In my last article for the Orlando Pinstriped Post, I compared the Magic's two great backup power forwards, Ryan Anderson and Brandon Bass.  As I mentioned last time, the Magic are blessed with a number of great frontcourt players, a luxury most teams would love to have.  Beyond Anderson and Bass, Dwight Howard, Rashard Lewis, and Marcin Gortat could all be considered above average players for their position (and they are paid like it).  The challenge for the Magic's coaching staff is finding playing time for each of these five players while also mixing and matching in order to find the combinations that are most effective.  Today I'm going to go through the play-by-play data of the 2009-10 season and see how the Magic have fared with each frontcourt combination.

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Blessed with two talented, young, and hard-working power forwards, Stan Van Gundy and the Orlando Magic are pressed with a tough question each night: who plays behind Rashard Lewis?  Each player has his own unique skills, and each is certainly an above average player and an asset off the bench.  Today I'll take a look at the two using various advanced statistics, some created by me and some created by others.

Using Basketball-Reference's player comparison tool, we can compare Ryan Anderson and Brandon Bass with a number of advanced stats.  A quick glance shows the two are pretty close in many stats, with Anderson generally holding a very slight advantage.  Anderson leads in PER, Defensive Rating, and Win Shares, while Bass has the edge in Offensive Rating.  However, each of these is a close race.  Bass has been a better offensive rebounder, while Anderson has been a better defensive rebounder.  Anderson is a better passer and gets more steals, but Bass records more blocks and turns the ball over less.  As you can see, there is no clear winner according to these numbers.  

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My last few posts have focused on tracking different aspects of the Magic that are normally ignored by the box scores we see every day.  Those posts included looks at the Magic's hustle and the Magic's defense.  Box scores generally do a good job of measuring offense, but even in that regard a lot is left out.  We may know how many points a player scored or how many assists he had, but we don't know how he scored those points or assisted others.

With that in mind, I decided to track the offense of one player in particular: Dwight Howard.  Howard's offense has a ways to go before it catches up to his defense, and in the two games over the weekend he really struggled.  I went back through the tape of the game against Minnesota on Saturday with the hopes of finding out why he's struggling. 

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Last week, I tracked the defense of the Magic.  Thanks to positive response from the readers, I have decided to do it again.  For a full a description of each statistic I track and what they mean, see last week's article.  Basically, what I did was watch the game last night and keep my own statistics (things that are not in the box score).  Defensive statistics are often quite limited, and techniques such as manually charting and looking for certain things are often necessary to get a clearer picture.

Without further ado, here are the numbers from last night:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvNKNGJ_AHijdHJqRkVlYmlhTTRETzRMZTV1OXh5Y0E&hl=en

Again, if you don't know what any of those things mean, please read last week's article. 

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For my previous piece on the Orlando Magic, I charted hustle stats such as deflections, loose balls, missed blockouts, etc.  While these things are all important, perhaps the area in which hustle is most important is defense.  Although it takes more than just good hustle to be a good defender (as a certain Mr. Dwight Howard will show us later), effort is one of the keys to being a good defensive team.  Therefore, I decided to track defensive plays in last night's contest between the Magic and the Pacers (this time, I only kept track of the Magic's stats).  I imagine most (if not all) NBA teams track these on their own, as well as companies such as Synergy Sports. 

To see the numbers, click the link below:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AvNKNGJ_AHijdFVaanJkQ2xSSG5DU3ZNcUVPRHpfSkE&hl=en

The rest of this article will explain what those numbers mean.  I will also provide a few observations and notes about the contest.

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A week ago I tracked the hustle plays in a game between the Los Angeles Clippers and the Memphis Grizzlies.  Tracking hustle plays is presumably something most, if not every, NBA team does.  After all, box scores are pretty limited.  Even if we use the play-by-play data to do thorough analysis, it still doesn't include things such as diving for loose balls, deflections, missed blockouts, etc.  But teams would like to know these things, so they must track it themselves. 

I decided to track the hustle plays during last Saturday's game between the Magic and the Golden State Warriors.  During the game, I kept track of five things.  First, I tracked players going for loose balls.  In my experience with a college team, we only record plays where a player dove for a loose ball.  But since this is the NBA, and effort is often lacking, I include all plays in which a player ends up with the ball, regardless of whether or not he dove.  A second thing I track is drawn charges.  You can somewhat glean this from the play-by-play data, but it is much easier to just record it yourself.

Thirdly, I kept track of good sprints.  I define these as plays in which a player creates a play for himself or others by sprinting the floor and forcing the defense to adjust.  For this game featuring the fast-paced Warriors, I had to be more selective in my criteria or else we'd have a lot of good sprints.  A fourth thing I tracked for this game was deflections.  This is relatively easy to define and track.  Basically it includes any deflection that is not recorded as a steal, rebound, etc.  Finally, I kept track of missed blockouts.  These were most noticeable when they led to an easy offensive rebound, and they were much more rare in this game than in my first one.

Of course, these aren't all the hustle plays that players can make.  Traditional box score stats such as offensive rebounds and steals often reflect hustle plays.  Defense is also largely a product of effort, but that is something I will track another time.

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Ed. note: This post has been updated, as of 4:22 p.m. EST.

(Note: These stats are updated through November 27. Games from this past weekend aren’t included. )

For those who are unaware, every year I calculate a statistic called Composite Score (numbers are here and here) for each player. Composite Score is a rating system that combines six different advanced statistics, with three measuring offense and three measuring defense. The offensive statistics are Offensive Rating, Offensive Plus-Minus, and PER. The defensive statistics are Defensive Rating, Defensive Plus-Minus, and Counterpart PER (the estimated PER allowed on defense by a player). These numbers can be obtained from Basketball-Reference.com and 82games.com.

Although I can’t compute Composite Score for Magic players just yet (because of the way its calculated, I need the stats for every player in the league before I can calculate Composite Score), I can still present how every Magic player has fared in the individual components. I will break things down into offense and defense. Below is a table presenting every Magic player’s offensive performance so far, as measured by the three offensive statistics I mentioned earlier:

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A couple weeks ago, Eddy Rivera e-mailed me this:

"I was wondering if you could look at the progression of the Orlando Magic defense this year, in comparison to how the team progressed in its first month under Stan Van Gundy when he arrived in 2007. The reason why I ask is because that's the first year the Magic were adjusting to SVG's defensive scheme and eventually, they were ranked 6th in defensive efficiency. Given that this year is a new team of sorts, with so many new players, I wanted to see how the squad was adjusting on defense (SCHOENE projects them to finish 5th)."

It's about time to take a look at this question.  With 14 games (through Sunday) now under their belts, the Magic have developed at least a tiny bit of a sample to look at their defense. 

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Some of the best stats out there, ones that most fans familiar with advanced stats know about, are actually based on estimates using box score data.  For example, when we calculate Marcin Gortat's Offensive Rebound Rate, we're trying to determine what percentage of available offensive rebounds he collected while he was on the court.  However, we don't really know how many rebounds were available.  We have to estimate based on how things usually go for the Magic and their opponents, and assign a portion of that to Gortat. 

Using box score data, that's the best we can do.  But we also have play-by-play data, and we don't have to estimate.  We (actually, a programming script) can go through the hundreds of thousands of recorded plays from the NBA 08-09 season, and find how many of those resulted in offensive rebound opportunities for Gortat.  From there we just total how many offensive boards he had, and divide that by the number of available ones.

This method removes some of the guessing game, and the results of this method on various stats for the Magic will be discussed today.  For a full explanation of how everything works, I will refer you to the article I wrote over at Basketball-Statistics.com last Thursday, which is here.  Let's start by comparing the estimated rebound rates to the actual ones, as calculated from the play-by-play data, after the jump...

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Making major changes to your team when you are already very, very good appears to be the thing to do in today's NBA.  The Lakers essentially swapped Trevor Ariza for Ron Artest, the Magic swapped Hedo Turkoglu for Vince Carter, and the Cavaliers added Shaquille O'Neal.  Each of these teams was among the best in the league last year, and we'll see how messing with a good thing turns out.

Of course, since this is a Magic blog, I will look at Orlando's decision to let Hedo Turkoglu walk and trade for Vince Carter.  I will be using a number of advanced statistics that, thankfully, I didn't have to calculate myself.  There is a wealth of basketball statistics available on the Internet these days, and everything I will discuss today is publicly available.  The numbers I will be using were gathered from BasketballValue.com, my own Composite Score statistics, Basketball-Reference.com, 82games.com, and a new site called Hoopdata.com. 

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Last week I took a look at how Dwight Howard impacts the effectiveness of close attempts for opponents.  Specifically, we saw that opponents take it to the basket less often when Howard is in the game, but they are slightly more efficient in making those attempts and getting to the free throw line. 

As promised, today I'm going to show which opposing players are the most affected by Howard.  To do this, I again turned to the play-by-play data.  First, I narrowed the list down to players who attempted at least 10 close shots (dunks or layups) against Howard last season.  For each player, I calculated their field goal percentage in close shots and close attempt rate (amount of close attempts divided by total attempts), as well as their free throws per field goal attempts rate.  All of these were calculated when they weren't facing Dwight Howard.  I then calculated the same three statistics when Howard was in the game, and compared the differences.  The results are available in the spreadsheet below:

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Dwight Howard is a defensive presence in the middle, that’s for sure. His size and athleticism make him quite the deterrent for offensive players trying to take it to the rim. But how big of an impact is he actually having? Does he make opponents less efficient around the rim, or does he simply scare them from attempting close shots in the first place? When I’m trying to answer questions such as these, the first thing I turn to is the play-by-play data (specifically, the play-by-play data available at Basketball Geek). I will use this data to determine three things:

• How often opponents attack the basket relative to total shot attempts when Howard is on court and when he is off it
• How efficient opponents are around the basket when Howard in on the court and when he is off it
• How often opponents get to the free throw line relative to total shot attempts when Howard is on the court and when he is off it

With those three calculated differences, we can start to get an idea of how good Howard is at deterring shots around the basket. The data is presented in the graph below:

Here we see two negatives and one positive. When Howard is in the game, opponents get to the free throw line more often and surprisingly convert more of their close attempts. On the other hand, they tend to attempt less layups and dunks. This is a good thing for the Magic because of how effective those shots are.

For the sake of comparison, here are two other great interior defenders:

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