This is a thing I'm totally okay with. Matthews posts up like a SF, spots up like a SF, and is now being played like an SF. Lillard is a combo guard who can rest on the court while Batum sets LMA up. If half our plays are getting a contested pass into our PF, why not let the tall player with great passing skills give him that ball? That sort of play making is low risk and high reward.
I used to think a team needed a point guard to run the team. That was conventional thinking when Magic and Stockton (two of the all-time greats) played during the 80's and 90's. However, our team generally goes with Batum and Dame as the playmakers and everything else develops around them.
You would need at least a chapter of a book to tell how RPG measures a players effectiveness, and the conclusion to that chapter would not be very satisfying. So, should we not talk about RPG? No, we SHOULD talk about RPG, but in context which is also what you should be doing with PER. I'm pretty sure that's what you're saying in some of your posts, correct me if I'm wrong.
I think Stotts sees Dame as such a gifted scorer that he leans on Nic to run the offense more often than not, but I also think that Nic might be a more gifted passer than Dame. He has been great at running the pick and roll with Rolo.
I see what you're saying. Yes, you absolutely have to use a great deal more care and context when using PER. To me, RPG is just something that happens in a game. It's one way to end an offensive possession. It's doesn't take a paragraph, let alone a book, to explain and defend it. And, I don't think RPG goes beyond its limitations to describe what happened during a game, or a players performance. PER does in my opinion, in fact ignoring half of the game (defense), and arbitrarily weighting existing stats to try and combine them for comparison. Granted, you can't really create a model for data that doesn't exist and expect it to produce anything meaningful, so Hollinger just made a model with what data existed, threw it in and added weights till it looked like the best player had the highest number. I mean, I know he's genuinely a smart guy, and even a pretty nice guy from the interviews I've heard, but did we really need PER to better describe player contribution? No. It's a search for short hand and lazy imo, and basketball just isn't that simple. In other words, Batum's skill set isn't adequately described in a tweet. PER is... even though it doesn't do that either, but at least it fits within the character limit. If I make an argument without all the pertinent facts, at the least you'd reserve judgment assuming you'd get them all at some point, and then decide if my argument is represented by the facts. Hollinger doesn't have all the facts. He only has what is in the box score, which apparently is enough to give the appearance that if you manipulate them all into one number, it can predict... "something." The issue I've seen most often is fans take PER, and cite it as "Beasley" is better than "Batum" because of "PER". Clearly this is my personal experience, but it happens often enough that I can say with great confidence (in my experience), most fans on message boards don't understand the limitation of PER or what it even represents, and fail to account for context that explains why a player has a higher or lower PER, running counter to whatever Hollinger's model predicted.
Maybe he's better, but I think it's more so that he's taller. Batum's length gives him a distinct advantage to enter the the ball in the post (same reason Nic is the out of bounds guy), and he's harder to double for the same reason. Oh, and, double Batum and leave LA or Lillard open? lol Yes please. It's hard to trap once and recover. It's near impossible to throw a second double team on Batum who is opposite Lillard and not get burned. It's either a pick n role with RoLo or someone else, or the ball gets tossed down to a corner 3, or back to dame for a 3 up top. It's just funny thinking about how crazy hard it is to defend Portland.
"Duck tape on a Dixie Cup"...this is the title of my next composition! Thank you Blazer Fanatic! Brilliant! Sounds like the title to a Tom Robbins novel.
