Mocking the NBA draft…

I love basketball. Not just the NBA, and not just college hoops. Every girl I’ve ever dated has complained that I have a basketball game on the TV from Thanksgiving to Memorial Day. I cheer for the Bulls and the Fighting Illini, and I venomously root against the Lakers, Celtics, Purdue and Kentucky. I am a Lebron apologist; I am not a Roy Hibbert apologist. I could do this all day, but getting to the point, I believe this love qualifies me to create my own mock draft. This mock is based only on my thoughts and research.

Let’s mock it up.

1. Cleveland Cavaliers – Smart Pick: Andrew Wiggins. Actual Pick: Andrew Wiggins.

Cleveland is going to do the smart thing. The Cavs took a risk last year, and it did not benefit them in any way. Supposedly Anthony Bennett may someday be able to play basketball in the NBA, but I will believe that when I see it. Wiggins and Kyrie give a 1-2 punch of a contender . Reasons Wiggins is a no brainer:

I. Wiggins will be the best trade bait in any Love/Lebron situation. Wiggins would be a fit anywhere with his defense and upside, while Parker may not have a place on every potential trade partner.

II. Continuing with the Lebron theme, Wiggins himself may be one of the reasons the King returns to Cleveland. Lebron is tired of having to defend the best wing on the other team. Wiggins will put an end to this, can run the break and will only get better over the next 5 years. Imagine Lebron paired up with Kawhi or Paul George. That’s what Cleveland could be in 2016.

III. Defense. Deng will undoubtedly not be re-signed by the Cavs. Wiggins is ready right now to step in and make the defense formidable, while increasing the athleticism three fold.                                                                                            

2. Milwaukee – Smart Pick: Dante Exum. Actual Pick: Jabari Parker.

Milwaukee is not going to do the smart thing – rebuilding, not trying to win now. Exum provides them a combo guard, if the team deems Brandon Knight is not the solution. He will give them playmaking, defense and flexibility with lineups as he matures and learns the NBA game, which may come faster then people think. Milwaukee is not in a hurry. However, the Chicago ties, immediate scoring boost and new ownership will drive them to Parker.

3. Philadelphia – Smart Pick: Joel Embiid. Actual Pick: Joel Embiid

Philly is after talent, regardless of team fit, and Joel has the most in this draft. Embiid will drift down to the ecstatic 76ers. Playing Noel and Embiid together in rookie seasons may give the team brass a second’s pause, but only a second.

Don’t be surprised if Philly makes a move for Wiggins on draft day.

4. Orlando – Smart Pick: Exum. Actual Pick: Noah Vonleh

This is a tricky pick for the Magic. Oladipo is not a point guard. The organization has to at least suspect this fact, so they will potentially reach for a pure point guard instead of another combo guard. Vonleh will be a good NBA player, but not for at least 2 seasons. As mentioned earlier, Exum has tremendous upside. Putting him beside Oladipo gives an outstanding defensive backcourt, and Exum has the potential to take over a portion of the ball handling responsibilities as well.

5. Utah – Smart Pick: Aaron Gordon. Actual Pick: Julius Randle

Utah is in a tough situation. The organization needs to get more athletic, but they also need to improve their wing scoring, especially if Hayward continues to regress. The Jazz will be lured in by Randle’s numbers and brutality in the post, but he is going to have to figure out how to play in the NBA.  Gordon would as well, but he will contribute versatility on defense, shot-blocking and athleticism right out of the gate. Gordon will develop a shooting touch, but Randle is never going to be a tremendous athlete.

If Utah does not plan on keeping Hayward around, Exum here would not surprise me.

6. Boston – Smart Pick: Exum. Actual Pick: Exum.

Boston’s situation will be decided for them when Exum falls to them. Some sort of deal for Love that would include this draft pick is rumored, but I have my doubts if Exum slides to #6. The Celtics will value him more than other players and will hesitate to package a potential All-Star in a blockbuster deal. On the flip side, Minnesota is going to want much more than an unproven Australian fresh out of high school

7. Los Angeles Lakers – Smart Pick: Marcus Smart. Actual Pick: Marcus Smart.

Los Angeles needs pretty much anybody that can play basketball that doesn’t make 25M a year. Gasol will not be back. I don’t expect Nash to spend his last season on this team. Lakers need someone to put with Kobe that can handle the difficult defensive assignments, take care of the ball, pick up his slack with rebounding, and slide over to shooting guard when Kobe inevitably gets hurt. Outside of playing with Kobe his first NBA seasons, this is an excellent situation for Smart. Lakers will spend money going forward, and he could find himself surrounded by a couple top 20 NBA players in 2 years. I don’t see the Lakers taking potential here, not with the Black Mamba years winding down.

8. Sacramento – Smart Pick: Doug McDermott. Actual Pick: Gordon.

DeMarcus Cousins led the kings in most major statistical categories. This is a problem. Sacramento needs scoring they can depend on night in and night out. With the choices left, McDermott should go here. Luckily for Doug, the Kings will fall in love with athleticism, wind up taking Aaron Gordon and not develop him.

9. Charlotte Hornets (it feels good to type that) – Smart Pick: Nik Stauskas. Actual Pick: McDermott.

Charlotte needs some help from the outside. They played MKG and Gerald Henderson together, like a LOT. Talks in the Hornets camp will come down to Stauskas and McDermott, but MJ will be drawn to Doug’s basketball IQ and gaudy Creighton numbers. McBuckets will still be good for them, but Stauskas would contribute more and sooner, as there is more court time available for him.

10. Philadelphia – Smart Pick: Zach Lavine. Actual Pick: Stauskas

As mentioned above, this pick could very easily be traded. If Philly keeps their picks, however, I think the organization shifts strategies and attempts to get MCW some help. I really like Zach Lavine to the Sixers as an athletic shooting guard with the potential to be a terror on defense, while methodically improving the other parts of his game. He’s not particularly weak at anything, just inexperienced. Upside is much higher than Stauskas, and Philadelphia needs the help on the defensive end of the floor.

In the end, the team shies away from taking another guy that would be inexperienced by NBA standards (24.4 MPG at UCLA paired with partial seasons by Noel and Embiid). I do believe Stauskas will better in the short term; unfortunately, the Sixers miss on an All-Star.

 Anthony Sloan

End of the Spanish Dancing

The margins at the top are razor thin. Spain’s World Cup team, though they were bounced from the tournament after 2 games, is still likely one of the 20 best teams in the world. Even with this generation of Spanish players’ time as the world best having ended, they will always have their legacy of Tiki-Taka.

Tiki-taka emerged from La Masia, Barcelona FC’s youth academy. The story goes that, Barcelona found the the most talented young footballers from around Spain,(with a couple additions thrown in… like Messi) taught them to play the game together from an early age and they developed an almost super-human ability to find each other with one touch passes anywhere on the pitch. These players, after training together for so long, could predict each others movements and play the ball into the space their teammate was moving into. Barcelona, when coached by La Masia alum, Pep Guardiola, who preached the ideals of Tiki-Taka; was the most dominant team in world club football. This same advantage was used by  Spain, since Barcelona’s youth system is primarily filled with Spaniards, to field a team dominated by Barcelona players.

When this philosophy worked, as it had since the 2008 European Championship for Spain, the ball pinged around from teammate to teammate so quickly that the other team was powerless to be in position to close a player down, let alone repossess the ball. Should Spain lose control, they applied relentless pressure until the ball was won back and the passing immediately  started again. It did not matter where on the pitch the ball was won, clearing was anathema, quick passing, on the floor, was the only option. The players were cogs in a machine and the rest of us were Jon Henry, realizing that we would never be able to match the machines output.

Spain were infuriatingly patient, often winning games 1-0. This was not the 1-0 victory of catenaccio where you were knocking the ball around your back 7, but a dismantling where they would work into your half, then, passing up shots others would have taken, play the ball back away from your area, without being touched. Think I’m exaggerating? Spain won 6 games in the 2010 World Cup. 5 of them were 1-0.

Though talented, these players were not holding the ball in the midfield because of their physical prowess. Offensive players that played in the 2010 title game for Spain: Xavi, 5’7″; Iniesta, 5’7″, Pedro 5’6.5″, David Villa 5’9″, Fabregas 5’10”. The cyborg-weapons of the Real Madrid front line (Ronaldo, Bale, Benzema) average 6’1″.

This much winning breeds resentment and people eventually started to turn on the Spanish team. There were grumblings about referees protecting these nymphs in the middle of the field. People even went as far as to call the Spanish team boring. After all, it’s terrible to watch your team get cut a thousand times by intricate passes, but even worse to have to do so while no goals are being scored.

Whether Spain heard their critics or not, the world knew Spain was still at their best when they beat the Italians, who bravely attempted to play with Spain in the midfield, 4-0 in finals of Euro 2012.

Where was this dominance in this year’s World Cup? There is absolutely no room for error at this elite level of soccer. The intricate short passes played by all players everywhere on the field that allowed the Spanish to have such control of games that goals became just another pass, proved to be their undoing. Not that the philosophy of La Masia was wrong but it can only be successful when you are half a step quicker than the other team at every position. When the other team can physically challenge you, the 6″ and 30 pounds that you traded for agility suddenly matters alot.

When Xavi and Iniesta were at their peak, their short passes slowly knocked the other team out of position until the only thing their striker had to do was slot the ball into the back of the net. Every one of those touches had to be perfectly calibrated, otherwise the world-class athletes they were playing against would be able to disrupt them. Playing a thousand short passes everywhere on the field meant that if the Spanish lost possession, they were out of position for defense and they had to press fast or they would be exposed to a counter-attack. This risk, which keeps other teams from daring to play Tiki-Taka, was something Spain had never worried about before. They rarely gave the ball way and when they did their press was swift and effective.

In their recent loss to Chile, the Chileans didn’t do anything that hadn’t been tried before against Spain. They maintained a high line to compact the field and they pressed the Spanish. In the past the Spanish either would have tired them out, relieving the press and causing the line to have to pull back, or they would have put 4 past them by running free into the space behind the defense, like they did to Italy. This time though, the Spanish had lost their elusiveness. Rather than disappearing like smoke when a Chilean tackle came in, the Spanish players were there. When the Chileans did gain possession of the ball, they were able to make quick passes away from Spain until they created enough space to try a direct ball to their forwards, over the Spanish midfield. Those direct passes weren’t searching for scoring opportunities as much as they were daring Spain to try to play through their defense. They were betting that they could stifle Tiki-Taka enough times that their hopeful, low-percentage passes would be the better bet. In 2010, this didn’t pay off, Chile lost 1-2 in the World Cup. This year a goal was created by some direct passing up the flank, and out of position Spanish defenders in the area. The goal that sealed the match was a free kick that was poorly handled by their legendary keeper, Iker Casillas, who, perhaps, like the rest of the team, has lost some of his ability through the years.

The team Spain brought to this tournament was still full of great players and there’s a chance that had they trade their beliefs in Tiki-Taka for a more pragmatic approach, they would still be in the World Cup. The world champion’s early exit does not indicate the wrongness of this philosophy, but it does show that even the greatest must face the realities of time.

Grantland Power Rankings

Edition I

Anthony Sloan                                                                                                                                                                                                             

 

All of the contributors to this blog are avid Grantland readers (all on our well-deserved free time of course), so it only makes sense to do some power rankings. We couldn’t read every single article, but we did our best. Quality and volume are taken into consideration, and we only looked at recent stuff (roughly 7 days). If we missed somebody, throw it in the comments. Without further ado…

 1.  Bill Simmons – the editor-in-chief of Grantland has to start out number one. Excellent wrap up on the NBA season, putting as much of a bow as you can with an exciting draft and free agency looming. He did not let himself enter the trade machine too many times, but did get into the legacy of Duncan vs Kobe. Bill likes to get his digs on Kobe in when he can. This #1 spot is more of a life time achievement award (Kobe’s latest contract, anyone?), and The Sports Guy can be dethroned in future editions.

2. Zach Lowe – Zach is becoming a bigger and bigger deal in the NBA circles. His sheer volume of quality workhas been remarkable, considering everything happening in the NBA. We got the NBA Finals coverage we have come to expect with Zach, as well as an informative article on max salaries. I have pondered the NBA’s limit on salaries myself to the tune of “Each team having one max player that could only count the max against the cap. However, this player could make whatever a team would pay him. So that essentially creates a free market for the best 32 players in the world. Durant can make 50M a year, but count for only 25M against the cap.” Anyway, I digress so back to the rankings. Lowe has an excellent way of circling potential ideas from all directions and discussing the positives and negatives, as well as ramifications that I didn’t even think about with the particular idea being discussed. He also knows his audience and covers the biggest storylines, as shown with the Lebron destination write-up.

3. Jonah Keri – As a fellow blogger commented, Keri gets bypassed because there are so many writers that occupy his niche. However, these rankings will give him credit as he churned out 3 solid articles, with my favorite being his on Tony Gwynn. He summarized his life and legacy nicely, with several facts and stories that I had not heard (Not that I am a Tony Gwynn expert my any means. I did, however, have a Tony Gwynn glove in little league. That’s something, right?) Example: “Next year? We’re going to hit some fucking bombs next year.” You’ll have to check out the article to get the context. At any rate, Jonah introduced me to that side of Gwynn this week.

4. Bryan Curtis – I thoroughly enjoyed the article about the early days of soccer journalism in the United States. I can relate to the story because while I played soccer when I was younger, I had to essentially start learning the professional game from scratch in my 20s. It’s difficult to imagine someone 20 years older than me not only trying to learn the game, but writing about it to pitch the other football to Americans. The “60 second loop of memory” that describes how George Vecsey trained himself to keep track of the game was fairly amazing. It works.

5. Spike Friedman – Extra points for volume, as he’s kicking out About Last Night (ABL) every day. Spike is quite funny, and a pretty good soccer analyst. It’s a credit to writing skills that he can switch tones so easily. The Putin and Showalter/Tommy John jokes were his best ABL material, and good insight into the World Cup with his article on offensive fullbacks.

6. Rembert Browne – He’s not as relevantas the top five, but as famous blogger Nate Smith said to me recently, “He’s [Rembert] the only writer that can do the New Yorker thing. What I mean by that is this: if I start reading one of his articles, even if it’s about something I don’t care about, I always finish it.” Big fan of the Chapelle show piece and huge bonus points because I discovered he is covering 24 as well. I will be checking out all of them as soon as I can get my Jack Bauer fix. DAMNIT CHLOE!

7. Stephen Hyden – Several of my friends are not the biggest Hyden fans, and he can get a skosh Pitchforky at times. But I bought two albums after reading articles of his, so I think that puts him on this list. He was right on about the Lana Del Ray record.

8. Andy Greenwald – I typically enjoy Andy more in podcast form, but the Louie article actually made me want to watch Louie. That desire was a new one, so I’ll give Andy credit.

9. Mark Lisanti – There needs to be a writer on here whose only job is making people laugh at silly things. Lisanti edged Shea Serrano because of timing. Well, that and the Captain’s journal may be my guiltiest indulgence on Grantland. This wasn’t one of the better entries, but I always laugh at A-Rod the Centaur, and the digs at Oakland are clever.

10. Michael Baumann – I have to be honest: I didn’t read this article. Mainly because it’s about the NL east, which interests me none. Mad props for the title though. Power rankings are hard.

Also considered: Molly Lambert, Sean McIndoe, Shea Serrano, Andrew Sharp, Emily Yoshida.

Nate Smith contributed to this entry. All writers can be found at www.grantland.com.

 

The First Night of LeBronukkah: The Rockets

By Ross Poland

Ed. Note: Just like Chaunkah is too big of a day to be contained to one day, covering the NBA’s offseason is too big for one post. This is our first covering basketball’s Festival of Lights.

The LeBron to Houston bandwagon is picking up steam around here.(Ed Note: Ross lives in Houston)  I want to believe, but I don’t.  So that sucks.

Just for fun though, I did some Math and it appears that, if the Rockets can trade Lin and Asik for nothing, they’ll be able to clear roughly enough cap space to sign someone. Someone good.

Their current cap figure for the 2015 season is $63.2.  This includes Francisco Garcia’s $1.3M player option, which he will likely decline, and Chandler Parsons’ new Restricted Free Agent (RFA) cap hold.  Trading Lin and Asik for nothing would decrease the cap figure to ~$46.5M, which would be a little flexible if they felt like trading Terrence Jones or Donatas Montiejunas. < I’m not sure what you mean in the last half of the sentence >

$16.8M in cap room is pretty good, but it’s a little presumptuous to demand that a top-tier free agent take a pay cut while Dwight and James do no such thing.  Unfortunately, renouncing Chandler Parsons and his $2.6M cap hold could be what makes the difference.

Parsons as an RFA causes a few problems, greatest of which is other teams attempting to screw the Rockets by clogging up their cap sheet with a large offer for Parsons.  Were Parsons to sign an offer sheet for another team at a starting salary of $8-9M/season, his cap hold for the Rockets would equal that amount.  This would kill the chances to sign a new super player while retaining Parsons.  The plan, I’m assuming, is Houston hopes  Parsons will wait to sign an offer sheet with another team until after the Rockets conclude any new free agent negotiations and the contracts have been signed.  After this is complete, they can use his bird rights to go over the salary cap and re-sign him at any salary up to his max.

Of course, this all hinges on being able to give away Lin and Asik for essentially no returning salary.  By my estimation there are at least 5 teams (Boston, Philly, Phoenix, Orlando, and Utah) that need to add contracts in order to meet the salary floor requirements.  These teams could also all use a top 15 or so starting center.  Maybe to a lesser degree, some of them could use a reasonably good offensive point guard.  If they insist, which it’s reasonable to assume they will, the offer to accept Lin or Asik without returning salary could be sweetened by throwing in some draft picks.  All of these teams like to hoard draft picks.  Based on Daryl Morey’s history of getting deals done and the fact that he has a few assets laying around to grease palms, I don’t think that unloading those two contracts will be impossible if it means he’ll be signing another great player.

If Morey does end up making the contracts work out, the remaining Rockets roster would be something like this:

Beverley / Canaan
Harden / Troy Daniels (remember him?)
Parsons / Robert Covington (he’s good I swear, he won Dleague MVP)
Super Player / Terrence Jones
Dwight / Montiejunas

I think that has potential to be a championship caliber starting roster, but I would be somewhat concerned about the depth given what just happened to Miami.  If anything, Morey has proven that he’s pretty good at finding good deals for 7-9th men, so there’s reason to have faith.  Bottom line, I’m on board with it.

NBA Players Do Get Tired

By Ross Poland

The Miami Heat just got run off the floor in the 2014 Finals by the San Antonio Spurs. Miami’s lack of bench production and all-around fatigue appeared to be a strong contributor to San Antonio’s utter dominance, but just how much worse than usual was Miami? Was their fatigue due to a long regular season or due to mental fatigue from getting to four consecutive NBA Finals?

To try to answer these questions, let’s take a look at some of the players most frequently used by each of the four Conference Finalists. For the sake of brevity, I’ll show stats from five players from each team.¹ As a rudimentary way of comparing their performance in the regular season to the playoffs, we’ll compare their Player Efficiency Ratings (PER).²

San Antonio

Player	Season Minutes	Season PER	Playoff PER
Tim Duncan	2158	21.3	21.0
Tony Parker	1977	18.9	15.7
Danny Green	1651	13.9	16.5
Boris Diaw	1874	14.1	15.4
Kawhi Leonard	1923	19.4	18.7

San Antonio made history this season by limiting each of their players to fewer than thirty minutes per game. Gregg Popovich was able to keep his players fresh and mostly free from injury by keeping them off the court. It’s natural that the Spurs would adhere to such strict minute limits due to the advanced age of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker, and Manu Ginobili. In addition to the players listed here, Marco Bellinelli, Manu Ginobili, Patty Mills, and Tiago Splitter all played a huge part in the Spurs preservation of their stars’ health.

In the playoffs, the only noticeable PER dropoff was Tony Parker. Parker’s downturn, which didn’t actually happen, is an artifact of the PER stat. Simply put, Parker’s PER probably dropped due to his assist totals decreasing and his 2 pt FG% dropping slightly during the playoffs. The assist decrease wasn’t due to him not passing, but due to the scoring pass coming from him less frequently than during the season. This phenomenon is known as the “hockey assist”. No one knows where the term originated.

Miami

Player	Season Minutes	Season PER	Playoff PER
LeBron James	2902	29.3	31.1
Chris Bosh	2531	19.0	18.2
Dwyane Wade	1775	22.0	18.5
Mario Chalmers	2178	14.0	10.2
Norris Cole	2014	8.0	7.2

LeBron James has played an astonishing amount of professional basketball since he joined the Miami Heat. Having been to four consecutive Finals, he’s played nearly an additional season’s worth of games over this time period.³ Naturally, he got better in the Playoffs. His PER in this case is both accurate and inaccurate.

Though LeBron was great, the rest of his team morphed into the 2007 Cavaliers. Chris Bosh had a pretty good series, but didn’t elevate his game as the way he did during the previous two Championship series for the Heat. Dwyane Wade, despite severe minutes restrictions during the 2013-2014 season, was rendered almost useless in the Finals. His 18.5 Playoff PER is somewhat skewed by how well he played in the first three rounds. By the time he faced the Spurs in the Finals, it was clear that whatever was ailing him finally caught up. Most alarmingly; however, the rest of the Heat fell almost completely apart. I won’t go into extended detail, but suffice to say that Mario Chalmers and Norris Cole are a pretty reasonable representation of how much the rest of the non-LeBron heat contributed. Except for Rashard Lewis; that dude played pretty well.

Indiana

Player	Season Minutes	Season PER	Playoff PER
Paul George	2898	20.1	20.5
Lance Stephenson	2752	14.7	13.5
George Hill	2434	13.4	12.7
David West	2472	17.5	15.5
Roy Hibbert	2409	13.5	12.1

Frank Vogel ran his starters into the ground, plain and simple. Roy Hibbert, savior of in-the-paint defense during the 2013 Playoffs, regressed noticeably throughout the entire season. By the time the Playoffs started, he was borderline unplayable after frequently going scoreless and rebounding poorly. It’s impossible to say whether Hibbert was playing through an injury, if he was simply tired, or if there were other factors at play. Luckily the Pacers managed to avoid any serious injuries (possibly excluding Hibbert), but they also never developed any backup plans with their bench. Evan Turner made his best contribution to the team by catching strep throat. Andrew Bynum appeared to become the embodiment of a story by The Onion.⁴ The only bench players to log any serious minutes were Ian Mahinmi and Luis Scola. Chris Copeland was never worked into the rotation until they were desperate during the first round against the Hawks. For a moment in the Heat series it felt like they finally realized that they have a pretty great transition offense in between George, Stephenson, and Hill. Unfortunately, as quickly as they started showing some promise of beating the Heat at their own game, the Heat answered with a roster tweak of their own in Rashard Lewis and revitalized Dwyane Wade.

With reference to their PER shift, the Pacers had an abysmal offensive performance during the last half of the season that extended into the Playoffs. During the season they averaged roughly 97 points per game, which dropped to 91 points per game in the Playoffs. Paul George averaged almost a third of those points during each game. Their poor scoring accounts for the team-wide PER decrease, but even that decrease doesn’t do their postseason justice. I won’t go into great detail about how bad they looked since it’s been covered pretty extensively by basically everyone (it was really bad).

Oklahoma City

Player	Season Minutes	Season PER	Playoff PER
Kevin Durant	3122	29.8	22.6
Serge Ibaka	2666	19.6	16.6
Thabo Sefolosha	1584	10.4	9.0
Kendrick Perkins	1207	6.3	6.6
Russell Westbrook	1412	24.7	24.9

Kevin Durant led the league in minutes and in points this season. He had an incredible season and deservedly earned his first MVP award. Unfortunately, Durant had to watch from afar as Kawhi Leonard accepted the MVP trophy he certainly would have preferred.

The Playoffs weren’t kind to Durant. His hometown newspaper called him unreliable. He shot poorly (for him) against the Spurs. Durant’s ability to fill up a box score dropped off more than any other player, according to the PER metric. It’s not really a mystery why this is the case: Durant had to load up on points during the regular season, and he did so extremely efficiently. During the playoffs, his point, rebound, and assist totals dropped off as did his shooting efficiency. He went from “all time amazing” to “wow, this guy is good”. It makes sense that, as the playoffs progress, defenses become better at containing him. But wait, what happened to Russell Westbrook? Well, his numbers are a bit deceptive. Westbrook certainly played a huge part in OKC’s playoff run, but he did it while shooting a lot (he shot 2 more 2 point field goals and an extra 3 point field goal per game, on average). He scored more and assisted more, but he missed more too. Now, this isn’t me saying that Westbrook lost the series against the Spurs for OKC. Far from it; he was their best player. It’s just worth mentioning that there’s more than one way to affect PER.

Aside from Westbrook and Durant, the Thunder found themselves scrambling for third and fourth options just like Indiana and, eventually, Miami. Jeremy Lamb played a huge part in Oklahoma’s first win of the series, but he got minutes in place of Thabo Sefolosha, whose offensive regression made him extremely difficult to keep on the court. Kendrick Perkins played reasonably well, but he has never been an offensive player who commands much attention from the defense. In the end, Derek Fischer, Jeremy Lamb, and Caron Butler combined for 357 minutes (roughly 25% of the entire series) and Sefolosha received two DNPs. That trio played just 200 (19%) during the six game series with the Clippers, while Sefolosha played 105 by himself.

The Argument for the Bench

It’s difficult to find a correlation between overplayed players and subpar playoff performance just this year. One year of the Playoffs is a small sample size. Certainly, there are examples that indicate overplaying may have a negative effect on individual performance, but it’s hard to say exactly why. Kevin Durant had noticeably worse Playoffs than regular season, but LeBron James remained his usual level of superhuman. Minute restrictions will obviously help reduce fatigue, but exactly how important is that for a “young” player’s performance?

I don’t know if there’s a certain amount of minutes that, if exceeded, will cause a player undue amounts of stress and performance loss, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that players who have been treated like workhorses end up suffering. Amar’e Stoudemire hasn’t been the same since Mike D’antoni overplayed him in the 2010-2011 season. To pick on D’antoni again, Kobe Bryant tore his Achilles tendon during a two-week stretch in which he averaged 45.5 minutes per game.

In direct contrast, the five most-played Spurs during the 2013-2014 season (Duncan, Diaw, Bellinelli, Leonard, and Parker) each clocked in just over 2000 minutes for the season, which equates to just over 42 “full” games played over the course of a season. The next four most-played (Green, Ginobili, Splitter, and Mills) played a combined 5,999 minutes, or just over 31 “full” games played.

This year, Kevin Durant played the equivalent of 65 “full” games during his regular season alone. He logged more minutes before the playoffs started than Tim Duncan did during his entire season and Championship run combined.

If there is a point to my discussion of limiting minutes, it’s that the Spurs have clearly picked up on something beneficial. The Spurs sustained injuries to Kawhi Leonard, Tony Parker, Tiago Splitter, Manu Ginobili, and Danny Green (combined 81 games missed) during their season, and were still able to finish with a league-leading 62 wins. They frequently rested players on back to backs and played without a full roster against top tier teams in an effort to preserve energy and health. But, what’s perhaps even more important than their health, Popovich was forced to experiment with a wide variety of lineups and players. It was this experimentation that led to the emergence of Green, Diaw, and Mills as dependable players. By the time the Finals came around, the Spurs were ready for every permutation of Heat players that Eric Spoelstra could put on the floor. Their substitution patterns and assignments were second-nature, and they were able to produce points in ways the Heat had no chance to stop.

We all like to think that these guys are immune to normal human ailments like getting tired and dealing with strained muscles. The truth is that it’s a knock on their toughness to rest properly. Sure, we all admire when a player goes the extra mile for a win, or to drag his team to a higher playoff seed. But wouldn’t we all be happier in the long run if skipping a game here and there led to LeBron James or Kevin Durant winning a championship in 2025 rather than a spot in Naismith in 2022?

1^ In a few cases I included a player who wasn’t top 5 in minutes played. I did this to account for specific situations like Dwyane Wade’s limited minutes, Russell Westbrook’s knee surgery, and Tony Parker’s injury

2^ PER is actually a pretty bad stat for discussing the actual efficiency of a player’s minutes. Really, I just like to use it to determine who did most of the work in a particular period of time. High PER will usually correlate with production.

3^ Not like, he played in 82 more games than he would have by not going to the Playoffs; he’s played 75.5 additional games worth of minutes in the Playoffs since 2011. That doesn’t even take into account his time with the US National Team in 2012.

4^ Stephon Marbury Embroils Celtics’ Big 3 in Elaborate Shakespearean Intrigue. Imagine Bynum as Marbury and swap the two starting rosters and this is basically an NBA Mad Libs.

Amazon Heat

By Nate Smith

Much has been made about the potential affect of the heat in Brazil on teams from cooler climates. The manager of England team, Roy Hodgson, went as far as to call the weather in Manaus, the city that USMNT played in on Monday night, “problematic”.

Emotional reactions from English managers aside, how will we know if the heat is really changing the outcome of the most watched sporting event in the world? We can start by defining hot. Luckily FIFA has already done this for us, sort of. In response to concerns about the weather, FIFA decreed that the “Wet Bulb Globe Temperature”(WBGT) must be above 90 degrees F for officials to consider cooling breaks. Strangely enough, I already have experience with the wet bulb temperature, when I belonged to an organization more powerful than even FIFA; the US Army.

The WBGT differs from the reading on a normal thermometer in that you take readings off 2 different thermometers, one wet and one not. These numbers are then plugged into a formula which spits out the WBGT. What this ended up looking like in the Army, was that once an hour, one of the smarter trainees go over to the thermometer, make sure the bulb was wet, take the readings and then, using a chart, determine the heat category and report it to the instructor. This was a really big deal if you were a trainee. It dictated whether or not you could untuck your pants from your boots and how long you could be made to do push-ups when you inevitably did something your drill sergeant was not happy about. The most severe heat category, category 5, starts at a WBGT of 90 degrees F.

If the most severe category is 5, it then logically follows that there are heat categories 1-4 as well. (for the specifics on this) The Army also defines work loads allowed in various heat loads. Once we have decided that soccer is indeed hard work, we can go to the chart from the link above and see that the most work you should do under those conditions is 45 minutes hard work with extended rest afterward. For the purposes of this we will assume heat category 3 and above constitutes sufficiently hot to affect the game.

Unfortunately, even though they are undoubtedly measuring the WGBT for every match, FIFA was not reporting it anywhere I could find on their website. They are however reporting the humidity and temperature of the matches. Using this we are able to calculate the Heat Index, which while inferior in the eyes of the Army, will act as the metric we will use to classify a match as hot.

This leaves us with 4 matches from the first round. (FIFA’s website also did not report the temperatures for the England Italy game) In fact, using these measures, 10 of the 16 games have a heat index of 81 degrees F or lower. That wouldn’t be ideal weather to play soccer in, but as someone who grew up playing soccer in the Midwest, it wouldn’t be something that would give me second thoughts about playing either.

Now that we’ve identified games that we might see this effect in, we need to determine which team would be more likely to be accustomed to playing in the heat over their opponents. There are a lot of variables that could be used here, such as where team members play their club football, where players grew up, or how long the team has had to acclimatize to the conditions in Brazil. For the purposes of this post, we are going to use whether or not a large portion of the country lies in the Tropics, that is between the Tropic Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn’s latitudes. In practice this eliminates matches like Mexico vs Cameroon, where both teams lie in the tropics, and Belgium vs Algeria, since both teams are non-tropical.

Of the games that made the cut based on heat index, this eliminates the beating Spain took at the hands of the Dutch. So, while heat may have affected the game, there is no reason to believe that the Dutch, a country famous for their canals and coffeehouses, should have been better prepared than the Spanish, a country famous for their beaches.

This leaves us with Chile’s 3-1 win over Australia, Costa Rica’s upset of Uruguay and USA’s nail-biting win over the Black Stars of Ghana.

The next thing we should look for is signs that the game somehow turned out differently than was expected. In the Chilean victory, Chile actually represents the team that should have been negatively affected by the heat. The end result looks about right according the ESPN’s “Soccer Power Index”, so no affect from the heat in this match. This non-affect could be due to a gulf in quality that was so wide that the heat didn’t matter or it could be that the crude sorting mechanism used to categorize Chile and Australia doesn’t accurately reflect the climate
differences between the two countries.

The Ticos 3-1 victory over last World Cup’s semifinalists Uruguay on the other hand was quite unexpected. It is true that Luis Suárez missed this game, but even so Uruguay would have been favorites going into the game and certainly they looked even better when they went to the half leading 1-0. Is it a coincidence that Costa Rica (the tropical team) scored 3 goals in second half of the only game that we’ve examined that reached heat category 5? Probably not. If we look a little deeper we can see that while Uruguay had more possession,
Costa Rica had the better Total Shot Ratio(for an explanation on TSR) indicating that this was probably not a fluke. (Costa Rica TSR ~.6, Uruguay ~.4) Either way, even drill sergeants would agree that half-time does not represent the “extended rest” laid out by the Army, as necessary recovery for 45 minutes of hard work in category 5 heat.

Now we come to USMNT finally beating Ghana in a World Cup. At first glance, it would seem this match would go against the theory that heat had affected the US negatively in this match. When you look just a little bit deeper though we see that Ghana had 62% of the possession and a TSR of .72! This coupled with the fact that US had to sub out players due to muscle injuries and cramps, points to the fact that the conditions probably did play a part in this game, even if the US came out on top.

There are many issues with this analysis (small sample size, my own bias of hot, arbitrary end points) but there is some evidence to support that the heat could be affecting the outcome of matches. If this is true, we should see more results similar to the Uruguay upset. Either way, before choosing a European team over one from warmer climes, check the heat index.

Samurai Blue World Cup Preview

By Anthony Sloan

 

I am in a soccer pool. The scoring process and drawing process was and is convoluted and overly complicated. It was thought out by an Englishman, so I guess it’s to be expected. Essentially, everybody drew a “good” team and a “bad” team, as I believe was determined by the FIFA world ranks. I was the only participant to draw the country of which I am a citizen.

But I don’t need to discuss the stars and stripes, as much has already been written and there will be much more to come. I am going to give you a quick breakdown on Japan, my B team, based on some lazy internet research. Let’s change it to lazy googling. Research is a strong word.

Japan burst onto the global soccer scene in 1968 with a third place finish at the Olympics. However, the team would not make the World Cup until 1998, where the team’s best finish is the round of 16. The national team has had the most success at the Asian cup, where they have been crowned champions 4 times. Fun Wikipedia fact: their worst lost came in the early 1900’s to the Philippines. Japan would have their revenge 50 years later in their biggest win as a national club.

The Japan kits are either a blue that is somewhere between royal and navy or neon yellow.  Orange and pink are the accent colors.  Yellow recently replaced white as the alternate kit. Another fun fact, Japan wears blue instead of red due to a superstition that dates back to the 30s. Japan’s nickname is either Daihyo, Zac Japan (coach’s name abbreviation) or Samurai Blue.  Am I the only person that thinks Samurai Blue is about 113 times cooler than the other two?? At any rate, that’s the name I will be using.

Now to the actual football: The “Blue” are a fun team to watch on the attack but have lost some of the defensive discipline that gave them success in past years.  Japan lacks physicality across the board.  Joji Sakurai of the Associated Press and Andrew McGirdy, Japan soccer writer, are both of the opinion that they are a confusing team that can amaze you one match and confound you the next.  As a Tottenham supporter, this is par for the course, so I should have no problem cheering for them. SB will need to dominate possession in the middle of the field to minimize the opposition’s scoring chances. Wait… this is exactly like Spurs! I wonder if they also have a keeper that will terrify me any time he touches the ball with a body part other than his hands. I can only hope.

Key players:  Keisuke Honda – attacking midfielder, Shinji Kagawa – midfielder, Shinji Okazaki – striker, Yuyo Nagatomo – back

Check back for my observations from their first World Cup match against the Ivory Coast. In the meantime… Nippon Ole, Nippon Ole.

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