Nylon Calculus Week 21 in Review: Lillard, JaVale McGee, and reader questions

We’re nearing the end of the NBA regular season: the ides of March signify the last stretch is coming up. While some teams have visibly thrown the towel, the good news is that we’ve got some exciting races in both conferences. The grouping is so tight outside of the top seeds that in just a week, a team could fall from having homecourt advantage to being out of the playoffs entirely.

There’s a lot of volatility right now; thus, there’s a lot to track. I personally just like to wait and watch it all play out rather than obsessively looking at the standings; time has a way of working itself out like that. But for those special few, there’s a lot to closely watch right now, and I’ll advise everyone that people who say they know for certain what will happen are not to be trusted. And with that, let’s look back at the last week in basketball.

Damian Lillard is on fire

Ever since his 50-point game a month ago, Damian Lillard has been on fire. He’s been averaging 34.7 points per game since then on great efficiency, and it’s propelled the Blazers to the third seed in the Western Conference. This is an important season for him too, as well for the team, because there were swirls of discussions about his future with the squad. They were on the verge of a quasi-rebuilding season, not good enough to compete and too good to snag a top pick. If they’re in a transitional phase, then you can see how it’d be best for both parties for Lillard to move on to another team. He’s already 28-years-old. But with how they’ve been doing recently, that may not come to pass.

The zenith of Portland’s resurgence after the All-Star break was a win over the Warriors. They just beat them on Sunday, but that was sans Stephen Curry; the one  back in February was truly special and helped set their course for the rest of their run. Lillard actually had one of his worst recent games. But his value goes beyond the simple box-score — his ability to draw attention is Stephen Curry-lite, and his team’s offense stalls without him. We’ll see how the rest of the season plays out, as the seeding is incredibly close in the Western Conference, but this is a big development for the team that could have far-reaching implications once they think about their future. Plus, even with how deep the point guard position is, Lillard is making a strong argument for a decent All-NBA slot too, and this may end up being his career season.

The old man in Sacramento

Vince Carter is having a largely forgettable season over in Sacramento. But the fact that he’s even playing is newsworthy. He first made headlines in the NBA back in the 1990s, and he’s still playing now in 2018 with kids who were born in 1998. It’s like how there were still woolly mammoths 4000 years ago back when we were writing the Epic of Gilgamesh and building Stonehenge. He’s out of time. There are very few NBA players who were still in the league at 41-years-old, and the vast majority of those were 7ba-footers — the exceptions were gimmick come-backs from guys who had already retired in Bob Cousy and Nat Hickey, who played in 1948 when it was the BAA. He’s half-man, half-social security, but competing in the league at his age on the wings is impressive, even if he’s buried in Sacramento.

The inevitable San Antonio decline

The standings in the west have seen something we haven’t in eons: the Spurs are in a three-way tie for eighth, and they’ve got the win percentage of a 46 win team. That hasn’t happened since 1997 when David Robinson missed most of the season due to an injury — that was pre-Tim Duncan. That was the last time they went under 50 wins (prorating the lockout seasons.) This season too comes with an asterisk, as Kawhi Leonard has been dealing with a mysterious injury. Reportedly, he may return in the next week. And they desperately need his presence.

The biggest positive from the season is that San Antonio has remained an elite defense despite the lack of an elite defender outside of Danny Green, a shooting guard. Gregg Popovich should get an award just for building a great defense with Pau Gasol at center and a bunch of odd pieces like Kyle Anderson, Patty Mills, Tony Parker, and sophomore players. But the problem has been their offense.

They’re doing well in offensive boards and turnovers; it’s the shot making they’re struggling with. They’ve been hurt by some awful shooting from some primary backcourt pieces Dejounte Murray and Tony Parker, and they haven’t had anyone with exquisite efficiency to balance things out. This is where they miss Leonard: having a superstar like that on offense can help the role players immensely, and he can draw a lot of attention for open shots elsewhere. They will indeed be a lot better when/if he returns, but from how they’ve been struggling to the frustration dealing with the medical issues, you can see how all this discord might cause Leonard to leave the team in the near future. We may be gearing up for a sad end to this San Antonio pseudo-dynasty — all things end eventually.

Cleveland Cavalier Jr.

The new-look Cavaliers have had a rough patch over the past week, but at least they stopped the bleeding with those series of trades a month ago. The team still needs a lot of work, and I don’t exactly peg them as a true contender despite the presence of LeBron James. But they did get one thing right: Larry Nance Jr. has been a great pickup, and he’s been one of their few truly effective players.

It’s also cool to see him play on the same team his father had been on for seven seasons. He’s one of those vertical scorers who do so well next to LeBron, like Chris Andersen back in Miami. You can see an example below that includes a mesmerizing pass. He’s been a decent defender too with a high rate of steals for a center. Those trades didn’t fix everything, but they got at least one keeper.

JaVale McGee: The maturation

For years, as NBA fans are well aware, JaVale McGee was a running joke thanks to many bone-headed plays and his inability to translate his ridiculous physical gifts into something more valuable. When his first team traded him for veteran Nene Hilario, who was on a large contract with a history of injuries, I expected Denver would learn to rue the move, and that Washington would not miss him. And that’s basically what happened, as McGee played himself off the team eventually.

After barely hanging onto the league, McGee has established himself as a valuable bench center for the world champion Warriors, and I’m still surprised every day. He had always had the gifts for finishing at the rim, blocking shots, and rebounding, but they’ve only now been leveraged into helping his team. What’s funny is that he hasn’t become a low usage player on the Golden State, picking his spots; and he’s still having his most efficient seasons by far for his career. (How a guy who almost always shoots inside who’s assisted on over 80 percent of his shots manages a usage rate over 20 percent is frankly amazing.) But he’s still committing one of his most common errors from his youth: only four players currently have more goaltending violations with 11 for him, yet he hasn’t even played 500 minutes. He still also has a high foul rate, and it hasn’t changed since he was a youngster.

Honestly, what’s helped his game the most is having great teammates. They can cover his screw-ups on defense, and his threat as a lob target is immensely valuable with the Warriors. Opponents are obviously so concerned about shooters like Kevin Durant, and the floor is spaced so well, that there are many plays like this where he can just dive straight to the rim for an easy dunk. He’s a great target too — it’s not just luck. But he’ll still have weird plays, like this driving hook shot (who does that?) he slings at the backboard awkwardly.

Defensively, his length, unparalleled outside of giants like Rudy Gobert, is a huge deterrent, and the dude can stuff LaMarcus Aldridge or a 3-pointer from Damian Lillard. But he is still not good defending in space, and he has poor footwork. I can understand why the team wants to limit his minutes, but he’s so useful on this team it would indeed be wise to reconsider how large of a role he has — and that’s a strange thing to admit about McGee.

Isiah Thomas’ ultimate career value has long been a contentious topic between the conventional wisdom and the advanced stats. In fact, referring to Ben Taylor’s excellent top 40 all-time series, I fall in line with his opinion: he doesn’t even merit a top 40 spot, although Ben notes he was an honorable mention. I think he was a very good player, but his prime is outshadowed by other superstars and both his prime and his career didn’t last long — he was out of the league at age 32 thanks to an Achilles injury.

Here’s the problem with Thomas and the advanced stats: he had high assist and usage rates, but he was not efficient, and in his late 20’s his efficiency went south. Given that he was a short point guard, his defense cannot make up the difference, even though he was generally a good defender with a decent amount of steals. It’s the classic case of the lead offensive player on a great defensive team getting too much of the credit, and there’s a bit of a championship bias too. While I would agree he played better in the playoffs, relatively speaking, it was not to such a degree that you’d want to take him over someone like Chris Paul or Steve Nash. It’s tough to find any evidence he had a superstar-like impact; you can even see Ben Taylor’s “with-or-without-you” stat peg him with a decent peak value but nothing earth-shattering.

There are people out there who may want to take the meta-view that the modern stats-folks are going too far and that we should consider a lot of that conventional wisdom in his evaluation, but even at the time he wasn’t considered an elite player, at least in the regular season. He has a high of fifth in MVP voting, and that was only once; he was eighth and ninth a couple times. For his career, he’s a mere 87th right now in MVP share, behind the likes of Blake Griffin and Penny Hardaway.

There’s just no evidence he had a fantastically valuable peak, and he doesn’t have a long career either. As for the specific comment on his inefficiency, I’ll defer again to Ben Taylor. He breaks down the conundrum there with Kobe Bryant, another high volume guy who wasn’t known for his efficiency. Basically, high usage guys, especially ones who pass, have positive global effects on their teammates. His offense definitely wasn’t mediocre, at least at his best. It’s just he doesn’t do enough elsewhere to attain Hall-of-fame, MVP status. A longer breakdown would be interesting on his career value, but I’m unconvinced the results would change much unless I find some new evidence.

“Are NBA referees protecting shooters more than drivers?”

From mailbag to mailbag: this is extending Kevin Pelton’s work a little while ago on shooting foul rates for at the rim and past the 3-point line. Using Second Spectrum tracking data, he could go back to 2014, but shot foul location data actually goes back to 2011 — you don’t need tracking data for this. So while my data source isn’t exactly the same — for 3-point rate mine is about 3 percentage points lower and it’s 6 percentage points lower for restricted area attempts — it trends closely enough to spot the patterns.

Per Kevin Pelton’s numbers, the 3PA rate has been 0.017 the past couple seasons, so it has slightly increased since 2011. However, the interesting thing here is how much higher the shooting foul rate was before 2014. I’ll allow for some theorizing there — could be the influence of verticality, could be an increase of open transition buckets, or it could be something else entirely.

Table: shooting foul rates

I wanted to answer this here to have more space. I do indeed believe that if Rudy Gobert had more time on the court he’d be an easy Defensive Player of the Year pick. It’s just that he’s missed enough games that it’s more of an open race. For a starting point, let’s see how some defensive metrics see this race. In the table below, you can see the top players by a blend of defensive real plus/minus, box-score plus/minus, and minutes played. It’s just MP*(0.7*DRPM+0.3*DBPM); I don’t use replacement level because that gives too much credit to okay defenders who just play a ton of minutes.

Table: top players by defensive metrics

Looking at the results, Andre Drummond, surprisingly, is first, but it’s because he’s played a large share of the season and has an anomalously high DBPM value, as I’ve explained before. Rudy Gobert is just a hair behind them, and then you get a large grouping of players. Kyle Anderson is another odd result, and it’s for the same reasons as Drummond: BPM is most likely overrating him there. I would also posit many Spurs players are getting overrated because the team’s system is essentially getting no credit. After that, you get a number of the usual suspects, and you can see a case made for almost every one of them.

Next: Raptors, Boban, and NBA questions

Rudy Gobert, however, does have the best case. He’s the one who jumps out most when watching him play, outside of Joel Embiid. His length is borderline historic, and he’s become disciplined and skilled in utilizing that asset. Most other candidates have warts, and if his only problem is games played, I hope we don’t penalize him too harshly. After all, even if you quantify things by time played, he’s still arguably the most valuable defender. This is a tough award to sort through right now, and I hope we don’t make a mistake. If I had to choose now, it’d be him, and that gap will only widen as he plays more games.