Nylon Calculus Week 1 in Review: October games

With a smaller preseason, the NBA season began sooner than it usually does, and after that wild summer where many stars switched homes we were all anxious to see how the experiments will play out. We also have a number of interesting rookie debuts, new rebuild projects, and a handful of teams fighting for “we could win a title if Golden State has injury problems.”

Sure, we probably know how the season will end, but it’s the moments in between I’m more interested in. And with that’s, let’s start the first Week in Review of the year, where I looked back at the first week of the season and breakdown various storylines with an analytical mindset.

Gordon Hayward’s unfortunate injury

I was a fan of Gordon Hayward’s, and for years I had hoped he’d jump over to the Eastern Conference because I was sure he’d be a multiple time All-Star against weaker competition. The West was too deep; it was unfair. I was glad to see him earn the nod last season, but it could have come sooner in the East. Yet I was still part of the skeptical cohort about Boston’s chances this season, a reversal from the past couple years. I enjoy many of Boston’s players, but I was looking forward to the arguments that would come as they moved through the season, whether they slumped and confirmed my projections or they excelled and called those numbers into question.

Gordon Hayward’s season was taken away from him. And he has to live with fears about how he’ll heal and what, if any, the long-term impacts will be. From all accounts, the surgery went successfully, and hopefully the soft-tissue damage was minimal. Shavlik Randolph, the only other NBA player I know of with the same injury, was more optimistic, saying Gordon could be back by the end of the season. But whatever happens, a season of his prime will be lost forever.

MVP: 2018

I’m seeing a lot of MVP talk for Giannis Antetokounmpo, and going into the season I was hesitant in picking him for a prediction just because I wasn’t sure if the Bucks were going to be good enough. I know Russell Westbrook bucked that trend last season, but he averaged a triple-double. Being on a contender is a hugely important criterion for most voters. However, if the top of the East is weak while Cleveland slumps during Isaiah Thomas’ injury, Milwaukee will look better by comparison, and Giannis does have some of the telltale signs of an MVP. It’s quite early, yes, but his usage has skyrocketed and that’s one of the most stable statistics. He is indeed a plausible MVP now — NBA die-hards may now rejoice.

Lonzo Ball

The Lonzo Ball era did not start smoothly. In his debut with the LA-vs-LA game, he was smothered by Patrick Beverley and ended the game with 1-of-6 shooting. Beverley was physical, and Ball often had trouble going by him. He had a bounce back game the next day, scoring 29 points, but that was against Phoenix — it’s like playing against a Division II school. Then he had another poor shooting performance, this time against the Pelicans. I wouldn’t judge his shooting percentages yet. Rather I would be impressed with his rebounding and assist totals, which is a great sign for a young guard.

Houston and clutch defense

On opening night, the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets — most likely the two best teams in the league — sparred for a match-up we’ll hopefully see in the playoffs. With a wild finish, the Rockets won by a single point.  It was an impressive defensive finish too, marked by their new defensive pros in P.J. Tucker, Mbah a Moute, and Chris Paul.

Naturally, this leads to a question of whether or not the Rockets can maintain their good crunch-time defense. But as Ian Levy noted, clutch defense is usually noise. Perhaps Houston actually can extend their clutch performance, but as I’ve seen over the years and through the data, that’s not to be trusted. After all, if Kevin Durant’s shot at the buzzer came a split second sooner, the Rockets would have lost and we would be talking about their clutch failures.

The play-by-play site

You may have noticed I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with play-by-play data, compiling totals and creating my own stats. Part of the reason I was providing this was the lack of good play-by-play data out there. Thankfully, Darryl Blackport just created a site to display a lot of play-by-play numbers: www.pbpstats.com. You can see things like points created from assists, rebounds broken down by free throws or field goals only, with or without stats, and much more. It’s exciting to see the Nylon Calculus team create a spiffy stats site like this that can be updated regularly, and hopefully we can add more to the site in the future.

Cleveland and fit

In a shocking decision, the Cavaliers moved Dwyane Wade to the bench — who knew a starting backcourt of Derrick Rose, Wade, and LeBron James wasn’t going to work? They may be friends, but LeBron and Wade are an awkward pair at this stage in their careers. Teams are still at their best when LeBron has the ball, while his friend has negative value playing off the ball right now. Sadly, Wade is a pretty awful defender, and he’s obviously not a shooter either. He’s best off the bench where he can try to lead some of the lineups with LeBron resting. Their synergy together doesn’t cancel out all those negative effects.

Reusing a graph I made a few weeks earlier, you can see how Rose rates on the 3-and-D scale versus other players. He’s pretty much the furthest away on the graph. He’s not an outside shooter, and his defense ever since his major injuries has been among the worst in the league. I know people said it’s not a bad move because of the price, but he’s actively harmful because he’s a ball hog who’s inefficient on a team with great options who provides no 3-and-D support. Hopefully, he’ll be benched too; even though injuries have killed their point guard position they could still be helped by putting a non-point guard in that slot.

The collapse of the Suns

For my regular season predictions, I usually make some adjustments for coaching changes. Those adjustments are mostly subjective because the data available is poor out there for evaluating a coach — it’s hard to disentangle the value from players, their development, and their coaching. Amazingly, for the first time since I’ve been doing projections, there were no coaching changes at all. But once the regular season began, that reversed quickly.

The Phoenix Suns had arguably the worst start in NBA history. They had some of their worst losses in franchise history, and they an NBA record for worst point differential through their first three games. Naturally, coach Earl Watson was fired, but as Kevin Pelton pointed out, they’d better realize they need to bring in an outside hire because the rest of their coaching staff is a who’s who of worst NBA defenses in modern history including interim coach Jay Triano and assistant Tyrone Corbin. As I pointed out in their season preview, they have a lot of things to fix, but it all starts at the top.

The first three games: What can we learn?

After a full year since his injury, and even longer since he was drafted, we finally got to see Ben Simmons in a real NBA game. He had a sensational start to his NBA career, and we’ve seen all sorts of statistical comparisons to past greats, like Oscar Robertson. Some of that can be explained by an arbitrary endpoint fallacy — a player can be statistically more similar to another player under the thresholds of 10-10-5 quite easily rather than over. But what if we compared Ben Simmons’ entire production to other rookies from the past, and are three games enough to get a sense of where a player’s career will go?

First of all, yes, this is just looking at the first three games of every rookie with a minimum of 60 minutes played. For production I’ll use DRE, which summarizes all the basic stats in a box score into one number, like Game Score on Basketball-Reference but with “smarter” weights. Then I transform the numbers in a per-minute setting for a slightly more even playing field.

You can see the results below for every rookie from 1984 to 2008 (full box scores are available only going back to 1984, and I wanted a sense of how good a player turned out to be so the cutoff ended at 2008). The best raw DRE and the best DRE per minute belongs to Adrian Griffin, a wing who bounced around the league for a few years never fully establishing himself. His rookie season was arguably his best too, and he was already 25-years-old at the time. After that, Michael Jordan and David Robinson appear, but the list is definitely hit-or-miss with the likes of Paul Graham and Willie Anderson mixed in with Ray Allen and Eddie Jones.

Table: top DRE scores through first 3 games, 1984-2008

I suppose it might have been better to rank players by raw DRE — there’s some advantage with factoring in minutes played, either because it’s a larger sample of playing time or because that says something about the prospect. But the point here is to show how a great start to your career doesn’t necessitate greatness, and vice versa. There are some great players at the bottom of the list here, like Dwyane Wade, Chauncey Billups, and Alonzo Mourning. It’s better if your first three games are spectacular, but it obviously doesn’t completely write your future.

Looking at the leaders since 2010, there have been few truly strong performances, and one player in particular stands out: Michael Carter-Williams, who ended up winning Rookie of the Year and then went downhill quickly from there. There are definitely a few stars and future stars on the list, but, again, Ben Simmons is being ranked next to Mario Chalmers — there are better indicators for where his career will go.

Table: top DRE scores through first 3 games, 2010-2018

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Obviously, we should judge a player by a bigger sample set than three games, but there’s an amazing amount of signal in all that noise. Many superstars do indeed start their careers with a bang, and given Ben Simmons’ college career, his status as a prospect, and how his first week went, I would be optimistic about his future. Let’s just hope he doesn’t follow in the last Rookie of the Year’s footsteps, as Michael Carter-Williams who failed earning a starting role with the sorry Chicago Bulls last season and is now (an injured) backup guard with the Hornets.