtg (in points produced per 100 possessions) suggests a usage vs. efficiency tradeoff twice the size of that found in a study by Dean Oliver. By looking at game-by-game stats, he found that a 1% increase in usage translated to a drop of 0.6 points produced per 100 possessions. However, I don’t think my findings necessarily conflict with his. As discussed above, a big difficulty in studying usage vs. efficiency is separating out the confounding factors that make usage correlate more positively with efficiency but that don’t really mean that there isn’t a diminishing returns effect. These are things such as players using more possessions in games when they are playing better, players using less possessions when they are matched up against better defenders, etc. Often these factors will completely drown out any actual diminishing returns, and a positive relationship will be found between usage and efficiency (such as in this study). Dean’s study was unique in that it was able to find a negative relationship, but it’s still very possible that the confounding factors were present and while they weren’t enough to cancel out the diminishing returns effect, they may have obscured its true size. So the fact that the study that I have done finds a stronger negative relationship between usage and efficiency could be because it controls for more of those confounding factors by looking specifically at situations in which players were forced to increase or decrease their usage.

I'll apply this to Melo later

I'd also be interested to hear why you assume it'd be Carmelo's usage that goes down, and not Rose's. It was certainly Iverson, not Carmelo, that took the bigger hit in usage when they teamed up.

Actually, in Iverson's first (and only) full year with the team, Melo's usage dropped roughly 10% from the previous year. Now, Iverson obviously didn't have the usage year(s) in Denver he had become accustomed to, but Melo far from made him another spectator, and actually did demonstrate an ability to account for a lesser percentage of the team's possessions.

Applying this to the Bulls, it would be reasonable to expect Melo's usage to decrease (either to the level of that full Iverson year or even further) because 1) he has demonstrated an ability to decrease his workload a bit and maintain production (he put up 25.4 PP36 that season) and 2) the Bulls would (or should, at the very least) know that efficiency is one of the knocks on Melo, and would ask him to work somewhat within the confines of the offense and with his very good teammates to make both himself and the team better. I think it also reasonable to believe Carmelo actually will buy in to this strategy because, unlike his past years in Denver, there is no reason for him to be skeptical of his new teammates; he knows that Derrick Rose is really good, and he knows that Carlos Boozer is damn good in his own right. No longer are the players coming to him and forcing him to feel them out, he would be coming to a team with established almost-superstars ready and waiting, so why continue to chuck up the ball?

Applying the above methods to Carmelo, we can get a picture of what his efficiency would look like with decreased usage. Let's assume Melo comes to the Bulls and averages a usage rate of 29%, or a 2.1 drop in his career average (this assumption is not an unreasonable one, considering he averaged about the same usage rate during his first two years in the league). Since we know the rule is 1.25 points per 100 possessions (1.25 ORtg, gained or lost) for every increase/decrease of 1% in usage, the result of that drop from career average would be 2.63 points per 100 possessions. Adding those points to his career ORtg (because that's where we got his usage, and adding them because his usage decreased), we can reasonably expect a new ORtg of about 109.63. And that is figuring conservatively only a 2.1 percentage point decrease in usage over his career averages. So far this season (a small sample size, I know, but this is just for argument's sake), his usage rate has been about 27%, a 4.1 percentage point decrease over his career average rate, that results in an extra 5 points per 100 possessions, or roughly an increase in ORtg to 112. And for those of you that were wondering, his ORtg so far this season is 112. Again, small sample sizes to be sure, but interesting nonetheless.

 

[nickofypres]

I love Kool-Aid. It's refreshing. I love meatballs as well. Very filling.

Oh what a tough job it must be to sit on your fat ass in your mother's basement, covered in crushed doritos, hammering away at your keyboard with your hotdog sized digits, bemoaning the idiocy of the world you're afraid to step out into. I truly pity you. Internet nazis are a sad & lonely bunch. I hope that one day you can have the flagpole removed from your ass so you can actually have a rational conversation, you know, like humans do.

 

[DewsSox79]

I have no idea why lefty is wasting his time with this thread. This really isnt a debate whatsoever, Mello>>>>Noah.......Mello makes you closer to a championship.there is just no denying that. it is a simple fact.

 

[RamiTheBullsFan]

I have no idea why lefty is wasting his time with this thread. This really isnt a debate whatsoever, Mello>>>>Noah.......Mello makes you closer to a championship.there is just no denying that. it is a simple fact.

Wow.

 

[Shakes]

Screw it, I'm running on lack of sleep and my response was needlessly hostile. I'm out of any Carmelo topics, it's just going to be the Ben Gordon of this year, and I can't do it again.

 

[Lefty]

I don't know what's more insulting, the fact you assume I'm unfamiliar with that article, or the fact it says in the very first paragraph that there's a lot of debate amoung the leading stat heads about the usage vs efficiency dilema (ie exactly what I said) but you're using it as though it proves that it's a solved problem.

Are you, uhhh, familiar with what an introduction paragraph is, by chance?