The Blazers had to get a second round pick for the 14th spot because that keeps them under the luxury tax vs a veteran. Neil probably thinks with a year of practice and if he works hard maybe Elleby can do something next season. There is a track record with Gary Trent, Allen Crabbe, Will Barton, etc doing nothing as a rookie then some minutes their second year. I doubt Neil thought Elleby would play a minute this season.
Last year I'm fine with them only doing all they can to make the postseason, when you are struggling to make the playoffs. But I agree with your critique for other seasons. The Blazers seem to focus on getting the 3rd seed, but Dame is exhausted when the playoffs start and they have no ability to change styles or lineups. With a deeper team maybe there is a change to that this season. Either we will finally see Stotts succeed with more weapons, or it will be evident his coaching has major shortcomings and the team should explore a new option.
This is from The Athletic's Blazer preview (by John Hollinger). Apparently he counts Carmelo as about on a par with Elleby:
Those are fairly close to that I would value each player at. However, I do think RoCo and DJJ might be valued a tad too high - along with Nas & Melo. I don't see anyone who I consider undervalued by this evaluation.
so, according to that criteria, Portland has 4 bargains as starters and one serious overpay. No surprise who the overpay is
Yes, with the proviso that they're ranked according to some weird Frankenstein stat he's invented. BORG and BORD$: The nitty-gritty There are lots of one-size-fits-all ratings out there, and some of them are pretty good. In most cases, you’ll get a good answer using just one of them. But for an exercise in ratings of every single player in the entire league, and trying to figure out how to value their future performance, inevitably every rating has its shortcomings. What is less likely to suffer from the same maladies is a wisdom-of-crowds approach, one that pulls from multiple ratings and thus can referee between ones that might rate a player too high or too low. I call it “cocktailing” — mixing multiple ratings to make a tastier drink. (Less well-known, this is also an increasing method in drug research, including some potential COVID-19 treatments. It was that, not a long night at the bar, that first gave me this idea.) One thing I discovered in my time in an NBA front office was that using approaches like this to value players could be really useful even if they weren’t as academically pure. The results passed the eye test much better than any single rating, both before and after the fact. While that doesn’t necessarily prove this approach is better, it is an important hurdle to clear. To pull a cocktail together with publicly available information, I took three metrics that are fairly well known and then combined them to produce an all-in-one cocktail rating that I callBORG. (This, of course, stands for Big Ol’ Rating. But fear not nerds, it also pays homage to Star Trek’s assimilating monolith that took pieces of everything). The three pieces: • The multiyear version of Jacob Goldstein’s PI-PM method, which is a luck-adjusted rating for player’s on-court and off-court performance. Fans of regularized adjusted plus-minus (RAPM) will note that this method is similar, except the luck adjustment (mostly in terms of 3-point shooting, which can be fluky in small samples). (Here is adescription) • Nate Silver’s Raptor, which operates partly off of box score and tracking statistics and partly off of RAPM. (Here is adescription) • My own Player Efficiency Rating (PER) over the previous two seasons, weighted by minutes and weighing 2019-20 twice as much, and normalized to be on the same scale as the other two variables. (Here is adescription) Why these three? Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of each methodology, this was the best way to offset them all. More.
This is awesome. Almost makes me want to subscribe to the Athletic to read more about the methodology. Is there a list for all players in the NBA? If so, I just might subscribe. Bit curious what led him to using certain thresholds, like two years for PER, and how he accounts for players that didn't play many games or were injured the whole season.
CJ is the 27th highest paid player in the league this year. Dame is 19th. If he's on a "superstar contract" what does he call guys like Tobias Harris, Gordon Hayward, or D'angelo Russell? People need to readjust their scales a bit. Hollinger also called Nassir undersized. Dude really did no research outside of looking at his excel sheet for this piece. No wonder Memphis was miserable during his tenure.
Hollinger is a boring nerd that isn’t even good at being a nerd. He made a whole argument that Whiteside should get around 17m before free agency started.
As I recall, when he started his career here he was fairly strong in the upper body but would get pushed around in the post because he lacked lower body strength.
