Injury Excuse Propaganda

Aminu and Harkless werent starting on a contender, and CJ and whiteside arent starting on a good team.

 

ohhhhh....nice counter-punch

 

3rd seed and made it to the WCF with big leads in 3 of the 4 games.

It's not the roster.

 

And lost in 4 to a broken down GS team, it could be the roster. Though last year's roster was better than this years.

 

Are we now at the point where in order to say that they suck because of Stotts we have to pretend their current roster is good it's only bad because of the coaching...?

Cause seriously their bench is straight garbage, yeah Simons / Little may have NBA potential down the line but they as a group aren't good. CJ is exactly who he's always been an inefficient scorer who has little impact on the game when his shot isn't falling. Whitesides putting up good numbers and I'd saying doing his job, but he's not exactly an all-star, he's a very flawed player like CJ is. Melo is basically CJ but worse (look at his advanced Stats he's AWFUL). They really have one well-rounded good / great NBA player right now.

The roster and the coaching aren't good. A new coach wouldn't get this team to win either, because of a.) injuries, b.) they just aren't good... Hopefully with health and Little / Simons developing next year is better, but I don't care who they bring in coaching wise, Nick Nurse, Pops, Phil Jackson, Reincarnated Jack Ramsey, it won't magically make them good, I'm not sure health makes them a real contender, but it'd help. I liked most of their moves over the summer, but I was wrong about them (really all of them). Health, Coaching, Make some moves and they could be good again fairly soon, but they need a combination of all that to get anywhere.

 

Why do you have to infer that I'm trying to bash Stotts? I'm not. I just think going from the WCF to calling this team Dame and a bunch of scrubs when they mostly got rid of players that most people didn't like is a bit ridiculous.

You know I'm not the biggest CJ fan but he's a legit starter in the NBA, not some bench guy. You can correct me if I'm wrong but I don't recall you ever saying CJ wasn't a starting caliber player in the NBA so when you try to say he is now when the team is struggling mightily with injuries kind of seems disingenuous.

 

You said its not the roster, so what is it then.

 

1) Injuries

2) Coaching

3) Complacency

4) Leaving two roster spots unused while the team is struggling with depth issues

 

CJ I think is fine if he’s running his own team, and Ive said before this year I think his best role is a 6th man scorer type. He’d start in a similar role as Kemba on a lot of teams, and I think as a PG he’d be fine, but he’s really not an efficient player, and Ive also said before when his shot isnt falling he doesnt do much else for the Blazers (partially because of his role).

Last years team was a lot better than the current team. So Im not saying they got to the WCF’s with Dame and a bunch of scrubs, but this years team is Dame and a bunch of scrubs, I did say that I was wrong about the off season moves.

edit:
Currently CJ is the only rotation player from last years team playing (with Dame) So. last years team was just better than this one. Yes part of that is injuries.

 

I still owe you lunch on the Melo thing!
I believe signing Melo was an awful move for them. Now theyve got two fairly ineffecient scorers starting in CJ and Melo, neither pass very often, neither play any defense at all and those two guys are getting massive minutes. Whitesides statistics are great, but its astonishing how often he goes for blocks and because there no other bigs it leaves the paint wide open for offensive rebounds. He’s also just slow and out of position a lot.
Id mostly agree.
Injuries.
Coaching.
Roster.

Not sure what weight Id put on those things but its pretty even in my book anyways.

I still think Aminu and Harkless werent good enough, but the Blazers did figure out it was ok to play Hood and Zach, and to mix it up. My issue was the pairing more than the players as they were both good roleplayers most of the time.

 

Whiteside just had a game with 23 points, 21 rebounds and five blocked shots, for crying out loud. He's already had a game with a Blazer record setting 10 blocked shots. I don't know how many double doubles he's had this year but it must be somewhere around 15 or 16.
Meanwhile, in the same game McCollum had 39 points and six assists.
Wow, you demand a lot out of a player.

 

C'mon Lanny, that was a response to Tortured. I was sarcastically mocking that.

 

Whiteside is good statistically no doubt about that, and I think he’s done an ok job for the Blazers at the least done what they asked of him. I just think his deficiencies really hinder them, he’s out of position a lot which leads to a lot of offensive rebounds for the opponent. I just think the gulf between him and Nurkic and other guys Id consider top tier NBA bigs is “bigger” then the numbers make out to be.

 

Ok, I had to crunch some numbers before I gave my opinion.

Here's a look at missed games due to injuries, sorted by team records:



The Blazers have missed 23.8% of potential games played due to injuries. That's third only behind Golden State at 27.6% and Washington at 26.9%. The league average this year is 12.8%.

You can also see from this graph that the teams with the lower winning records also have the higher rate of injuries. Well, that makes sense. Injuries obviously play a role in team record.

But not all injuries are the same. The Blazers have lost Nurk for most of this year. Nurk was on the upswing with a WS/48 of 0.189 (the amount of 'win' he contributed per game). Washington's big loss was John Wall. Wall has been decreasing his productivity over the past few years, with a WS/48 recently of 0.051. The Blazers losing Nurk was a significantly bigger impact to the WL column than Washington losing Wall.

Here's a look at at how much injuries has affected each team measured by lost Win-Share:



The Blazers have lost the equivalent of 14.1 wins due to injury. Of course this doesn't take into account the wins contributed by their replacements, but it gives us a better idea of how much productivity was lost due to the injuries. The next biggest lost WS due to injury was Golden State with 12.3. The league average is 6.2.

So what does this tell us? I look at this data and see that the Blazers have hit a massive hurdle with injuries that they have to over come. Have they done a good job clearing this hurdle? I'd say mixed results. There are games I think they definitely should have won. But at the same time, the Blazers are currently 'under performing' and sitting in the 8th seed. They are ahead of teams like the Spurs, who have the second lowest rate of injuries in the league at only 2.1% of games missed.

I'm optimistic about the finish for this season. We're going to get some of these injured players back, and I think some of these close games will start bouncing our way. I'm a big Dame fan, and I think he won't let this team quit on the season. Hassan has out performed my expectations. And although Carmelo has his negatives, I think having that 3rd scorer in the lineup will help come playoff time. And because of these injuries, a bunch of the new guys have gotten a bit more playing time than they probably would have with a healthy roster. That experience will only help us as we approach the second half of the season.

There's a lot of season left to play.

 

Good post.

The issue to me is that even if they start getting guys back I dont really expect them to be “back” for a while after they start playing. For instance I dont expect Nurk to jump in and look like he did last year his second game back.

Ive said Melo’s awful a bunch of times and I believe that, but I would love him as a bench scorer. Just having to play him major minutes as a starting PF yikes... If they signed him as fire power from the bench I would be all for that.

Again I love your posts!

 

ok then....

*Nurkic had a .189 winshare/48 on a team with a .646 winning percentage
* Whiteside has a .219 winshare/48 on a team with a .417 winning percentage

considering the relative winning percentage of the two teams, that's a huge advantage for Whiteside. If you adjust Whiteside's number up to last year's winning percentage, it's a .339 vs .189 advantage for Whiteside. If you adjust Nurkic down to this year's winning percentage, it's a .219 vs .122 Whiteside advantage. And yeah, I know it doesn't exactly work like that but this massive overrating of Nurkic's impact compared to the shitty-hollow-stats Whiteside is approaching mythical proportions

so I'm having a hard time buying that graph because it does not account for replacement, which at times can be as good or better than the lost injury games. Back out the 36 missed games by Nurkic because of Whiteside's presence and where would that Blazer line be on that graph? It sure would not be extending as far up as it does, and would be below teams like Houston, Toronta, and Indiana

I mean it's not like Nurkic got injured in game one this season. Portland had time to find a very capable replacement

I'm having a hard time with that number too, sorry...at least I am if you're trying to argue the Blazers have lost 14.1 games to this point in the season....?

Last year, Nurkic had 7.8 winshares in 72 games. Zach had 2.9 winshares in 77 games Hood had 1.2 winshares in 27 games last year and 1.1 winshares in 20 games this season. You can check my pro-rating math if you want, but that comes out to 3.8 missed winshares from Nurk; 1.3 missed winshares from Zach; and 0.9 from Hood. That's exactly 6 missed winshares, not 14. And as you said, you have to offset that by the combined 5.0 winshares added by Whiteside and Melo. So in that rough exchange, Portland is only missing 1 winshare

obviously, there are several factors mitigating things in a minor fashion, one way or the other

* Zach could have been in line to play a lot more minutes. But even a 50% increase in minutes would have only upped his missed winshares to 2.0 or so, which is adding .65 winshares

* Dame has missed a couple of games, Whiteside has missed 3, same as Skal. But that won't make a significant difference

I'm also wondering how those injury games were calculated. Both Hezonja and Tolliver have missed 10 games. That would inflate and skew Portland missed games number without making a difference in wins...because they generally suck

of course the biggest flaw in all of this is the assumption that Nurkic's winshare ratio this season, along with those of Zach and Hood would match last year's winshare. But it's two different teams and guys like Aminu, Harkless, Curry, Mayers, etc were almost certainly aiding teammates' winshare totals more than Bazemore, Tolliver, Simons, and Hezonja are aiding teammates this season

maybe there's a flaw in my thinking or something I'm missing?

 

Sorry but Stats don't tell the whole story on Collins impact and expected improvement this year as the refs finally seemed to start respecting him.

https://www.blazersedge.com/2019/9/...trail-blazers-media-day-2019-hassan-whiteside

On Zach Collins: “He is a phenomenal shot blocker...even if he gets dunked on, he keeps going, keeps jumping...it wears on guys.” He said that Collins is the best shot blocker he has played alongside, so he is looking forward to how the paint looks like with the two of them on defense.

 

well, the post I responded too was about stats, missed games and what they showed. It wasn't about hype or pre-season chatter

so, we have Whiteside praising a teammate....kind of like everybody in Portland was praising Simons before the season, and that's looks a little premature doesn't it. And like some were jabbering about how good Hezonja was.....Zach may or may not have had a big impact this season, we just don't know

but I think his defensive prowess has really skyrocketed since he was hurt

compare him to Aminu defensively:

http://nbashotcharts.com/rapm5?id=1052846636

he would have had to make a historical jump this season to be as good as some are claiming he was going to be

 

Many good points. As you noted, it's very difficult to quantify the impact of injuries.

Quantifying the missed games is relatively straight forward. I simply calculated the number of games that were missed (by looking at the official injury report), and compared that to total potential games to get a percentage of missed games. A missed game by Tolliver counts the sames as a missed game by Nurkic. That got me the 23.8% for the Blazers.

Once I had that number, I recognized 23.8% didn't tell the full story. One game lost to injury by Nurk was not equal to one game lost to injury by Tolliver. As you noted, there are challenges with any metric. However I felt Win-Share was a good start to at least demonstrate that the injuries sustained by the Blazers were more impactful than the injuries sustained by many other teams. Keep in mind that at this stage of the analysis I'm not trying to measure value over replacement. Only the potential impact of losing the injured player.

Injuries are part of the game. However I think that looking at these numbers we can see that the Blazers have sustained almost twice as many injuries this year than the league average. And on top of that, the injuries they sustained were to players that were making considerable contributions, not just old vets or young players not expected to contribute significantly.

 

ok

my point was kind of narrow actually, that being if you go by winshares, the impact has been overstated. Nurkic & Zach accounted for 10.7 winshares over a full season (yeah, less than a full season...about 75 games avg). If you projected Whiteside and Melo the rest of the way, assuming they stay healthy and hit say the 76 game mark for Whiteside and 65 mark of Melo, while Portland maintains the same winning rate, then Whiteside + Melo would total 11.3 winsahres. Let me repeat that, Nurkic + Zach = 10.7 winshares while Whiteside + Melo = 11.3 winshares

now, while I really believe that too many people here are either significantly overstating the impact of injuries or are significantly underrating the impact of Whiteside, I recognize that there is probably something a little skewed about that equation above. But frankly, I think a large part of that skew, if it exists, could be tied to the massive changes in the roster from last season to this, as much or more than the injuries, and they have not been good changes

don't get me wrong, I'm not dismissing the impact of the injuries. But I believe you have to set the Nurkic/Whiteside component off to the side because of the debatable level, if any, of the downgrade. For me the bottom line was this years' team started with crappy perimeter defense and weak rebounding, even with Whiteside. Both were significant downgrades from last season, And when the season began, game 1, the bench was Simons, Bazemore, Hezonja, Tolliver, and Skal. That's a pretty funky bench