As Ben linked in the Full Court Press, Mr. Ziller over at sactownroyalty did a piece on what the Kings' players would earn if their salaries were based on their court production during the regular season as a theoretical alternative to what they were guaranteed by their contracts.  I thought that this was an interesting idea and was curious to see how the blazers would do if this theory was applied to them.

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Since Dave has posted his stat differentials from last year to this year, I figured it was a good time to post the charts of how our team has changed its stat sheet over the course of the year.  Whereas Dave's charts show the differences from last year's final tally to this year's, these charts start out with the individual totals from each game through the year, and then refine this by looking at the differentials and averages to find trends and improvement during the course of this last season.  Also, something I want you to keep in mind when you look at these charts: Remember other than a brief stint in game 1, Greg missed the first 7 games, as well as games 53 through 67.  So let's jump straight into it.

Points.

via i44.tinypic.com

via i44.tinypic.com

As Dave pointed out, point differential is probably the best single measure of a team's overall health.  Leading the league in this category with a +5.35 is a very healthy sign (that's the blue line in the second chart).  In fact, we scored a grand total of 8153 points over the course of the year, while our opponents only managed to rack up 7714.  Looking at the first 2 charts, we see that thanks to our atrocious schedule, we got off to something of a slow start, but our guys battled through it and came out the better for it.  Once we were over the initial hard stretch and got some creampuff teams, we started blowing them out.  At game 16, our point differential average for the first 5 games was 18.4, which is slightly amazing seeing as how it took until game 8 for us to get a positive point differential average over the last 5 games.  We never matched this figure again until the very end of the season when we were playing really well.

Regarding blowouts, you'll notice we had quite a few wins with a very large point differential.  An amazing 13 of our wins (a hair shy of 1/4 of our total of 43) were by 20 points or more.  Perhaps it's time we nicknamed the garden to The Woodshed, because our guys are consistently handing out beatings there.  At the same time, we only suffered 2 losses of 20 points or more, and we only lost 11 games by double digits.  In addition, other than the blowouts in games 12 through 17 pulling our overall point differential up for awhile, you'll notice our point differential average for the season grows steadily over the course of the year.  The line for the last 5 games reflects this quite well.  Since I'm already filling up a lot of space I'll leave the rest of the analysis to you fine folks and move on. 

Rebounds

via i43.tinypic.com

via i39.tinypic.com

Our bread and butter, and boy is it delicious.  Once again, other than the swell in games 12-30, there is a trend of continuous improvement over the season.  The dip when Greg was out late in the season can also be easily seen.  The only times we averaged in the negative over a 5 game stretch was at the very start of the season (hard sched, no Greg) and at games 31 and 37, both of which averaged a less than 2 ppg difference.  You'll see the differential chart for boards was still very up and down over the course of the year.  Thankfully there were many more ups than down.  We got outrebounded by double digits only 5 times, however we outrebounded the bad guys by double figures a whopping 23 times.  Also notice that even at our almost slowest pace in the league, there were no fewer than 10 games where we pulled down over 50 (!!!) boards.  Our performance this year on the glass can only be described as dominant, and as Greg improves we will only become more and more scary.  This year we pulled down 3419 rebounds whil only giving up 2967.  The share of these that were offensive boards is 1059 for us as opposed to 787 for the bad guys.  I fully expect us to outrebound our opponent in every single game next year barring injury to a center.  I could talk forever about rebounds, but it's time to move on.

Points in the Paint.

via i41.tinypic.com

via i40.tinypic.com

This category is very interesting.  As Dave pointed out in the main page, we've grown a lot from lasst year, however we still have quite a ways to go.  Look at the game totals chart and draw a line across it at 40.  If the blue line gets above it, we probably lost, and it's that simple.  The scary thing is, the bad guys averaged 38.43 in this category.  We only averaged a hair better, at 38.66 a game.  In fact we tallied up 3170 points in the paint over the course of the season, while our opponents got 3151.  That's very, very close and has all kinds of implications, although its encouraging that we're still to the positive even though being labeled a jump shooting team.

The first time I looked at this I went "man, we suck.  With Greg, Joel, and LMA, shouldn't we be doing better?"  Then I looked at the differential chart again, and you know what?  You can see EXACTLY when Greg didn't play.  In our opening stretch, playing teams with good centers and us with no Greg, we got hammered pretty good in the paint.  When Greg returned, our total inside scoring immediatly started going up and the other teams' started going down, and this trend continued.  There were still times we got hammered pretty good when Greg didn't play much with fould trouble, and there's quite a bit of inconsistency (as you would expect from young teams), but there's no denying theres an upward trend there.  Our season average steadily increases right up until Greg got injured and went out for a stretch starting at game 53.  The trend didn't immediately start decreasing thanks to our whooping of the clippers on game 55 with a 56 points in the paint showing.  For the duration of the time Greg sat out we didn't perform well in the paint, and we finally started playing well again a few games after Greg came back, once he managed to work back into shape a little bit.  After this we reasserted ourselves for the remainder of the season and played quite well except for the loss in Houston.

I fully expect us to show a large improvement in this category next year, and when we do other teams will be shaking in their shoes.

Fast Break Points

via i39.tinypic.com

This chart is so ugly I'm not even going to try to get anything out of it, other than to note the obvious: that we're wildly inconsistent and that twice we've held an opponent to zero running points in a game.

In Conclusion.

via i39.tinypic.com

via i40.tinypic.com

Here I've given the lines from the 5 game averages and the season averages to date their own chart so you can see the trends in play without the clutter from individual games.  Remember that the red and greenish lines, at the end of the year, are first in the league.  You can clearly see the tough start we got off to, as well as the effect of a few bloouts around the 15 game mark.  You can see the dip in points in the paint after Greg went out late in the season as well as our great play during the last 10 games or so.  Undoubtably you've also seen that there's a lot of inconsistency, stats fluctuating wildly from one game to the next.  That's something we can probably chalk up to youth and not being able to impose our will on every team every night.  There are also several other factors that might play a hand in events and I'm sure you can find and point those out in the comments.

I was going to include similar charts for shooting statistics, but this going to be ridiculously long already so that'll have to be its own post later.  I have some work to do but I'll be back in a couple hours to answer your questions.  If you want to see some other stats ask and I'll see what I can do.

So what do you think?  Do the numbers match up with what your eyes told you over the course of the year?  What's your interpretation of the numbers?  What improvement do you expect to see next year and how much?

Wow.

Original Sports Illustrated article.

You all know what happened.  First linked here by blazerhopeful then re-reported by broyposse and generally flipped out on here, the blazers have thrown down the gauntlet when it comes to signing darius miles.  Since the first thread is now well over 300 comments, lagging, and also lacks a poll, here is part duece.

Now that we've fired off oppinions all willy-nilly, maybe it's time to debate this in a more structured manner?

GO!

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Over the past couple weeks we've seen people use the plus minus stat to basically say that the blazers play worse when Greg is on the floor as opposed to Joel.  Usually they then go on to say something along the lines of "this is entirely Greg's fault" or in some way imply that Greg is a bad team player or somesuch.

First off as a disclaimer let me say that I am a pro-numbers guy (engineering graduate).  And I do like my statistics.  Preferably cold hard absolute numbers.  Also, for most of this I won't be crunching numbers, so don't be afraid of seeing standard deviations and statistical methods.

Let's break down this stat to see what it means.  From nba.com:

"What is the AutoTrader.com +/- Stat?
The AutoTrader.com +/- stat shows the power of teamwork. It's a way of showing the best-engineered/best combination of players on the court. The +/- stat is a statistic that looks at the point differential when players are both in and out of the game, to see how the team performs with various combinations."

Okay, so (plus minus) = (total pts scored by good guys) - (total pts scored by bad guys)

This is a combined total offensive production of all 10 guys on the floor.  In concept this is a good idea for showing trends in the game for certain periods of time.  Where this breaks down is in applying this TEAM trend into an INDIVIDUALS performance.  Why? We need to dig deeper into its constituents. 

The points scored are a hard figure without dispute.  However there are a variety of factors that figure into whether or not points are scored.  (I know you're thinking "thank you, captain obvious!" but bear with me, this is a development of logic).

Factors for scoring on an individual possession (not all inclusive):

*Shooting Skill of offensive player taking the shot

*Whether or not the shot falls within the category of the shooters skillset.

*The origin of the offensive possession: half court set or turnover induced fast break?

*If it's a set: efficiency of the offensive scheme.

*Efficiency of defensive scheme.

*Defensive skills of player guarding the ball.

These are just a few and don't even begin to cover things like getting rebounds and turnovers to create additional possessions, pace of game, garbage time, etc.

As you can see, when totaled together for a team, this creates a lot of factors.  Any one individual is only responsible for a segment of these factors and certainly not enough to be able to contribute the entire plus minus score to his doing.  The plus minus is perfectly valid when applied TO THE WHOLE TEAM ONLY.  To apply 100% of this statistic to someone making 10% of the contribution to it is obviously a flawed method.

Furthermore, just for fun, I'm going to look at the biggest assumption that must be made for the plus minus stat to have any meaning.  Quite simply, for the plus minus stat to be meaningful when applied to Greg, the goal of the team must be to outscore the opponent for the duration of time that Greg is on the floor.  This is not always (indeed one might argue it could be never up to this point in the season) the case.  The overall goal is obviously to have the most points on the scoreboard before time expires.  However, KP, Nate, etc. said that the goal this year with Greg is to develop his skills.  If the team has a comfortable lead, WHY NOT give Greg a couple possessions to give him a chance to practice his post up skills?  He needs practice.  The team could run more effective offensive schemes when he's on the floor, yes.  However, they are giving him valuable time to hone his skills.

Plus minus conclusions:  Attaching significance to the plus minus stat when applying it to Greg (or any other individual) is logically unsound, mathematically faulty, and based on a usually false assumption.

Also, I don't plan on offering a complete mathematical refutation of the plus minus, but take a look at the following link and you can probably figure out why I don't attach much value to it, or many other composite stats such as wins produced, the defensive side of PER, etc.

Links:

Blazers plus minus from last year

Analysis of an adjusted plus minus

Greg's Stat Page

Joel's Stat Page

Efficiency Stats

More player stats

Greg's Contributions:  Now that I'm done being negative and ragging on the plus minus stat, I'd figure I'd share some numbers with you.  After all the skepticism about Greg's play I think it's a good idea to look at something helpful.  I've been keeping track of a lot of blazers statistics in a spreadsheet this year so I can chart both Greg's and the teams growth.  I was going to post this after our 24 game brutal stretch and then again at midseason.  I can't do a full defensive analysis until years end because I need teams season averages to calculate differences, but here we go.

I've just got 2 graphs for you today since this thread is ridiculously long.  Both of these are just hard numbers and not adjusted for time.  First we have points in the paint over 15 games, which should be entirely self-explanatory.

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Notice that while Greg is out we are getting schooled.  Even with Greg back, opponents are getting far too many buckets close in, but with him back these have decreased slightly, while ours have risen somewhat, albeit erratically.  These data points are a little spread out so I wouldn't read much more into it than a general trend.

The 2nd chart is rebounds.

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Yes, these points are all over the place and a little hard to look at, but this graph is more informative.  Our team has been winning the battle of the boards for the most part.  Our bigs have also done a good job of out rebounding the bad guys starting center.  Notice that Joel is a beast.  There are only 2 games where he has really bad numbers on the boards, and one of those was thanks to Orlando's zebra unit.  Also notice that except for the last 2 games, Greg has also grabbed more boards than the opposing starting center.  We are also doing a good job holding down the opposed big guy, the only 2 spikes in that chart are called Dwight and Shaq.

In conclusion, I think it is a little premature to be criticizing Greg.  I also think there's a lot of over analyzing going on by media types looking for stories.  People really need to just let the guy play and enjoy it.  Other than the last 2 games, his initial numbers are probably better than expected, and I don't think there's any reason for worry or concern whatsoever.

What do you think of the numbers so far?  Are there any other numbers, charts, graphs, etc. you want to see?  And how awesome would a Greg Oden beard night be if they handed out fake beards on strings to the fans?

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And why do these garbage lines of code keep showing up even after i delete them?

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