Basketball Free For All

Golden State Warriors fans had to be displeased watching Brandon Jennings take the League by storm right out of the gates this season knowing that their team passed him up to draft another promising young guard. However, they now understand why, as Stephen Curry has been playing at an incredibly high level amidst incredible adversity. Over the past month, Curry has posted first round value while averaging 19.5 points on .484/.879 percent shooting, 2.4 threes, 4.4 rebounds, 5.1 assists, 2.1 steals, 0.2 blocks and 2.6 turnovers. Congratulations if you drafted Curry or snagged him off the wire early on in the season but this kid definitely deserves to be recognized for his outstanding play as of late.

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Before we get to the good stuff, I just wanted to mention that we’ve experienced some trouble on the website as hackers thought we were an enviable target.  We have to assume they were unhappy with Plonden’s advice, but regardless, we lost Deebo’s post/comments and I’ve had to redo this week’s preview (that’s why it was late).  Regardless, lesson to be learned – BACK UP everything you do somewhere!

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It is truly rare to be able to sense a catastrophic event before it happens. However, for those carefully attuned to the recent offseason developments in the NBA, Detroit seems poised on the brink of the abyss.

Talk about piling on. It’s no secret that Detroit is in trouble in these oh-so-tough economic times (median sale price for a house in Detroit these days is $8,000; and no, that number is not missing any zeroes).

But taking a step back and examining the moves the Pistons have made to assemble the 2009-10 Pistons, it is clear that the old Pistons are truly gone. With Rasheed Wallace and Chauncey Billups gone, the perennial Eastern Conference Finalists have been forever changed, and most certainly for the worse.

It is understandable that Joe Dumars and the Pistons wanted change. After so much disappointment and so many letdowns following their 2004 NBA Championship, it was inevitable that they would overhaul their roster. But change for the sake of change is not improvement and that is exactly what the Pistons’ roster moves have felt.

The point of any change is to make the team better. Any roster move (applies to both fantasy and real life) that does not make the team better, either in the present or future, was a bad move.

So let’s break down the Pistons’ offseason moves to see if there is reason to believe this team has improved during the 2009 offseason.

Coaching Change

After a disappointing 2008-09 season, rookie head coach Michael Curry was canned in favor of another rookie head coach, John Kuester. But what do we know about John Kuester and can we expect his tenure to be different from Curry’s rookie season as a coach?

Kuester has a long track record as an assistant coach in the NBA, including working for Hall of Fame Head Coach Larry Brown on the Pistons’ 2004 championship squad and for Brown’s entire tenure as head coach in Philadelphia. More recently, Kuester worked with the Pistons’ Eastern Conference rival the Cleveland Cavaliers under head coach Mike Brown.

Kuester’s most recent, and most famous role was of Mike Brown’s offensive coordinator with the Cavaliers last season, a season that saw the team jump from 19th (and a very ugly 19th, at that) in offensive efficiency to fourth last season with Kuester joining Cleveland’s ranks.

Yes, the Cavaliers enjoyed a solid season from new addition Mo Williams, Lebron James improves, and the club also got a full year’s run out of Delonte West; but the shape of the Cleveland offense was markedly different with Kuester on board, something you couldn’t completely pin on personnel changes and internal development. Kuester had these guys in the right places.

Source: Yahoo!

No doubt about it, the 2008-09 Cavaliers were much better offensively than the 2007-08 version. That is a statistical fact. What is up for debate is how much of that is due to the continued development of Lebron James, how much is due to the addition of Mo Williams and first full season of Delonte West and how much is due to Kuester’s X’s and O’s.

Watching Cleveland’s offensive sets last season, basically every play revolved around putting the ball in Lebron’s hands and clearing out the lane. Lebron was the primary playmaker and rarely played off the ball, where his athleticism allows him to be deadly. Don’t underestimate the impact of the addition of Mo to the Cavalier’ success. With Williams on board, James had another guy he could trust to take big shots and initiate the offense instead of relying solely on himself.

One word is notably absent from discussions of Kuester’s assistant coaching gigs: defense. With all of his experience assisting Coach Larry Brown, you hope that Brown’s defensive philosophy has rubbed off on Kuester. For defense more so than any other factor is going to be the key to the fate of the Pistons’ 2009-10 season. And that is mainly due to the roster changes that were made over the last few months in Detroit.

Roster Changes

The current Detroit roster marks the start of the new era (i.e. end of the Rasheed Wallace era in Detroit).

Out: Rasheed Wallace; Allen Iverson; Antonio McDyess; Amir Johnson; Arron Afflalo; and Walter Herrmann.

In: Charlie Villanueva; Ben Gordon; Chris Wilcox; and Ben Wallace.
Rookies: Austin Daye; Deron Washington.

With all the changes, the depth chart looks fairly different from last season. (Not seeing Sheed on the Pistons roster just seems strange; beware).

PG: Rodney Stuckey, Will Bynum
SG: Richard Hamilton, Ben Gordon, Deron Washington
SF: Tayshaun Prince, Austin Daye
PF: Charlie Villanueva, Jason Maxiell
C: Chris Wilcox, Kwame Brown, Ben Wallace

The main problem with the Pistons new makeup is that most of the players they lost were known to be decent defenders, especially Wallace and McDyess. And the players they took on, Villanueva,  Gordon and Wilcox, are not known for being great defenders (to be politically correct). But that is all opinion.

What do the numbers say?

In trying to compare the outgoing players, offensive and defensive efficiencies are useful for comparing players on different teams that play at different paces, which can skew raw statistics. Comparing the net difference between a player’s offensive efficiency (O-Rating) and defensive efficiency (D-Rating) to show their net impact on the court.

Looking at the minutes is very important when consulting statistics such as these because in general a small sample is much less reliable than a larger sample.  It’s probably wise to take any advanced statistics with a grain of salt for any player who logged less than a thousand minutes. Like most statistics, the bigger the sample size the better.

First take a look at the players the Pistons have added to the roster.

*Table is sortable. Click on column headers to sort data.

And compare them to the outgoing players.

*Table is sortable. Click on column headers to sort data.

On the face of it, the exchange of players seems like it would be a negligible difference (excluding players who played less than 1000 minutes last season). The incoming players are a combined +8 and the outgoing players are a combined +8 as well. Everything seems to be in perfect harmony, right?

Wrong.

There are two main reasons why: Ben Wallace and Chauncey Billups.

First, let’s deal with Big Ben. Wallace’s career is clearly on its last legs and thus he can be expected to play a rapidly diminishing role on the team as time progresses. As the single biggest positive on the incoming side, this means that the incoming +8 is actually skewed and is only positive solely because of Wallace.

The more bearish you are on Wallace’s future performance, the worse this exchange of players looks. To put it in perspective, the exchange made the Pistons defensively worse off in the medium and long term (-4 excluding Big Ben).

Continuing with the long term perspective, let’s revisit the franchise altering trade of Billups for Iverson. Yes, I know McDyess was a part of that trade but he ended up back with the Pistons after negotiating a buyout and returning to D-Town. So this trade was Billups for Iverson, straight up.

Using mathematical properties, we can substitute Billups for Iverson in the outgoing chart.

*Table is sortable. Click on column headers to sort data.

With the Billups effect accounted for as well, suddenly the outgoing players are a +20 (again excluding players with less than 1000 minutes) and the incoming players are either a +8 or -4 depending upon how you view the impact of Ben Wallace for both next season and the future. This gives the entire transaction a net impact of either a -12 overall or a shocking -24.

The Verdict

On paper, it appears that the Pistons’ recent makeover has actually made them worse off overall. The big x-factor will be rookie head coach John Kuester. Teams can overcome having poor defensive players on them through superb coaching. In some cases, however, the defensive liabilities are just too great to overcome. This might be one of those cases. But make no mistake, Kuester has a chance to be a truly great coach one day.

Regardless, it is clear that the 2009-10 Pistons have huge potential. Train wreck potential (see also Memphis Grizzlies, 2009-10). For the Pistons faithful, let’s just hope that Joe Dumars hasn’t taken the D out of Detroit once and for all.

Moving forward with our quest to find the late round and waiver wire gold, we turn our focus to J.R. Smith. If there was some correlation between having a shitload of tattoos and being really good at basketball, then J.R. would be the next Michael Jordan and a guaranteed first round fantasy pick. As a team, the Nuggets would be a dynasty with Kenyon Martin, Carmelo Anthony and the Birdman all on the roster and sporting quite a bit of ink.

Too bad for this guy...

Since that’s not how the world actually works, he’s a mid-round fantasy pick valued solely for his chucking offensive prowess.  Smith is a first round product of the 2004 NBA Draft originally drafted by New Orleans. He came straight out of high school with the reputation as a high-flyer and potent scorer. Five seasons later, we’re still waiting for him to live up to his enormous potential.

Last season, Smith was the sixth man for the Nuggets. He had the primary role of providing a spark off the bench with his ability to score and hit the long long ball (he has serious range and can light it up when he’s hot). J.R. really flourished with this role last season and he averaged about 27 minutes per game during both the regular season and the playoffs.

Since last season, the Nuggets have made a couple of moves that impact that allocation of minutes at the two and three. The Nuggets lost both Dahntay Jones (18.1 minutes per game last season) and Linas Kleiza (22.2 minutes per game last season) while adding Aaron Afflalo (16.7 minutes per game last season). J.R. should now be slated to earn at least 30-32 minutes a night and his breakout sleeper potential will finally be realized.

Last season, Smith was fifth in total three-pointers made. With a few extra minutes this year, there’s no reason he can’t lead the league in treys. He averaged 15.2 points per game last season and with more time on the court, 20 points per game is not out of the question. The biggest knock on Smith has been his consistently been his inconsistency.

He is the definition of a streaky shooter. He will fire away from anywhere on the court at any time. When he is hot fantasy owners will rejoice, but when he is cold he can’t buy a bucket (and your field goal percentage will take a serious hit). Owning J.R. Smith is not for the faint of heart.

As a sixth man, he was out there to score as much as possible as fast as possible. His new role should offer him the chance to settle down on offense a little bit and get into a nice rhythm early on. If Smith can elevate his game to a level where he is scoring and distributing the ball effectively to his teammates, then his fantasy value will reach new heights.

He needs to provide more than just raw offensive production and threes. If he is able to rack up a few assists and a steal or two along the way, he could vastly outperform his Buser Sports ADP of 93rd overall. For reference, Yahoo! has given Smith an O-Rank of 83rd overall.

Let’s take a look at Smith’s per-36 minute stats from last season; he averaged 19.8 points on .446/.754 percent shooting, 2.9 threes, 4.8 rebounds, 3.6 assists, 1.3 steals, 0.2 blocks, and 2.4 turnovers. Looking at the numbers, Smith’s three point shooting and scoring ability stand out. He has low percentages but that’s the caveat that comes with him (as well as a horrid driving record). If Smith can put a strangle hold on the starting two-guard spot, he could easily approach his 2008-09 per-36 minute numbers.

J.R. Smith is a calculated fantasy risk, as he is slated to miss the first seven games of the season due to his aforementioned driving issues. Despite missing the first seven games, Smith is a solid bet to outperform his draft position in the middle rounds due to a solid increase in PT.

As he has proven in his first five seasons in the Association, he can be hotheaded and volatile both on and off the court. But if he is given the chance to start and see respectable minutes (33 minutes or more per game) he can really be a diamond in the mid-round rough. Smith has the tendency to start off the season slow and then build momentum as the season progresses (check out his All-Star Game splits).

So if you draft him next season, be patient early on and he’ll come around and will eventually make if rain for your fantasy squad.