Round 2 Preview: Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Atlanta Hawks

Here at Nylon Calculus we track and analyze a wide  variety of stats, so here are a few hand-picked ones offered as preview of the Cavaliers-Hawks series.

The Cleveland Cavaliers face the Atlanta Hawks in the second round, so it’s time to consider how a Hawk could defeat a Cavalier in battle and also, what exactly is a Cavalier? The Hawks were a media darling last season, but this year they’ve slipped under the radar. They won’t be a pushover for the Cavs, a far from perfect squad despite their gaudy record and lofty championship aspirations.

HBox Leaders:

LeBron James has the highest HBox in the series, but his lead over everywhere else isn’t gigantic — he’s mortal in his old age. Surprisingly, Kevin Love has the highest HBox out of anyone else in the series. His game is tailor-made to do well by that metric: he’s a big-rebounding, high-assist big man with outside range. He has many traits of a valuable player despite his relatively modest per game stats. Paul Millsap is Atlanta’s most valuable player, according to HBox; he’s just a hair behind Love. However, I’d say he rates higher in a few non-box score components the metric doesn’t track. And if you’re looking for Kyrie Irving, you have to scroll far down: he’s rated only a tick above average amongst a number of role players. Irving gets attention as a flashy scorer, but advanced stats with some consistency do not see him with the value you typically see from a star. In fact, the Cavaliers have played better with Matthew Dellavedova in similar lineups.

True usage: 

If one had to guess which player had the highest true usage percentage during the regular season, Dennis Schroeder would likely not be the first guess. The Rajon Rondo comparisons are key here — he has the ball frequently when he’s on the court, and he’s taking more shots than Jeff Teague. LeBron James, predictably, leads the Cavaliers. And during the post-season, his usage rate often rockets towards the sky — he may take over a few games.

Rim protectors:

The leader in rim protection for the series is Paul Millsap, a power forward thought too small to play well in the NBA. He contests a high number of shots and opponents shoot a fairly low percentage when he’s near the rim. A number of people, actually, made the case for him being third on the Defensive Player of the Year ballot, and it’s based on hard data. Meanwhile, Timofey Mozgov had a miserable season that will cost him millions of dollars, but his rim protection numbers are still solid. Both Kevin Love and Tristan Thompson, however, had poor scores here — opponents shoot a high percentage near them. Thompson has the tools to do better in this respect, and if the Cavaliers want to steam-roll the Hawks and into the finals they’ll need his defense to improve because they can’t afford to play Mozgov and they need real defensive chops to make it unscathed into the finals with a (small but significant) of a chance at a title. The monkey-wrench here is that the Hawks play five-out basketball using Al Horford’s range, so they’ll need mobility and rim protection from the whole team.

Jumping to Conclusions: 

With Timofey Mozgov on the bench, the Cavaliers are actually using an inferior player for one of the most important events: the opening tip. Al Horford isn’t an above average jump ball artist, but he’s a mile better than the untamed Tristan Thompson, who has the hops and length but not the timing or the touch. Using my own model, Horford has a 66% of beating Thompson at the opening tip. It’s not an insurmountable battle, but it’s a tough one for the inexperienced Thompson.

Prediction:

As the favorites with homecourt advantage, the Cavaliers have a 76.2% chance of winning the series. The numbers used here and seen below are a mix of team ratings with a few players factored in and projected RPM via Nathan Walker. The team rating method is also explained here, and it’s essentially what you see at basketball-reference with SRS but it’s using a more robust method, ridge regression, with a few key players as additional variables. As an aside, Kyrie Irving missed a few games during the regular season, and it’s enough to get a rough estimate of how much better the team is with him. They were roughly 2.6 points better, which is quite good for a player who averages only 30 minutes a game though it’s not spectacular. It’s evidence that Irving does actually boost the team when he plays, but he’s not their key either. This is still all about LeBron James.