Blurgh. Not again.

Really has nothing to do with the game, but I love this picture. Ricky, Chris, and Deron.

This was one of those games you could see coming from a mile away. Not that any of us Hornets fans predicted it- we were caught up in the big win over L.A. and the recent stretch of good play. But combine a road back-to-back with the end of a 4 game road trip with our hideous bench and this isn't anything extraordinary. It really was a classic case of the starters needing some assistance from the bench. They played heavy minutes last night in a pretty emotionally charged game, while the bench got to sit much of it out. Asked to provide a helping hand, the second unit fell flat on its face.

There is one positive tonight- the game isn't necessarily an indicator of gloom and doom in the playoffs. The back-to-back nature of the last two games really exacerbated our bench issues. The game was decided in the opening minutes of the second quarter, when the majority of our offense came in the form of Melvin Ely bricking free throws. In the playoffs, we'll at least be able to run rested starters out there.

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Woo, did we ever need that one.

32 points, 15 assists, 0 turnovers, and one primal roar.

48 minutes of exhilaration. I feel like I just ran a marathon, what with all those crazy runs. 25-10 by them, then the next second, 15-0 by us. We withstood the full powers of Kobe Bryant tonight, getting a glimpse of what the Toronto Raptors felt coming their way on Janurary 22nd, 2006. Kobe's dropped 50 on us in that past- I still remember him cruelly dissecting our defense in Charlotte that one time, including the game winner at the buzzer. But this was something else. Three threes in 93 seconds? 34 points on 14 shot attempts at one point? It was Kobe at his finest. He finished with 39 points on 22 shot attempts; thing is, our own David West one-upped him with 40 on 23 shot attempts. And he wasn't even our best player. That honor should probably go to Chris Paul, who set up at least half of West's jumpers. After the jump is the new, extra-nifty, super-shiny Hive Five format. Get excited people!

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The Hornets will attempt not to get down by 30 points to the L.A. Lakers tonight... for the fourth straight time. I'll say it now- if we are trailing by 20+ in the 3rd quarter, I officially give up all faith in Byron Scott's ability to adapt as a coach. The Lakers routinely school us by showing hard on Chris Paul on screen and rolls, allowing one of Odom/Gasol/Bynum to help from the weakside on all plays, and by taking away the angles to three point shooters via the long arms of Kobe and Ariza. How do you beat that? Move! Have Butler cut to the hoop, Stojakovic cut across the lane, David West move from the weak to strong side. Seriously, I don't care if guys are crashing into each other. I don't care if Mo-Pete belly flops into Sool running across the lane. I will be mad if we lose this game the way we lost the last three- guys standing around, watching Chris Paul be bottled up, doing absolutely nothing. Followed by desperation post ups to David West. Followed by Devin Brown launching 27 footers.

The Lakers are a good team. They are a better team than us. I won't be mad if we lose this game. I will be mad if we lose it the same way.

And that ends that rant. On to a quick Q&A with the great Lakers blog LA Ball Talk. Only three questions this time, but you can refer back to our last two Q&A's with Forum Blue and Gold as well. The answers after the jump:

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Let's tackle the 'Hive Five' first, the five things I normally look at after a game. In plain English, they're shooting, rebounding, ball-handling, foul drawing, and game speed. The first four are commonly referred to as the "Four Factors," a concept pioneered by Dean Oliver. Oliver has shown that the result of any single game can be explained through those factors alone (order of importance being 1. shooting, 2. turnovers, 3. rebounding, 4. fouls). I like to look at pace as well, because pace can throw a huge wrench into even the best laid plans.

Now, on to the stats themselves. I've put down the old stats the new ones are meant to replace, my understanding of each of them, and how they're calculated.

eFG% || Effective Field Goal Percentage || Replaces FG%

Field goal percentage is one of the easiest stats to understand. Just add up all the shots a player made and divide that by all the shots a player attempted. It's simple to calculate and gives a decent estimation of a player's shooting ability. However, FG% misses one thing: all shots are not created equal. Specifically, some shots are worth 3 points, and others 2. If you cruise through the FG% leaders from year to year, you'll see that the top shooters are always big men- Andrew Bynum, Tyson Chandler, etc. But these aren't the guys you'd associate with the word "shooter." What's missing?

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Happy New Year everyone! Hope everyone had a great January 1st. Missed the DEN and POR games; from what I gather, Tyson Chandler got in a fight, and David West was awesome. Business as usual. Oh, and thanks for holding down the game threads. Now... it's back to real business. Namely, statistics. Long time readers of the blog know of my propensity to use stats in my write-ups. This season, we've had a sizeable increase in readers (and lurkers). So I figure now's a perfect time to start a little series on stats.

This first one will just be a small intro, covering two items, starting with...

Why Use Statistics?

Let's start with the most simple explanation: there are too many games to watch. 30 teams, an 82 game season, 3 hour long games, 5-10 games a day... it's simply too much. I've already missed three Hornet games this season out of 30, and I'm supposed to be writing amateurishly professionally about them. There's simply too much going on in the course of a season for one person to reasonably follow at every instant.

Second, it is human nature to seek out patterns in everything we do. In terms of watching basketball, this works against us. We want to find some sense of order in what we see in front of us.  I might see Paul Pierce play twice in a month and watch him hit game winners in each game. Maybe I come to view him as "clutch." What I fail to see is all the shots he's missed when I wasn't watching, all the times he turned the ball over, all the times he got beat on defense. It's really easy to associate disparate and isolated instances with a player's "true" value. Once we come to see a player in a certain light, viewing that player in any other way becomes difficult. His mistakes come to be seen as aberrations, his positives serve to reinforce the original opinion.

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