Nylon Calculus: Week 1 in Review — Welcome, 2016-17 season

After a rollicking and surprising past few months with few breaks, we’re finally into the NBA 2016-17 season, and it’s been as entertaining as ever. It was feared that this season would just be a prelude to a Golden State Warriors-Cleveland Cavaliers Finals but that has turned into genuine intrigue as the super team has struggled out of the gates.

While we’ve lost the breadth of an entire generation with the recent retirements of Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, and Tim Duncan, we have an intriguing set of young stars to obsess over and watch grow. The 2017 season is here, and for Week in Review here at Nylon Calculus that means picking apart a few big storylines during the season and digging into the details of the game, numbers or otherwise.

Is it time to panic?

Golden State was destroyed by the San Antonio Spus, then had unconvincing wins over the New Orleans Pelicans and the Phoenix Suns. A few flawed playoff teams, like the Washington Wizards, are still searching for their first win or look over-matched already. Is it time to panic? Is it time to stock up on canned goods, dig trenches, and burn effigies of your forsaken god?

Well…no. The NBA is too variable to make much out of a slow start, or a fast one for that matter. And with a league increasingly reliant on three-point shooting, we’ll have to get used to the role of luck in the outcome of games. You can’t control everything. The time to panic is when you’re down 1-3 in a playoff series. Even then, all hope is not lost.

Russell Westbrook’s triple-double mania

Westbrook, now the face of the franchise and without another star scorer, has been fully unleashed. This is the Westbrook we can come to expect from now on. I know people are obsessing over his triple-doubles — there’s something supernaturally special about numbers in double digits — but he has a real chance at breaking the unofficial usage rate record held by Kobe Bryant from the season when he averaged 35 points per game. Westbrook’s assist rate is one of the highest in the league, and with his high rebound rate for a guard you’re going to see a few metrics like BPM flummoxed.

Since Basketball-Reference uses BPM, this is important, as many people in the media will use BPM to support an MVP argument. In a roundabout way, Westbrook’s triple-double theatrics will win him the analytics crowd too. We just have to keep sight of what’s really going on the court and how we value those actions. Stuffing the box score isn’t the end process for a game of basketball.

Golden State’s plummet

Team rating systems are tough to implement early in the season when there are so few games to use. Typically, you use information from prior seasons to estimate a team’s rating. FiveThirtyEight, for example, uses an Elo system, which is like a long, long rolling average. But there’s something off about how their projections changed after Golden State’s surprising blowout loss to the Spurs on opening night. Their preseason projected margin of victory was 13.6, while after the loss it sunk to 10.9. Correspondingly, their title odds fell from 55% to 38%.

Read More: The Rotation — Warriors aren’t making threes…yet

What’s wrong with this? Well, here’s a simple exercise. Based on just this one game, at home against a team as good as the Spurs, the Warriors played like a -25 team. Since we know how many games they’ll play the rest of the season and what their new projected rating is, we can back-calculate how good Elo thinks the team will be for the 81 games after the opening one — the calculation is (82*10.9-1*-25)/81. But the projection for those 81 games is 11.3, which is curiously much different than their preseason estimation of 13.6.

However, that’s not how Elo is calculated, and one has to dig into the methodology for things to become a little clearer. An Elo rater bases things on recency, and the strength of recency is determined by a K factor. FiveThirtyEight stated that their K factor is 20, which seems high for basketball, as it’s in the same range as the NFL. It could at least partially explain for Golden State’s sudden drop after one game. But I’m not quite certain how they weighted their preseason BPM-estimations with Elo, and how that changes with real games. I’d be wary when using these numbers for now, until a larger sample is in place.

James Harden, the next Tiny Archibald

After Sunday’s game, James Harden is averaging 10.7 assists per game. And per Mike D’Antoni, who suggested he wanted Harden to 15 assists a game, we’re going to hear a lot of talk about James leading the league in both scoring and assists. This is, of course, an accomplishment only completed by Tiny Archibald back in 1973.

First of all, no, Harden is not going to average 12 assists, much less 15 — if only because he shoots so often it’s tough for him to gobble up all the potential assists. Secondly, Harden would have to have more assists than consistent high-assist machines Chris Paul or John Wall, among others.

Tiny Archibald also had a huge advantage back in 1973: he averaged 46 minutes per game, leading the league, and no other guard was even close. One would need a perfect set of circumstances to achieve both distinctions, and that’s tougher to do in a more competitive league — 1973 was during a much different time in the NBA’s history. It’s not likely because there are too many point guards who are better at racking up assists, and it’s probably not good for the team either because Harden would likely lead the league in turnovers by a ridiculous margin.

Joel “The Process” Embiid

After losing Ben Simmons for the first part of the season, we were given a healthy Joel Embiid for universal karmic balance, and yes, it’s been spectacular. It’s not just that the guy is huge and can physically overpower opposing players; it’s that he’s preternaturally and precociously skilled, able to spin around NBA-level opponents, hit outside shots, and drive to the rim like a perimeter player. He’s also not a giant import forced to play the game because of his size alone, as he clearly loves the game and wants to play. If healthy — and that is a scary conditional for a guy as large as he is — this guy is a basketball gift and a future superstar.

Joel is inextricably linked to the Philadelphia NBA experiment too, which is amusing and interesting by itself. He drops in “trust the process” like it’s his own slogan and has even added, “PROCESSING…………………..” to his twitter bio. He’s more aware and more entertaining than most NBA players already, and he already has a candidate for quote of the season, as seen below.

The promise of the Sam Hinkie plan was that with enough attempts in the lottery, you’re bound to strike gold. Tanking once and grabbing a top-three pick isn’t enough; there are busts every year, even for the best informed teams. In a league where games are dominated by a handful of players, a high-risk, high-variance strategy like that can make sense. And right after everyone wrote him off because of his two years on the sidelines, Joel Embiid might be the promise from The Process itself.

Iron-Men: 2016

Every year I compile a list of NBA iron-men to thoroughly account for the leaders, who’s next in line, and which guys should qualify in the spirit of the designation because their missed games are, for example, suspensions. I’ve been hesitant to make one its own article this year because the list has gotten small and so many of the past iron-men have fallen, like DeAndre Jordan. Each player must have at least two seasons with no missed games, so it’s a pretty soft filter.

In fact, the list of iron-men from last season is impressive: DeAndre Jordan had 360 consecutive regular season games and 410 including the post-season interrupted by a bout of pneumonia; Brandon Bass missed several games, many were coach’s decisions, so his streak ended at 284 for regular season games and 314 for post-season; Damian Lillard had plantar fasciitis, ending his streak at 275 and 291 games, respectively; Jeff Green had a concussion, seeing his end at 308 and 325 games, respectively; Timofey Mozgov had a terrible, injury-plagued year, snapping his streak of 176 regular games; and Ben McLemore injured his wrist, resulting in the first missed game of his career at game after 211 in a row. There were four rookies, too, from 2015 who played every game but couldn’t make it through 2016: ; Elfrid Payton had ankle problems; Andrew Wiggins had knee issues; Nikola Mirotic had an appendectomy; and, most distressingly, Dante Exum was out for a year because of a torn ACL.

Is anyone even left? I actually have only one holdover from the previous season’s list: Tristan Thompson, who takes the Iron-Man crown from another bouncy, dunk-happy center in DeAndre Jordan. As you can see in the table below, there are only two other players who qualify without any conditions. James Harden makes the cut with an asterisk because a one-game suspension doesn’t rule you out from being an iron-man. Andre Drummond is a tougher case because he missed a game due to “rest,” which shouldn’t strictly count but if it’s only one game I’ll include him anyway with a caveat.

Table: Iron-men for 2016

*Missed a game because of special circumstances

Corey Brewer, by the way, should have been included last year. This is what makes the research challenging: I can’t simply just look for players with strings of 82 game seasons because there are so many legitimate reasons for playing fewer than 82, from trades to canceled games to, in Brewer’s case, attending the birth of your child. If one were to excuse Brewer’s missed game there, then his streak would nearly equal Tristan Thompson’s — not bad for a guy who runs every fast break like a maniac.

That brings me to an important point for this exercise. I have seen no rhyme or reason or pattern between all these iron-men. Guys like Tristan Thompson and DeAndre Jordan should be the ones who get injured more frequently because of how often and how high they jump. You’ll see a few guys like Luis Scola and Andre Miller who have old man games and don’t jump high, in direct contrast to others on the list. You’ll also see a fair number of role players…and some high scorers like Damian Lillard, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden. Being an iron-man doesn’t have a lot to do with playing style; it seems to be more about good genetics, injury avoidance by landing and loading appropriately, and just sheer luck.

Until next year … and let us all pray for the health of our current iron-men, because they will need it.