Over the course of the season, Cavs:the Blog writers will square off in a series of head-to-head debates over a variety of topics. At the conclusion of each; you select a winner.
Did you see that pass that Dion threw to Alonzo Gee off the rim at the end of the Atlanta game for the winner? Who knew Dion had such a firm understanding of trajectories and physics!!
The first topic today pits Kevin against Tom, in a battle of “Dion Waiters is unquestionably one of the NBA’s five most impressive rookies” versus “I’ll question that”.
Kevin (sent prior to Friday night’s games): I’ll start this off with lists of rankings for Dion compared to his rookie competition, broken into four categories. The rankings include the 25 rookies who played 150 minutes prior to November 30th.
Strength of Schedule
- 1st – Ratio of away games to home games. Cleveland has been on the road a lot.
- 8th – Highest opponent win percentage
Team Burden
- 1st (tie) – Ratio of games started
- 2nd – percentage of team minutes played
- 4th – usage
Production
- 1st – ratio of steals to fouls
- 5th - points per 40 minutes, pace adjusted
- 6th – Three-point percentage (15 players with over five attempts)
- 6th – assists per 40 minutes, pace adjusted
- 7th - Pure Point Rating (PPR, a variation on assist-to-turnover ratio)
Age
Of everyone ranked higher, the entire list within sixteen months of Waiters includes:
- Anthony Davis for usage rate, points, and opponent win percentage (only six games played)
- Austin Rivers for assists and PPR
- Moe Harkless for opponent win percentage
That’s it. Basically, against a cumbersome schedule, facing-off against the opponent’s starters, and playing crunch-time, Cleveland requires Dion to handle a heavy-load, all at a precariously young age. And he’s helping, spreading the floor and moving the ball; two areas where Cleveland struggles otherwise.
Today, I list only Damian Lillard, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Anthony Davis above him for “most impressive rookie”.
Tom (sent prior to Friday’s game): How does it feel to be hanging from a mile-high cliff using silly string? It looks like it might hold, so long as no one exposes the word “impressive”. Impressive is a relative term, it is based on expectations. In that sense, when Lance Allred made history in 2008, we could have declared him the most impressive NBA rookie ever. But should we? This is like the MVP debate, it’s about semantics, and there is no clear winner so long as there is no agreed upon metrics. It’s one thing to say “not every rookie has had to battle LeBron James and Tony Allen in their first month”, it’s another to say “at a precariously young age”. What stops us from saying “while battling a hard-nosed coach that randomly benches him unfairly” or “and he did this while playing his overweight butt into game shape!” Anything can be impressive if you frame it right.
Using the 1st bullet, the road/home ratio, the implication is that those games were more challenging, and thus, there will be an across the board drop in performance among all Cavs players that Waiters can’t overcome. Too simplistic. Do you expect Anderson Varejao’s PER to be 30 when the Cavs start playing some cupcake teams at home? Once the usage burden eases and the SOS evens out will Andy be in the MVP discussion? I doubt it. Make no mistake, Waiters is going through the gauntlet right now. I’ll be “impressed” if he emerges and raises his game to a higher level. Not until then.
Team burden? Minutes played? Jeremy Pargo’s minutes tripled from last season. So did his PER. Maybe the next argument can be “if only Dion Waiters got more deserved minutes, his value would increase.” I’ve shown in my Don’t. Trade. Varejao. post that in his career arc, more usage has meant better things. More production, more efficiency, more notoriety, and more value – the things that truly impress. Yes, it lends that with less people treating Waiters as the head of the snake, and with a less grueling schedule, he will be in an environment more conducive to success. I get that. Let’s be impressed by what people do, not what they’re going to do. I’m going to ignore SOS and team burden. How many people were upset when the Cavs barely beat that D-league of a Wizards team on opening night? No one. This glass-half-full-all-the-time-thing doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Actually among a few of the more “distinguished” people here, it’s more like “the glass might be empty, but we’re DEAD SURE that someone is going to be filling it with Cognac shortly, so please shut up.”
Kevin (sent prior to Saturday’s game): OK, with you throwing down the ‘semantics’ hammer, I up the ante: Dion Waiters ranks top-five for ‘best’ rookie of this young season.
Carrying on; from 1997 through 2008, NBA home teams won 61% of games and home court carries value of 3 to 3.5 points. I won’t argue a dramatic impact, but teams, and by extension, players, are better at home. Over small samples, some credit needs given for facing road-heavy schedules.
Varejao is an outlier in many ways. In Basketball on Paper, Dean Oliver developed Skill Curves (definition is here), where he tracked individual offensive rating as a function of a player’s usage over many games. The general rule, as makes sense, is that the less required of a player, the more efficient he performs. This article provides quantitative averages of how usage impacts offensive rating. Using those numbers, if Waiters usage decreased from 25 to 15, his offensive rating calculates at 119…identical to 24-year-old Kyle Singler; which brings me back to age. If you bought Basketball Prospectus this season, they included an article utilizing data since 1978, fitting a regression model to assess year-to-year performance improvements as players age. Generally, players improve rapidly from 18 to 22, and continue at a slower rate through age 26. At 20, Dion still treads through early stages of development.
You are critical of outright expecting improvement, as if a given, but how can you view 30+ years of NBA trends, and say, “I don’t see it happening here”? Are you one of those people that hate science?
Tom (sent prior to Saturday’s game): You want me to drop some ‘science’ on your ass? I keep PER out of this debate as I think your “it’s been a burden” narrative parry’s that, and it doesn’t account for sample size which can widely vary between players at this juncture. But I like dropping stats too. Among rookies, Dion Waiters ranks:
Tied 19th in Win Shares (source: bball-ref)
Tied 9th in Estimated Wins Added (EWA, source: hollinger)
No other information is going to make my case so succinctly. Waiters would unfairly struggle in these stats if he was missing games or playing time – but it’s been the opposite. He’s getting opportunities to create positive value. Honestly I could have just made that my entire post. That alone allows one to question whether Dion Waiters belongs on the top-5 most impressive rookies list. But low hanging fruit is boring and I like killing ants with ICBMs so…
33rd in Offensive Rating (18th if filtering by >= 150 minutes played)
48th in Defensive Rating (19th see above)
Dion is relatively far from being ‘among the five best rookies’; a lot of your trends need to align perfectly for that to happen. While they may, you are too optimistic to ‘unquestionably’ decree it.
Kevin (sent prior to Saturday’s game): Do I need to teach “Advanced Stats 101”? As a direct derivation of PER; using EWA, while claiming to ‘keep PER out of the debate’ is contradictory. I like PER, but it lacks accounting for quality of opposition; how many rookies are playing against back-ups and in garbage time? That has to be accounted for. By Hollinger’s own admission, PER is also a poor defensive quantifier.
Defensive rating is useless, and by extension, so are Defensive Win Shares built from it. Individual Defensive Rating almost entirely credits the strength of the team, not the player; unless you want to argue that Louis Williams is performing 3 points per 100 possessions better than Anderson Varejao this season. I’ll assume not, so let’s move on.
Offensive Rating is awesome (see earlier deference to Dean Oliver), but should never receive mention without the accompanying usage; provided you do not believe Steve Kerr ranks as a better offensive player than Michael Jordan.
David Stern should sanction you for gross negligence in the use of advanced stats.
Moving on, there are two ‘genres’ of advanced stats: box score generated and scoreboard generated. Each of your stats are box-score derived, the other set relies on plus /minus.
My very simplified understanding (Here’s something more complex) of Adjusted Plus / Minus (APM) is that the following equation represents every line-up matchup over the course of an NBA season.
MARGIN = Home Court + X1 + X2 + X3 + X4 + X5 – Y1 – Y2 – Y3 – Y4 – Y5
MARGIN is the differential outcome of the matchup, prorated to 100 possessions. Home Court is the league-wide average advantage per 100 possessions. Each variable is an NBA player; the X guys are home, and the Y guys away. Over a season, up to 60000 of these equations run through a regression model. Every variable ends up a number, which indicates how many additional points are added to a team’s scoring margin by a given player, compared to league average.
Regularization is a statistical technique that improves the accuracy of APM, and provides improvement in the prediction of future game outcomes. The 2012 – 2013 Basketball Prospectus discusses a projection contest during the 2011 – 2012 season. Six stats systems competed, and of the thirty NBA teams, the model based on RAPM closest predicted the win totals of seven squads, leading all systems.
Everyone knows that many actions occur that are not capably captured in the box score. RAPM offers a means to answer the question, “Who does the most things to help their team win?” And in answer to that question; Dion Waiters ranks 3rd of all NBA rookies this seaon.
So, in addition to scoring and distributing at high frequency, the advanced stat that accounts for home & road splits and quality of competition & teammates, thinks Dion outperforms most rookies.
Very interesting…
Tom (sent prior to Saturday’s game):OK, so one ‘genre’ of advanced stats says Dion is a top-three rookie. Case closed, I guess (mock applause).
When Irving went down, my hope was that Waiters would step up. He would be free of trying to “fit” and would be given a mandate to be an impact player. Since then he has struggled. In the game against Memphis, he checked into the 4th quarter after a long rest. He fired up 3 misses, including an egregious out of rhythm 3 from way behind the line, and suffered a turnover and a shooting foul. In 5+ minutes of a game where all the Cavs needed was to not get SHUT OUT on offense, he was a complete non-factor. And so they lost a winnable game. Their lone win since KI went down was because Jeremy Pargo was given the reigns and took advantage. That was impressive. Subjectively, I’ve mostly seen a guy firing up a lot of outside shots, and unable to finish around the basket. He’s pressing. He’s showing me the goods, but they haven’t come out of the oven yet. Some have commented that they love his low turnover rate and his nice steals/fouls or steals/TO ratios. I see you brought up something similar. I call those Eric Snow indicators.
If I had to rank the best rookies it wouldn’t deviate too drastically from a WinShare sort (lazy or not), certainly not enough to prop Waiters up from 19th or 9th (depending on your metric of choice) to top 5. If I had to make a plea to “impressive” I would say guys like Shved, Jonas, and Drummond have done more to impress me. I would add them to MKG (who I expected to struggle more), Singler (who I thought was in Europe), and Lilliard – who has clearly been the most impressive rookie. Drummond, Singler, Brian Roberts (UD Flyers baby), and Shved should not be adding more wins than Dion Waiters. And other than Drummond they shouldn’t have higher PERs (oops I did bring it up). I do not expect their high level of play to continue. I’ll keep Anthony Davis out of the club until he plays at least half as many games as the rest of these guys. So I would make Waiters my 8th most “impressive” rookie. That being said, there is only 1 guy I would definitely have drafted before Waiters – AD, and only 1 other guy I’d have to think about (MKG). So, in a redraft, Waiters is 2nd or 3rd in my mind. Also, if I had to rank this rookie class by their upper 6-sigma “ceiling” I’d rank Waiters 2nd behind AD. But if my directive is to point out that it’s “questionable” that at least 5 people have been more “impressive” than Waiters – I think you’re hitting from the black tees, and I’m starting from the fringe. Of course the Spurs scrubs were 20 seconds away from beating the Heatles last night…
Kevin (sent Sunday morning, with a Dion- related hangover): Waiters didn’t help me out last night. Four for seventeen, at home, against one of the NBA’s worst defenses; ”winning” this debate became more difficult. Thanks for nothing, Dion. As far as him stepping up in Kyrie’s absence, it’s been 7 games in 11 days, in 5 cities, culminating with double OT. His shooting reeks, but improved distributing lead to 5.3 assists per game, compared to 2 turnovers. During those games, he pitched in 17 (inefficient) points a night, and in 24 minutes of ‘final three minutes plus overtime’, he scored sixteen, with three assists and two turnovers. It could certainly be worse from a 20 year-old during a grueling schedule stretch.
Based on highly predictive RAPM moving Waiters towards the top, and also the heavy load carried against a tough schedule, I still rate him as a top-five rookie of the early season. I’ll give you Lillard and Kidd-Gilchrist. You ceded Anthony Davis, but I included him below, with your ‘better than Dion’ group:
- Drummond – back-up averaging 6 points and 6 rebounds
- Roberts – back-up averaging 8 points and 2 assists
- Shved – Contrasting Dion, he plays against the opponent’s second unit, facing one of the five-easiest schedules of the early season.
- Jonas - I do not want to turn this into a Jonas love-fest.
- Singler - 15% usage, and a non-elite defender, on a 5 – 13 team.
- Davis – played six games.
I am not willing to put that entire group of back-ups, role players, and injured guys ahead of Dion. You can pick two, add Lillard and MKG, and Dion rates out as top five…winning debates is easy.
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What do you think Cavs:the Blog readers? Has Dion been a top-five rookie so far this season? Leave your vote in the comments section or tweet @hetrick46 or @tompestak.
Guys dont click on that site Kevin linked to. Its full of made up numbers in a table that arent sorted and is NSFW (but not in a cool way) and…and will give you Mal-phishing-spygate-ware. Alright Kevin – serious question. So this early into a season, in RAPM how are the weights assigned to home/road and SOS? When Hollinger put out his power rankings the other day his biggest observation is that there are no outliers. Its NFL style parity. I mean, we are supposed to change our shorts because the Cavs barely lost to the world champion super team heat. I’d be impressed, except the spurs third unit played them ever better. Also the Cavs are the youngest team in the league. I get old teams struggling with grueling schedules – shouldn’t the league wide effect since 1742 be less of a factor for a bunch of underage kids? Should we really be soooper excited about Dion because of all these facors?? Is he going to be rookie of he year once the Cavs play a crap team like the Blazers at home? Kevin I think I’m going to tweet your name because I really took a dump on this argument. You took me to the shed on this one. Does RAPM predict Jeremy Pargo to be a first ballot HoFamer?
I’m not complaining at all – I think this is a great article to have, and a cool format, but at the same time it is a ‘pointless’ discussion. Rookies are such a tough topic because on some teams they get playing time, and others they do not. Raw numbers always impress people, and we are rightly wary of drawing conclusions from limited sample sizes, and so rookies who perform excellently in limited minutes are always going to seem worse than rookies who perform less well, but in a lot of minutes. Clearly, as Tom states, Dion has been by no fair measure close to the most efficient rookie overall. But he has been given minutes that allow him to make a splash even though his numbers would not be impressive scaled down to the 10 to 15 minutes (if that) that many rookies get.
At the same time, however, I think there is something really impressive about being called on to shoulder the offense at such an early stage in your career, and not making a total mess of it. Aside from the horrific shooting, Dion hasn’t embarrassed himself at all, and I suspect the shooting will begin to develop somewhat when he is a little more comfortable. I think the fact that he can be slotted in at starting SG, with PG responsibilities without a melt down is a huge hint that he will be useful in the future, and that’s great.
Aside from all of that though, I think there is a tendency to put an enormous amount of emphasis on rookies because they are new and shiny and exciting, and haven’t ruined all of our hopes and dreams yet. The fact is, though, outside of a vintage year, it is incredibly unlikely that any of them will be ‘superstars’ or even ‘stars’. Cleveland is SO SO SO fortunate to have Kyrie Irving that it cannot be said enough. He is the rarest of NBA players – ready from the get go, an efficient scorer, a good and potentially great point guard. He will probably be better than Derrick Rose in the not that far off future. But everyone else – you should be aiming to get a starting caliber player, essentially. You look at almost any year and what jumps out is how often high draft picks with all this potential just turn out to be middling NBA players, and you have to realize, that’s what usually happens, with the occasional jewel.
Yeah, when Tom said that Jonas has been more impressive? Ummm…Kevin wins by technical K.O.
I beg you, Tom, go to another blog.
Dion will have a better year than Harden did as a rookie. MKG is only better because of what he is asked to do on a deeper, more experienced team. Dion has 3straight games of 7 assists and at least a 3rd of those total assists have been damn near amazing passes. Ohhh no! I’m using my eyes again! How dare I! It’s all about advance stats only to debate anything Cavs or NBA-related! Forgive me!
Tom,
The ‘weight’ for home-court is the actual average per possession margin for the home team throughout the season.
Strength of schedule isn’t really ‘weighted’. Actual on-court plus /minus determines the strength of the opponent. As the model runs the regression, a value for each player starts being developed. So, if if a player suits-up against a lineup with 5 strong players and their team performs well, that will bolster their RAPM.
All plus / minus based stats are noisy in small sample sizes, but it does a good job of accounting for some things that box-score derived stats don’t.
Speaking of ‘noise’ and Jeremy Pargo; RAPM hates Pargo right now. The Cavs starting five was outscoring everyone prior to Kyrie’s injury; the insertion of Pargo and the subsequent struggles are putting alot of the fault on Pargo. That’s not true, but it is a product of plus / minus ‘noise’.
For what it’s worth, Dion was the #1 rookie as of Friday morning. The website hasn’t updated after Saturday’s game. By the end of the day, Dion will probably be 6th in RAPM, and the entire argument I was building towards would have been squashed over the weekend.
Oh Dion; why didn’t you score an efficient 20 against Portland…
All of the stats in this article are completely useless as none of them have come close to converging. You guys need to base your arguments off of something else.
I have mentioned this before and the writers here don’t seem to be catching on. You say you took advanced stats so dig in your closet, open your book, and refresh your memory on sample quality.
“Jonas – I do not want to turn this into a Jonas love-fest.”
He’s better than Dion and is miles ahead of TT.
Top 5 Rookies:
Lillard
MKG
Davis
Jonas
Dion
And the world crumbles like a cookie beneath a toddler (or something)
Dion’s been a top 3 rookie. Behind Davis. Maybe behind MKG (but his offensive potential is way way way ahead of MKGs), and you can argue about Lillard. But Jonas? Are you nuts?
WitmI,
It appears that you and I agree on Dion as a top 5 rookie, yet you off-handidly trash my argument, and say it needs based it on something other than stats.
Care to elaborate on your non-stat-based rationale for a top 5?
Oh, and I don’t think either Tom or I claims to have ‘took advanced stats’; we reference ‘advanced stats’ in our arguments, which is the generally recognized basketball term for numbers like PER, EWA, offensive rating, win shares, APM, RAPM, etc.
I was definitely not a statistics major or anything; just an engineer who derives fun from the numbers involved in the games I watch.
@Issac – i will say that I did not expect Waiters to have the handle or the ability to make some of the passes he has. (this early) Our Nate Smith has pointed out on occasion that the balls sticks with Waiters too much. I’ve seen evidence of that. But I’ve also seen a guy that can make some sweet passes. I had very few concerns when Waiters was drafted, but one of them was how a scoring 2 would fit with a scoring 1. But it’s not so dire. Both KI and DW might look to score first (and they SHOULD) but I think they will be both be competent enough passers that the ball will move from side to side. I thought the Cavs would be struggling to score at all when KI went down. They are still struggling to win, but for the most part they are giving themselves a chance to win, which is more than I can say I predicted when KI went down.
Per your link: The enhancement with the RAPM is a Bayesian technique in which the data is combined with a priori beliefs regarding reasonable ranges for the parameters in order to produce more accurate models. That is what ridge regression (a.k.a. regularization) does.” ~20 games in any version of RAPM’s rookie rankings are almost entirely based upon the a priori beliefs informing the parameters to produce more accurate models. It’s all R and no APM, and you’re not using the statistic appropriately.
Probably the a priori assumptions project the 1st pick to be best, 2nd pick to be 2nd best, etc, and Brad Beal has just sucked that much.
I am an engineer as well. I understand how measurement error can affect a system and how any reliable system needs some truth feedback mechanism. Our eyes can deceive, outside narratives can introduce bias, we have our own internal biases. If we don’t have a truth feedback mechanism to say “correct your drift” (that over time these biases cause) – it can spin out of control. This is where advanced stats can really help. It’s not the end all be all, but at least it is an objective way to better measure value. RAPM or PER doesn’t care that 99.98% of Laker fans think Kobe is the clutchest player ever. Nor does it care that he scored 81 points one time against the Raptors. It’s just a measure of things we have determined to be most valuable to winning. The arguments, then, can be on the effectiveness of the measurement (sample size) and the value it provides (how important is +/- REALLY?) They have no intent, so it’s a good starting place for an argument. I mean this is the Moneyball phenomenon. Coaches, scouts, execs, owners, etc – all wanted prospects that LOOKED like prospects and that had tons of RBIs – Billy Beane wanted prospects that PRODUCED like prospects. And this was after he had his stats guy show him what REALLY contributed most to winning.
It’s not the end all be all, and it makes sense to debate the effectiveness, but it doesn’t make sense to dismiss them entirely. I mean, I would guess that anything that has +/- in it all all is just too noisy to tell you anything certain until enough time has gone by, enough lineups given enough playing time, etc etc. Dion’s +/- is good. His shooting percentages are awful. He’s a pesky defender but by no means a great one. Is his “impressiveness” REALLY the reason for the +/-? Or is something else affecting his 3rd rating at this point that individual production based stats like WS is not capturing? Maybe. I will concede that after a certain time, but not after 1 month.
Kj in 2 sentences proved this phenomenon more than I ever could. (it was genius really). In one sentence he trashes advanced stats entirely, and demands we use eyes and box score stats. In my argument, after sort of getting bent over by Kevin’s advanced stat RAPM paragraph, I hedge towards “what I’ve seen”, “what I hoped for”, how he’s “struggled” – there’s a subjective term. I even called one of his shots “egregious”. Now I am deciding subjectively what is valuable. That “taking over” is valuable, and all this fuzzy terms that Laker fans love to drop. After that weaselly paragraph, you’d think the guy that has nightmares about advanced stats would be my biggest fan – especially juxtaposed next to Kevin, mr sabermetric wonk. instead, he politely begs me to vanquish myself from this community entirely. Makes perfect sense.
jdw,
Good comment, and while I am sure you are correct that the rookie data is noisier than most other playrs, your guess at the ‘a priori’ assumption appears to be incorrect.
Singler was one of the rookies that jumped to the top through RAPM, and he was a second-round pick. As you noted, #3 pick Beal (and also #1 pick Anthony Davis) rated poorly.
For the Cavs; the Irving, Waiters, Gee, Thompson and Varejao unit was performing very well. Through 8 games or so, they had the highest plus/minus of any line-up in the NBA. The Cavs have continued to hold their own with a lot of strong teams, on the road; two things that are going to help elevate players in an APM system. Varejao is around the 30th best player, Thompson is about 100th, and Waiters is a top-three rookie. The Cavs starters are generally being rewarded early this season by RAPM.
Advanced Stats are helpful from the perspective that maybe we all watch one game a day, and while actually watching games is very valuable; there are 5 – 10 NBA games every day and like 300,000 player minutes per season. To get an idea of who is actually performing best across all that action, some numbers are needed to sum it up.
Tom,
Regarding +/- stats, I certainly understand they are noisy in small samples, but over appropriate samples, I would argue there is nothing more important than +/-; the entire goal of the game is to be +.
All of the other stats: PER, Win Shares, Wins Produced, etc, attempt to take box-score numbers and calculate their approximation into wins. APM and RAPM basically take the one thing that actually matters; did you win?, and parses it out to players based on the scoreboard-outcome of their time on the floor. To me, their is a complex simplicity about the idea, that makes it possibly my favorite advanced stat (in appropriate samples).
We’re not there yet in the season for appropriate samples, but when Dion has been on the court, the Cavs have been relatively strong. I have read statistics-based articles discussing that the floor spacing benefits of taking three pointers improves offensive efficiency in a way that is not capably picked up by many numbers. Certainly, Dion’s ability to get into the teeth of the defense and force rotations leads to some easy putbacks for Tristan and Andy (I’ve seen them called “Iverson assists”). He does add a certain dynamism to the offense, that probably helps keep the opposing defense off-balance
Obviously I hope that Dion’s shooting numbers take a huge bounce, and that I don’t have to continue clinging to nebulous low-sample RAPM. If the shooting stays horrid, it is certainly possible that RAPM will catch up with him, and start casting him aside as a poor player. But for the time being, it is an available number that says Dion is contributing reasonably solid basketball things. While I won’t start inscribing Dion’s HOF plaque, I also won’t ignore that.
Kevin – if everything about this season was exactly the same, except Waiter’s came off the bench – would his RAPM be pulled way down? How is RAPM isolating players with any effectiveness this early into a season with so limited lineup combination samples?
I spent an hour the other day trying to gather some sort of information between TT and Anderson’s various +/- with different people (using NBA.com’s tool). I was getting strange information. Like, Andy’s +/- gets KILLED when he plays with Zeller, but TT’s doesn’t drop off much. So Andy looks great so long as he is with TT. And TT looks fine whether or not ANDY is on the court. When TT gets off the court, Andy EFFICIENCY goes into Beast mode, and the Cavs lose 7 points per 48 minutes.
http://www.nba.com/advancedstats/player-vs-player.html#Anderson-Varejao-vs-Tristan-Thompson|2760,202684;year=201213;season=r
Hi Kevin,
I watch a lot of basketball and have for years; a lot of my current judgments come from watching the players and teams, and extrapolating future performance. I combine this with advanced statistics used in broad strokes
Advanced stats CAN be used in rough estimation at this point, but not in the manner where we focus on one or two exclusive metrics to make your argument.
While most of these stats have not converged, you can approximate an error rate and use ALL of them to paint a picture. Using all of the metrics, attempting to put them in context combined with what I see is what I used to create my top 5.
Do I think Dion is going to be a top 5 rookie? Yes
Why do I think this? His skillset is that of a successful high-level NBA player. Dion has no trouble getting by his man and getting into the lane. This is the most sought-after skill in basketball (I’ll make this a tie with a dominant back-to-the-basket post game, this is why Jonas is so valuable) and should not be overlooked. Driving ability is valuable because it breaks down NBA defensive rotations, and opens up scoring opportunities.
Dion gets to the lane, but has trouble when he’s there. My ranking is based on me assuming that he will eventually pick his head up and develop some touch around the basket. This may not happen, but I think it will because I watch his progress on a game-to-game basis. I watch every Cavs game, and you can see Dion’s touch getting softer around the basket. Scoring over/around NBA bigs is hard, it takes time to learn.
Defensively Dion is already a decent on-ball defender; he lacks awareness and understanding of what to do off the ball. This is completely excusable for an NBA rookie coming from a zone defensive scheme. He has good instincts in passing lanes and his biggest mistakes come from learning his off-ball rotation. I feel this will improve dramatically between now and the end of the year.
Being a rookie Dion has literally never seen how LeBron will smother an opposing ball-handler. He has never seen how badly Ray Allen will punish a bad defensive rotation; he has never seen how NBA level centers and PF’s defend the paint. It will take time to adapt to all these changes. Dion also needs to adapt to Kyrie Irving being the man here, Dion commanded the ball a lot in crunch time in college.
Dion does not know where his high % areas are on the floor yet, let alone how to get his shot there. He doesn’t know which of his moves are effective on which players. It’s probably a giant headache watching the scouting reports of these different teams he has never played before, let alone looking at what he himself does. All of these things SHOULD come with time and experience. If they don’t, we’re completely screwed.
Also, my list for the best pro over the next 5 years looks like this:
Davis
MKG
Jonas
Dion
Lillard
I don’t know if your first question can be answered easily. It depends on how the bench ended up performing, relative to how they were performing without Dion.
Did you ever use basketballvalue.com? For some reason, they have not updated this season, but they tracked every line-up combo a team used, in an easy to download manner. With that, I could easily tell you exactly how many line-up combination Cleveland had used this year, how many Dion had been in, Tristan, Andy, etc. I missed basketballvalue.com.
The Cavs starters have played around 2000 possessions so far this year, and I imagine close to 100 ten-man floor combinations. Sample size is small, but differences are probably becoming discernible.
kevin – very interesting. Dion has had a bunch of iverson assists. I call the air ball ones or ones where normal rebounding position is not good position to be “Rondo assists” in honor of this dagger. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2ezos70pEs#t=59m50s
Another point, as the season marches on, the advanced metrics become increasingly more useful. I would say at about the 2/3rds mark we can really get some good data to use for these comparisons.
That’s my extent of nerding it up with stats for today.
WitmI – my list would be: Davis, Waiters, MKG, everyone else
Tom
I think you have it correct.
Tom,
Yeah, Dion also has his share of ‘rondo assists’. Obviously the game-winner to Gee being the most prominent.
WitmI,
Thanks for ‘nerding it up’ with us today.
Tonight, less numbers and more basketball watching.
Well, I declare Tom the winner. My argument couldn’t overcome that I relied upon low-sample-size plus / minus, which is a statistical no-no.
Dion sabotaged any hope I had with his 4 for 17 Saturday night.
It was a valiant effort though, as I teed off from the black tees and almost caught Tom starting from the fringe.
Haha – are you sure? well no one tweeted my name…
Kevin, I think you win the argument in the sense that I have a more Pro-Hetrick opinion now than I used to. The shooting %-ages are starting to take their toll though. Hopefully he turns it around when KI gets back
Here’s a question for you. Did you learn anything that was surprising while researching this?
I was surprised by how little few ppg Drummond and Jonas have. I’ve watched Jonas play once and it was his explosion against San Antonio. Then I read Hollinger answer a question about him in his chat where he raved about him and said he loved what he’d seen so far.
I’d seen Lilliard the most of the non-Cav rookies and have been very impressed. But how little usage Jonas/Drummond have surprised me the most. Another surprising tidbit was that for all the hand wringing we do about Dion firing away from outside, it’s actually his stuff around the hoop that is really killing him right now.