ROY comments on our offense - is there a problem here?

Ahhhh good old Jerome James the guy Isaiah signed after having a good playoff series with Seattle and he came into camp in New York like 40lbs. overweight.

Another key element to those teams was Reggie Evans, who led the league in rebounds per minutes during that year that the Sonics were so successful. They ran a statistic that Reggie Evans would grab 1 quarter of all shots missed while he's in the game.

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

I think Roy is more Pippen than Jordan on offense, if you want to bring up the Bulls. Roy proved from his first season that he can involve others in an offense, and his assisst totals also illustrate it.

Pippen played an effective point forward, with Kerr or Paxson being the point guard in name only.

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

If you look at the shot-distribution for Roy in 2008-2009 vs. 2009-2010 - it is clear that Roy played more off the ball last year - rather significantly. He was assisted on 3% more of his jump-shots and 5% on his dunks - but the biggest issue is that without the ball and the so called "ISO" offense, Roy's shot distribution changed a lot last year, instead of taking 66% of his attempts as jump shots - he took 74% of his attempts as jump shots, when he handled the ball - 31% of his shots came from close by - breaking the defense and getting close to the rim, this fell to 24% of his attempts vs. 31%

People complain that this is a jump-shooting team, but somehow, having a guy who can get close to the basket with the ball in his hands and shoot from up close is bad because he dominates the ball?

The team, as a whole, was at 66% jumpshots with Roy handling the ball more and at 69% jumpshots with him playing more off the ball.

It was not just this, but the team, as a whole, took 400 more shots in 2008-2009 vs the 2009-2010 team - and before you start telling me it's all offensive rebounds - the team took only 147 more offensive rebounds that year than last year...

Anyway you slice it - Roy handling the ball more is a good thing for the Portland Trail-Blazers.

If you want Roy to expand his game, I would suggest that the right thing to do for Brandon is to work on becoming even more of a PG than less of it, at least with the other players we have on the roster.

 

I think that the offense is to: Limit turnovers, and to improve on the usually conflicting aspects of offensive rebounding and opposition fast breaks.

If the offense is too freewheeling with too much freelancing, turnovers will increase, offensive rebounds will decrease and fast-breaks against will increase.

Will the increase in "easy" shots from opening up the offense be enough to make up for those losses?

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

I have never been one of the people complaining that this is a jump-shooting team, for one thing.

And I'll grant that Roy played more off the ball, especially at the end of the season, so I should that he didn't play exactly the same as the previous season. But that doesn't change my point that in neither season did he have an "off-the-ball game." He tried to play off the ball, but he had no experience or practice with it. That isn't what I mean by having an off-the-ball game. I mean knowing how to move and cut off the ball to get open for shots, including cutting to the hoop (all off the ball action is not getting open for jumpers).

What I'd like to see is Roy play off the ball some amount after having practiced and worked on that.

Certainly a valid position, but I think Roy's main strength is scoring, not passing. I think he's more of a Kobe Bryant Lite, not a Scottie Pippen Lite. Bryant has always been underrated as a passer, but he is a good one...he's just a superior scorer to passer. I see Roy the same way. And I see that all top scorers tend to cultivate an off-the-ball game to supplement their ability to break defenders down.

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

This is pretty much my view as well, but I tend to end up in mundane semantic battles over which stats define "efficiency" when asked to explain my seemingly rational opinion.

Nice post!

 

From an efficiency viewpoint, and given the current composition of the roster, I'd say the evidence points to 'No', at least when I look at the numbers.

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

My thoughts as well. As in all of last season.

 

Re: Why Roy likes a slow game where he controls the ball... and why we should too.

Thanks for the considered response; I went through the game logs and recorded our scores for the 30 games where Roy shot .500 FG% or better. The Blazers in those games score 100.7 points a game (league average was 100.4pts). This is 2.6 points per game higher than our average of 98.1 for the season.

What's striking is that, in the 26 wins out of those 30 games where Roy shoots 50% or better, our score was 100.9 points per game (which is higher), while our season average ppg in wins was 89.6ppg! By contrast, our ppg in losses was 102.9ppg.

(By way of comparison, the world champion LA Lakers scored 102.2 points in a loss and 94.7 points in a win last year; this sort of stat is apparently not unusual; in the 31 games where Kobe shot .500 or better, the Lakers were 24-7).

Shots per game: The Blazers averages 76.7 shots per game in those 30 games. The seasonal average was 78.7. However, in wins, the Blazers averaged 77.4 shots per game (80.6 in losses); in the 26 wins where Brandon shoots 50% or better, the shots per game was 76.9.

There's no "faster game" when Roy plays well, though we do score more points when he does, due to better efficiency. However, team performance in losses (more shots, more points scored) seems to indicate that a faster paced game might not be good for everybody on the floor in a Blazer uniform.

I look at it as a risk/reward system: if we were at .500 (41 wins) or below, changing our system would be a better than 2:1 chance to succeed. But we're winning between 50 and 54 wins recently, and the opportunity to fail is larger than the opportunity to succeed by changing.

I'm not against improving our pace; it wouldn't take much, either... just shoot with 7 seconds left on the shot clock rather than 6, on average. More fast breaks or shooting early in the shot clock will push this average up, of course. Basically, we just need 4-6 more possessions a game to push the pace up from slowest in the league to league average.

But I wouldn't want to be any faster than that; this is where the portion of your post I quoted is addressed: only 6 of the 16 playoff teams were above average in pace (this includes the Lakers, who were essentially at average, being 92.8 versus 92.7 for the league). But 12 of the 16 playoff teams were above average in ORtg (Offensive efficiency) and 15 of the 16 were above average in DRtg (defensive efficiency). Success correlates much more to efficiency than speed.

 

Re: Why Roy likes a slow game where he controls the ball... and why we should too.

Saved the best to last...

 

Re: Why Roy likes a slow game where he controls the ball... and why we should too.

LOL! Under-employed at the moment, yes. But next week I'm back on full-time. Mostly, I just wanted to put my money where my mouth was and post something substantive and thoughtful... and basketball related!

 

Re: Why Roy likes a slow game where he controls the ball... and why we should too.

Everyone has said Roy-ball doesn't win in the playoffs but in the one series that he played healthy, the one game in which had the ball the most, we won. Game 2.

Also- I believe the Heat won the championship in 2006 playing a Wade ISO offense.

 

Re: Why Roy likes a slow game where he controls the ball... and why we should too.

In the playoffs, Roy has 2 or fewer turnovers in all of the wins (3 out of the 4 total since 08-09), as well as 1 foul or less in all of the wins. These point to games where Roy was allowed to be Roy, and didn't make mistakes.

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

It feels like we have three or four threads all talking about the same thing. It's frying my brain trying to keep up.

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

I'm juxtaposing all the thread titles together. My vision is somewhat blurred at this point.

 

Re: Why Roy likes a slow game where he controls the ball... and why we should too.

If you have a very good ISO player and play him/use him a lot - you are going to win often. LeBron's Cleveland teams that went far in the playoffs were also ISO heavy teams.

We do not have stat breakdown from the Heat's championship year, but last couple of years the Heat played a lot more ISO for Wade than the Blazers played for Roy (look at the percent of assisted made shots for him and it is a huge different from Roy).

On the other hand, Kobe played more off the ball than Brandon - but to be honest, Kobe plays in a system that does not have a traditional PG and the offense can be initiated by many members of the team - and Kobe is not as good a decision maker as a ball-handler as Brandon, especially when it comes to his own shot-selection.

ISO offense is good if you have a good supporting cast. The Blazers had a terrible playoffs supporting cast in 2008-2009 when Roy was playing like a superstar in an ISO system. The Blazers lost the Houston series not because of Roy, but because of almost anyone else on the team...

At the end of the day, if you look at how good Brandon is at making decisions, how efficient he is with the ball and how low his usage% is compared to most star-players, and the only logical thing to do, to me, is to assume that you want Brandon to handle the ball more, not less.

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

This place is fucking nutz! I swear! First I come on here and read Brandon has peaked and will not make the all-star team. Now, "Fuck Brandon Roy!" Really? The same player who will help us win numerous games this season year and 28 other NBA head coaches would want as their starting 2 guard! Fucking amazing!

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

By the way, who can remember who are starting shooting guard was before we landed Brandon? That's right, Juan Dixon! Maybe we should cut Roy and bring him back!

 

Re: Fuck Brandon Roy

Hah. I was just thinking the same thing. All this win share and random statistics are making my head spin.

Seems to me a case of paralysis by over-analysis.