2015-16 NBA Preview: Sacramento Kings

SACRAMENTO KINGS

With a wildly entertaining front office, Sacramento is a smattering of talent in the center of California and they’re now coming back into the consciousness of the NBA, thanks mainly to the exploits of DeMarcus Cousins.

2015 in review:

As an effrontery to analytics, the Kings started out strong in 2015, winning nine of their first fourteen games. Then DeMarcus Cousins was put out of commision with a bout of viral meningitis and the team started to flounder. The Sacramento brain trust decided to right the ship by firing Mike Malone, who was the only coach so far who had convinced Cousins to commit to defense. The rest of the season was a mess, and when Cousins came back the team still had its problems. The team finished with a respectable offense, but the defense was atrocious, especially without Cousins, and they limped to the finish line with 29 wins.

Rotation players in: Rajon Rondo, Willie Cauley-Stein, Kosta Koufos, Marco Belinelli.

Rotation players out: Jason Thompson, Derrick Williams, Carl Landry, Nik Stauskas.

Sacramento revamped its roster, convinced the problem is with its players and not the management. Rajon Rondo was a cheap addition, which should be a red flag. Their prize rookie is Willie Cauley-Stein, a defense-only center with remarkable agility. Kosta Koufos is a solid center who could play next to Cousins and maybe even Cauley-Stein too. Marco Belinelli will get whiplash adjusting to the Kings after being with the Spurs, but they’ll need his shooting. The Kings lost a lot of below average big man fodder. Jason Thompson, however, was the longest-tenured Sacramento-era Kings player ever.

2016 Projected

Any projection of the Kings starts with Cousins, once an analytics black sheep who has since transformed himself into a monster as measured by all sorts of numbers. Many star players have positive qualities amplified by an absence of negative plays. Not Cousins — he does everything, and if you’re lucky the good outweighs the bad. He draws a huge amount of fouls, third in free throws taken per possession, and is regularly ranked high in drawing offensive fouls too; he also commits over four fouls per 36 minutes. He captures an impressive amount of steals for his position, and that’s countered by a high turnover rate, ranking first in turnovers per possession. He’s one of the highest scoring centers of the past couple decades, but at his worst he gives up points on the other end due to lazy defense.

Overall, Cousins has been a major positive lately for his gargantuan presence on the court. Teams have to gameplan for him extensively, and he’s still had acceptable efficiency at an exceptionally high volume of shot attempts, especially for a big man in today’s perimeter dominated world. With better teammates, one wonders how impressive his offensive output might look.

Unfortunately, this is a team with Rajon Rondo at point guard and Rudy Gay at power forward. Gay has readjusted well to a smaller role, as he should never been the primary scoring option he became in Toronto. He’s still a lukewarm scorer who’s best at creating middling shots. That’s still valuable — shot creation is a useful skill — and he keeps his turnovers low, but there’s a ceiling to that value.

Rondo, meanwhile, is coming off a season where the team he left improved and the team he joined cratered. He still has the name and attendant reputation from his days as an All-Star, but his game is predicated on handling the ball and when he plays off-ball, opposing defenses ignore him. Thus, a pretty simple understanding of basketball will lead one to conclude he’s not the ideal point guard for DeMarcus Cousins and Rudy Gay. There’s hope he can instill a different mentality and help them attack in transition and play lock-down defense, but that’s not an assured outcome. In fact, even in Boston his impact is questionable.

The good news is that Sacramento’s defense will likely be a lot better. The Kings replaced a few terrible frontcourt defenders with good ones, in Koufos now and Cauley-Stein in the future. Cauley-Stein will be the starter at power forward to open the season, per the latest report, and remember he’s used to playing next to star centers at Kentucky. Cousins shouldn’t be depended upon on defense anyway, and other defenders should get the tougher assignments given his load on offense.

The rest of the roster is a hodgepodge of NBA talents. Ben McLemore might be on the right track for a 3/D career as he shot well last season and has considerable athletic gifts. Darren Collison played well with the Kings, and he could usurp the primary point guard role over Rondo by January. But he’s still a smallish shoot first point guard with defensive limitations. Omri Casspi will remain essential to the team with the league’s increased reliance on outside shooting.

Finally, George Karl could end up being one of the most important pieces. The Kings have had a revolving door for head coaches, but Karl seems to have real clout as a coach — at least in the regular season. With his experience and the respect he commands, he might be a voice of reason. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Quick statistic/graph

The NBA released a new SportVU rebounding stat just recently, and they’ve completely remodeled their rebounding stats in general. Deferred chances are when a player is within 3.5 feet of a rebound but a teammate grabs it. Presumably, this helps identify plays who don’t pad their rebound totals with rebounds teammates can get and, conversely, you can use it to identify those rebound padders. For example, in the graph below total defensive rebounds are graphed against total defensive rebound chances, so in the bottom right corner you would have players who rarely “share” rebounds with teammates. Not surprisingly, three names stick out: Andre Drummond, DeAndre Jordan, and DeMarcus Cousins. Cousins is a voracious rebounder with one of the highest rebound rates in the league, but it probably overstates his impact there.

Summary

The season depends on the delicate balance of the mercurial DeMarcus Cousins and an assortment of odds and ends that needs to coalesce into a working team. The team should be much better defensively, and if Cousins stays healthy and engaged on defense they could make it past 0.500 basketball. Sacramento has been a poor team for a while, but they have a chance at breaking that cycle.

PBP-Metric[1. This is the initial version of my own metric, which uses a full range of stats collected from play-by-play logs and tested extensively to avoid overfitting.]: 38.9

PT-PM: 35

Nick‘s[2. For a short description, the predictions use regression models and neural networks to apply various stats like BPM, RAPM, and Win Shares to 10,000 simulations of the season game-by-game to select the “best” result.]: 41

Nathan Walker: 35