Game Thread GAME# 54: CELTICS @ BLAZERS - APRIL 13, 2021 - TUESDAY, 7:00, TNT & NBCSNW

Yeah, whatever happened to one for all, and all for one.

 

I'd be worried about the Grizzlies and San Antonio, too.

 

Despite him scoring 25, we were a minus 7 while he was on the court. We lost by one point.

 

Have the Blazers won any games this year wearing the Spurs jerseys?

 

Better than what? I should be upset? What would that accomplish?

I wish we would've won. Upset? Angry? Emotionally out of balance? Ready to wish injury on another person? Not at all.

 

I just pulled the standing off basketball reference, added the # of all-stars each team add, and popped it into a pivot table.

I can send you over the raw data if you'd like.

 

And to give some season long context: He is rated 76th out of 80 power forwards on real plus minus . Even his offensive real plus minus is negative. His overall real plus minus is minus 3.39; which is pretty bad for a team that has won 8 more games than they lost.

 

None of that seems to matter to The Walnut. Defense, efficiency.....not part of the equation for the Ter-Bear.

 

I'm with you on all your later points.

I'm all for any offense that scores efficiently over a long period of time. I prefer watching the free flowing ball movement to isolation basketball, so all things being equal, this was way better. I think it's clear that Nurk provides a totally different skill set allowing us to run different action off his movement. Melo obviously scored at a rate higher than we can likely depend on, so our total scoring might've been over-inflated there. On the flip side, I thought Dame/CJ shot under their expected percentage given the looks they got.

I hope we continue to try more of what we saw tonight. Obviously I prefer wins to assists/style of play... but if we can have all 3, great!

 

No question.

The Blazers easily could have scored 130 last night. We watched Lillard get probably the quietest 28 i have ever seen. No question he could have dropped 40 with the open looks he got. We all know CJ could have added 10 more. Take some away from Melo and add some to what Boston could have got as well and you still get the win.

 

The way we closed out the 3rd quarter cost us the game. We had a good quarter then the last minute or two were just a mess of laziness and distraction.

 

thanks, but no thanks. I have enough trivia on my plate.

what was the sample size? 1 season? 10?

Portland and Dame have been really overachieving then, because their 1-all-star winning percentage since the Aldridge team broke-up is .560. Of course, there is a difference between all-star and top-15 player

 

Great question... that chart was just this season, but I have a mini off-season project where I plan to compile 20-30 seasons worth of data for various things and this will certainly be included. I've already started chipping away at the project and I'm seeing fairly strong trends pop up. I want to dig on the best way to "rank" players, but I don't have any metric I love. Any suggestions?

I had pulled a couple other seasons of standings/all-stars and the correlation is very strong. I think there is more bias between regular season record and all-star selections in compared to post-season success and all-star selections.

 

It's incredible that the Celtics have lost so many games this year ... a quirk in the schedule has them playing more teams with more than two all-stars than anyone else in the NBA.

 

well, going by the long-running discussion here, I think it would be interesting to gauge the average defensive ratings of the 4 teams that make it to the conference finals, and among those 4 teams, the rate at which the higher ranked defense won the series. Just glancing at the last 20 years of the NBA finals, my sense is that the higher ranked defense won about 60-70% of the time, but that might be wrong. I suppose you could expand that to the teams that advance past the first round

in that same vein, it might be interesting to see if rating/point differentials actually translate to higher winning percentages in the playoffs

 

I'll take this as proof that my dream Powell/Little/Jones/RoCo/Nurk end-game need-a-stop lineup was nothing more than an hallucinogenic fantasy.

Oh, BTW: That lineup can also score.

Are the Blazers trying to win games or stroke egos?

Le Sigh

 

I like what you attempted there.

If you prefer one team sample sizes, I have a lot of other stats you would love.

 

All good stuff. All of that should be easy to pull.

My next question regarding the data we find with the conference final teams defensive rating. If it's average, good, or great, what do we attribute that to? Players? Length? Scheme?

 

I saw a couple of times NAS had an opening to make a play on offense, but instead thought about it and realized he had to give the ball up so Melo could go ISO 20 feet from the basket. Maddening.

 

Nope. I think we maybe win 7 more games the rest of the way. We're going to finish right around .500.