SB Nation - Jorge Garbajosa

3 In The Key - Toronto Raptors Game Day Preview vs. New Orleans

Raptors HQ - Vicious D — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 13:30:13 -0000

Chris Paul almost got a well deserved triple double. Heck, he almost finished with a 30 and 20 night against the Nuggets. Will CP3 get that elusive triple double against the Raptors today?

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In a rematch where Chris Paul will play the team that injured him, the Raptors will face one of the league's most dynamic point guards. Of course, Mo Pete will be the talk of the town as Vicious D takes a look at the Hornets.

This is all Morris Peterson's fault.

Well, not really, but let's look at how Mo Pete left.

Back in the wonderous 2006-2007 season, the Raptors decided to start benching Mo Pete after years of loyal service. The Raptors had a new guy in Jorge Garbajosa who was a tough Spaniard who wasn't going to take guff from anyone. He was going to be our defensive stopper who just played hard in every game and who could defend bigger people while using his crafty mind to take out the smaller small forwards in the league. Mo Pete was benched and his minutes severely reduced. When Garbajosa went down with his Raptors Career-ending injury, the team picked Joey Graham to start over Mo Pete.

Thus ended Mo Pete's career in Toronto.

Getting snubbed once for a veteran player like Garbajosa was nothing to be ashamed about, but getting snubbed for the likes of Joey Graham was probably the straw that broke the camel's back. Since then, we have been without any real stoppers at the small forward position in Toronto. And yes, that includes the recently end-of-bencher Antoine Wright.

But good news:

Mo Pete is back in Toronto.

With the Hornets.

Doing not much of anything.

As part of their 15 years anniversary, the Raptors will be celebrating Mo Pete's service to the Raptors and the Raptors' community. Without a doubt, Peterson was a man who just got to become Mr. Raptor by being a subtle part of some very good teams. He was the Ironman of the Raptors and gave us some very important years with some good defense, some better shooting, and some miraculous plays.

He'll be a Raptor whom I'll definitely stand up and applaud from my condo.

Up next though, the Raptors still have a game to play and against the New Orleans Hornets, they will have it out a lot tougher than the Nets. That's why today's game will be a much better measuring stick for this Raptors team:

1) Protect Your "Glass Jaw"
The Raptors are simply bad when they have to do anything tough, but more than that, it seems as though whenever teams start trading baskets with the Raptors, they will fold. In boxing, a glass jaw boxer is a guy with a weak chin who will go down for the count whenever their opposition tags them on the chin. With these Raptors, their "chin" seems to be their paint and the Raptors get hit there way too often. It all eventually changes the game to their opposition's favour. It happened in the Nets game, albeit only in the second half after they built a sizable lead, and it's happened in just about every game where they've been blown out. We're going to keep mentioning it until the Raptors change their ways, but the fact is, this team's best defensive unit is probably Jarrett Jack, Marco Belinelli, Sonny Weems, Chris Bosh, and Amir Johnson.

That's four bench players with Chris Bosh. With Chris Paul almost dropping a triple double the last game against the Nuggets, the Raptors have to keep protecting their paint otherwise this game will get ugly real quick.

2) Stick and Jab
The Raptors on the other hand, have to keep going inside against the Hornets. New Orleans just doesn't have a very strong front court despite having one of the most overrated centers in the league in Emeka Okafor. Chris Paul as well, has a propensity to being exposed by opposing point guards, so the Raptors should keep slashing and slashing in the paint like there's no tomorrow. Attacking them with two points here and there will keep New Orleans on their toes until you find yourself for open threes. Which leads us to...

3) Power Punches
The Raptors have not been shooting the 3-pointer very well lately. However, a lot of that has to do with who is taking those threes. DeMar DeRozan, Antoine Wright, and the recently cold Italian Duo are all people that should be careful about shooting too many threes. But if the Raptors start by hitting the Hornets with lots of jabs, they'll expose them for open looks on the perimeter. The Raptors are a team that needs those open looks and they'll have to stick them as it's a major part of what makes the Raptors a dangerous offensive team. It's how the Raptors pulled out a win in New Orleans earlier this year after all. However it's all got to start from the inside out. The best boxers establish themselves with their jab and then unleashes hooks and uppercuts when need be. The Raptors will need to do the same.

Eurobasket '09: France and Spain Get It On

Wayne Vore (ATS) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:08:09 -0000

What a tough draw for a France team that has dominated the tournament. This should be a hell of a war. Tip off is 2:00pm Spurs time (I think).

You can find links to the box score and updates for the game at EuroBasket's home page.

I don't have time to give you a proper LatinD style preview, but I can tell you this: there are a lot of NBA players in this game. France, as we know, has Tony Parker, Rony Turiaf, Nicolas Batum, Boris Diaw, Ian Mahinmi (if he's healthy yet), and SpurNando. Spain has the Geico cavemen (Marc and Pau), Rudy Fernandez, former NBA-baller turned I'm-getting-the-hell-out-of-Memphis Juan Carlos Navarro, former NBA-baller Jorge Garbajosa, Raul Lopez (who I think played a couple years in the NBA, but it could be a different Raul), and three young guys who were all drafted this last year. Sergio Llull, Victor Claver, and some dude named Ricky Rubio.

You can bet the BlazersEdge guys will be watching this one with both Batum and Fernandez playing.

The Pitfalls of Statistical Analysis: Basketball vs. Baseball

Raptors HQ - Vicious D — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:21:11 -0000

Jorge Garbajosa is a player that embodied "intangibles".

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Vicious D takes a two-part look at how statistics are used in basketball and how they can sometimes be problematic, ineffective, or misleading (but seldom boring). In this first part, he contrasts two opposite ends of the statistics spectrum: Basketball and Baseball.

Stats.

Fantasy players love them, apologists ignore them, and just about everyone acknowledges their usage in analysis.

But just how useful are statistics in a game like basketball?

When I was starting out in university as a Computer Science major at the University of Waterloo, statistics was a class that was required, but it was interesting and showed me a new way to quantify various objects in life. When I later switched my major to Economics, statistical analysis was required to analyze trends and figure out the "big picture". However, there were also a couple harsh lessons that almost everyone in my first year class took away from the year:

Statistics can lie. Which statistics we chose to measure and which ones we choose to ignore will often paint us a picture that can be detrimental to our analysis. It is always preferable to have a larger sample size and more measurements, but it is sometimes unavailable or too time-consuming and cost-prohibitive to do so.
Statistics will be used to lie. What we choose to show to people from available statistics becomes important as people have an inherit trust in numbers. How we present the numbers also affects how people perceive a situation.

There's little that we can do to dissuade the second point. People inherently believe numbers thrown at them. Numbers are often used to great effect as they are seen as undeniable truths and are factual cornerstones. On the flip side numbers can be far from objective if used improperly. To combat this, we need to be aware of how people choose their numbers to create their "skewed" statistics.

However, it's the first point that I wish to bring to your attention.

Basketball is first of all, one of the harder sports to analyze. We, of course, have the standard statistics available from the NBA.com websites which are replicated across other sites such as Yahoo Sports. For further statistical analysis, sites such as Wages of Wins, Hollinger's ESPN Statistical Analysis, and 82games.com all provide their own unique look at the numbers breakdown. I'll be covering the individual statistics and their effectiveness next week, but as for why it's so difficult to analyze basketball, we'll have to look at another sport: baseball.

On MLB's own page for Suzuki Ichiro, we can find 29 offensive statistic categories and 13 defensive/fielding stats. On the other hand, Chris Bosh's page on NBA.com displays 15 combined offensive and defensive stats. It's quite a staggering difference. It can be easy to argue that these two sports are not a fair comparison as they're as different as apples are to oranges. However, baseball is the perfect sport to illustrate why basketball statistics can sometimes be flawed.

In baseball, we have a sport that is clearly defined between offensive and defensive categories. What one player does when he is out in the field or at bat seldom affects the other. A baseball player's role is well defined. When you are hitting the ball, you can measure certain kinds of statistics that only pertain towards hitting the ball and when you're running the bases, there's another set of statistics that only measure your effectiveness at running the bases. In fact, it can be argued that baseball is a team sport that relies on the individual performances of players rather than players all working together at the same time, all the time. A play can be broken down into a series of moves being passed from one player to the next. For example, a pitcher pitches out so a catcher can take the pitch and then toss it to the short stop covering second base in order to tag a runner trying to steal second. Each player has a part to play, but statistically, each player's contribution to the play is compartmentalized. Their role before and after their individual contributions to the play have little bearing upon the success or failure of the play.

In contrast, basketball is a sport that is always reliant on the other players on the court who are with you at the same time. On offense, having a clear lane to the hoop for an easy basket relies on your 3 point threats drawing their defenders out to the perimeter, a perfect pick set by your big man, and a partial clear out under the basket so your wing can have room to score. Each player has a part to play at the same time in the possession, but in the stats registered in NBA.com, we only ever concentrate on the points scored or the assist made. Defense can be just as light on statistical analysis as a rebound grabbed by one player is reliant on having multiple players box out their man. In fact, it's not surprising that the champions of the NBA teams that are the best collection of players that have learned to work together for a common goal. It wasn't until Kobe Bryant learned to play with his team that the Lakers won their championship, and it's why a superstar player like LeBron James has still yet to wear a championship ring.

It's also why analysts in basketball often talk about the "intangibles" that players bring to the game. Jorge Garbajosa is a recent Raptors example. Despite having fairly average numbers across the board, Garbajosa brought things that we still talk about to this day and was a big factor in ensuring the Raptors won the Atlantic Division in 2007. His ability to play more athletic players, his will to go after loose balls, and his overall smarts for what to do in various defensive situations all led up to statistics that are not regularly calculated or released to the general public by the NBA. Players such as Garbajosa and Shane Battier are often applauded for their "intangible" work, but at the end of the day, isn't that just a way of glossing over the fact that the NBA statistic records are incomplete?

After all, what more are "intangibles" than statistics that are not completely calculated?

All that being said, statistics are incredibly important with the work we do at the HQ. We use them to show a team from different perspectives and in order to give people a hard look at the team we all love. We quibble over what statistics mean and whether a player will prove his worth on a roster. However, if we were to simply only look at statistics in our analysis, we would be failing in our work to understand the players on our roster. The picture would be incomplete because the statistics available are incomplete themselves.

Next week, I'll take look at the NBA statistics available to us, which are beneficial, which are flawed and how to improve upon them.

Previewing the Atlantic Division: Toronto Raptors Edition

Jim Weeks — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 09:00:07 -0000

I started this series last week with the 76ers and Knicks. The Nets are on deck. And my Celtics preview will run October 1st as part of a comprehensive blogger preview initiative. Things are starting to get interesting again...

2008 Record: 41-41

Playoffs?: Eliminated in 5 games by Orlando Detroit in the First Round.

2008 Record Vs. the Celtics: 1-3 - Two of those games stand out:

1. After the C's rolled out to a 3-0 lead in the season series the Raptors got white hot in the final match up of the season. They shot 58% (40-69) from the field, 71.4% (15-21) from beyond the arc, and 100% (19-19) from the line. Keep in mind the Celtics played phenomenal defense. And the game was in Boston no less.

2. On the flip side their initial match up went Boston's way. It was not a particularly well played game and Comcast's coverage cut out during overtime. Still Ray Allen's game winning shot (see below - "KNOCKS IT DOWN!) was one of those early moments that made me think, "Maybe this year will be different."

Ray Allen hits the game winner! (via NBA)

Departures: Maceo Baston, Primoz Brezec, Carlos Delfino, Juan Dixon, T.J. Ford, Jorge Garbajosa, Kris Humphries [Green Bandwagon Note - Humphries is still with the Raptors. My mistake. Thanks for the e-mail.], Linton Johnson, Darrick Martin, Rasho Nesterovic

Additions: Hassan Adams, Nathan Jawai, Willie Solomon, Roko Ukic

Key Story Heading into Camp: The collective health of the Toronto Raptors. Though not exactly the Washington Wizards when it comes to health, or lack thereof, the Raptors missed their fair share of games last season. Jorge Garbajosa only managed to play in 7, Chris Bosh sat out 15, and T.J. Ford missed 31. Of course the fact that Jose Calderon took his rightful place atop the point guard depth chart and Ford departed, along with the injury cloud that hung over him, has to help Toronto. Finally, much like the Celtics in 2008, the Raptors could have some roster flexibility during the season. As far as I can tell they've only inked 13 players to contracts.

X-Factor: 44, 51, 69, 42. Those numbers represent how many games Jermaine O'Neal played in during his last 4 seasons in Indiana. I wouldn't expect him to play 82 games, mainly because in 12 seasons he never has. And maybe that's the key. The Raptors organization and its fan base should go into the 2009 season with realistic expectations. At the same time popular opinion seems to have written him off so much that he's probably capable of more than a lot of people realize. And it was not that long ago (2007) that O'Neal was a candidate for the Defensive Player of the Year Award.

View From the The Other Side: I caught up with Scott from Raptor Blog and asked what fans around the NBA had to know about Toronto. His response:

"When it comes to the Raptors, most NBA fans are focusing on whether or not Jermaine O'Neal can stay healthy and give Chris Bosh some help on post defense. But don't sleep on Jose Calderon's new, well-earned, full-time starting PG role. He's developed into one of the most dangerous point guards in the East." - Scott from Raptor Blog

Random Points of Information: Regular readers of Green Bandwagon know that I'm a Jorge Garbajosa fan. Unfortunately Garbajosa has not looked right since breaking his leg against the Celtics back in the spring of '07. He was a shadow of his former self during the recent Olympics. Of course in order to play in said Olympics Garbajosa had to end his Raptors career. At this point (he turns 31 in December) you have to wonder if he'll ever be full strength again.

In other news, my old nemesis (long story), Chuck Swirsky, is no longer with Toronto. In hindsight the story really isn't that long. But I don't feel like linking to an old post where I praise Gerald Green's future. I've been open about how wrong I was about Green. We don't need to keep reliving it.