Nylon Calculus Week 24 in Review: LeBron’s defense, 76ers, and Raptors playoff rotation

We’re almost done — the NBA season is winding now. There are only a few games left — yet there’s still so much to learn. We’ve got new title contenders. The seeding still has to be decided to a large degree in both conferences. There are several injuries where the timetables for return will have major implications. With that, let’s look back at the last week in basketball and try to learn from the past to predict the future.

LeBron James: His defense is now a liability

Contrary to popular belief, as a “stat-head” I actually do watch a lot of video. Besides all the games I watch, I go through a ton of video for articles and other projects. With videos, I usually replay the clips over and over to take in every nuance, and you notice a lot more of the game that way. Here’s one thing I’ve noticed — LeBron James is not trying anymore on defense, and it’s killing the team on that end of the court.

LeBron has a tendency now to fall asleep off the ball and wait for the rebound. He’ll slowly move away from his assigned player at the 3-point arc and often turns his back and stops paying attention. That’s okay when you’re covering an offensive non-entity who can’t even hit open shots — and he’s hidden on a lot of those guys — but he’ll do that even when good shooters are involved.

Shown below, you can see a video where LeBron James was “guarding” Fred VanVleet. LeBron is distracted by DeMar DeRozan, Fred sees this and sprints to the corner, LeBron doesn’t even give help on DeMar, and Fred takes one of the most wide open 3-pointers you’ll ever see. The second video is a play against Miami where he doesn’t realize help rotated over to cover the paint, leaving a guy open outside; plus he wasn’t even covering Goran Dragic, the second open guy beyond the 3-point line, well. Miscommunication is common too like this play where LeBron James doesn’t realize no one’s picked up Doug McDermott, a guy you obviously don’t want to leave open in the corner, because a Cavalier scrambled inside to prevent a shot.

You can find so many plays where he’s clearly not trying and has stopped paying attention to his nearest defender, guarding thin air and waiting for the rebound. Then there’s this play where I can’t even tell who he’s trying to guard. Here’s a clip that involved on-ball defense where LeBron misreads an incoming screen and backs away from Josh Richardson, a good shooter, and allows a made 3-pointer. You can’t call him a rim protector either; look at how he concedes a layup completely (with zero fouls.)

I could go on. Basically, he is frequently not engaging on defense, walking away from his man and drifting inside for the rebound. There are too many instances where he doesn’t even put up a hand to contest or close out. I realize that people still think of him as a great defender because of his physical gifts, and it’s definitely remarkable he’s still a fantastic player with his history, but the proof of his defensive value has to be thin. The Cavaliers have the second worst defensive rating in the league, and they’re 8.8 points per 100 possessions worse with him on the court. Some of that is opponent 3-point percentage luck, sure, but not all of it. We’ve gotta factor that into the MVP discussion — LeBron James is hurting his team on defense now.

Origin of an MVP

Speaking of the MVP award, I’d bet voters will round out the rest of their ballot, beyond the obvious names like James Harden, with whoever looks like the most valuable player on the rest of the contenders. In other words, I believe DeMar DeRozan could get a few stray MVP votes. But why do we need to guarantee those top teams get MVP love? This is a team game. There are four other players on the court, plus the bench. In DeMar’s case, I actually found that their improvement this year has been almost entirely because of their bench and team-wide changes.

Let’s break this down a bit. Imagine a decent team where the best player is a “+4” — net points per 100 possessions — and two teammates are +3; those guys would basically be borderline All-Stars. With a decent rotation, that’s close to 50 wins. How do you improve to become a contender? One of those guys could improve to a +8, which is MVP level, or all three players could improve — maybe one’s +4 and two are +5 now. Or the rest of the rotation/bench could improve, as in the case of the Raptors. There are multiple paths to 55-plus to 60 wins. You don’t actually need a true MVP player either if you’re balanced well enough. Let’s stop voting for these individual awards with team results. We got enough information available now we can vote more accurately.

Playing with the play-by-play

Just a reminder: you know how in the play-by-play you’ll see shots listed like step-back jump shot or reverse layup, or the ones here on the player pages? Careful with those labels. Seth Partnow wrote about this years ago. They’re inaccurate. Basically, those are subjective calls, and if the transcriber doesn’t have time to jot down a more accurate descriptor then a fadeaway jump shot will be labeled a mere jump shot. Thus, when shots are made, you have more time, typically, and you get more accurate labels. That’s why you’ll see fadeaway jump shots with a higher efficiency than other jump shots — they’re not actually more efficient.

We can’t have nice things

Joel Embiid broke his face on Markelle Fultz, as the universe can’t physically allow the 76ers to have too many healthy big name prospects at the same time. The jokes followed quickly. Based on our best available evidence, while the team has a two week time-table for a return, something a little more than that is more on point given the history of the injury, and it will definitely require a face mask.

How will that affect the team? I know people love to cite his large on-off differential — they were much better with him on the court. But that’s a noisy, unadjusted stat. Per Basketball-Reference, they are not truly +16.7 points per 100 possessions better with him in the game. That doesn’t adjust for teammates, opposition, or anything else. I’d rather use something refined and tested well, like RPM, where it’s a +5.3 per 100 possessions player, and then account for their backups. In the end, given how often he plays in a typical game and how good they are now, they should function like a league average team without Embiid. Take note of that for when the first round starts, if it starts without him. They could play the Wizards with a healthy John Wall — they really do need him to return in a mere two weeks.

Post-ups and spacing

There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how isolation play has gotten more efficient because of how great spacing is now (and also rule changes have made the burden easier on the perimeter.) This effect is prominent on the Rockets, for example. I think this could extend to post-ups as well, but I have not yet seen the evidence. From what I can tell, post-up efficiency has been stuck around 0.85 points per play to 0.89. This could warrant further investigation, but it does stand to reason that with better spacing post-ups should be more effective — we’ll see.

Markelle Fultz, rebooted

After drama that lasted months about Markelle Fultz’s availability and how it related to either his jumpshot or some mysterious injury, he’s finally back on the court like nothing happened. He was firing away on shots too, and if it weren’t for him breaking Joel Embiid’s face I’m sure the 76ers fans would be ecstatic he’s back. I wouldn’t say he’s erased all the doubts about him; but it’s at least eliminated the weirdness of his absence.

Here for the jumpshot breakdown? Immediately in his first game he was a willing and frequent pull-up jump shooter, which is a good sign for his confidence. For example, he took three pull-up mid-range jumpers within the closing minutes of their win against the Nuggets. You can see those below. He’s probably still hanging too long in the air before firing the shot, but he’s getting elite separation — you can see why he was the number one pick with those moves. Ultimately, my concern is still with his efficiency in those shots, and the fact that Basketball-Reference lists only two of his shots outside of 15 feet. He would top out as their bench spark plug brought in to buoy the minutes where Ben Simmons is sitting; playing both is not ideal.

For scoring guards, athleticism is vital to track because of how hard it is to score at the rim against bigger players, especially when they don’t guard your outside jump shot. For example, there’s a clip below where Fultz converts a shot in traffic using a nice touch and a small step-back. As a small scoring guard, the ability to finish close range buckets at weird angles is important. Here’s another good example of finishing inside. Note the extra gear he has when attacking and how he can still manage to make a layup despite being off-kilter. Finally, the second video below doesn’t even show a true dunk attempt, but you can see how he exploded to the rim.

Defensively, there’s still some promise, but I wouldn’t make any grand proclamations yet: he’s a point guard who’s only played a handful of games. Helpfully, he’s had a decent number of steals. Here’s an example of one where he pokes the ball away from the player and runs out for the fastbreak dunk; he’s had many assists this way, just swiping at a player and poking the ball. Then there was this positive play where he swats a shot right at the rim — sure, it was Trey Burke, but it was still impressive elevation and timing.

Ultimately, the final book has yet to be written on Fultz’s NBA career; we’re still not yet done with the first chapter. There’s a lot to like with him as a slasher. He does possess the type of down-the-paint quickness scorers need, and he can finish well among the trees. Here’s another good clip where he draws a shooting foul. And while his jump shot inside does look fine now, he is not yet displaying the range necessary for a modern perimeter player. But for what he’s gone through this season, I think we needn’t be too harsh yet; let’s celebrate for now.

I am not part of Toronto’s coaching staff, but I do have a few ways of at least providing a reasonable prediction. Firstly, I assume the starters will make it: Kyle Lowry, DeMar DeRozan, OG Anunoby, Serge Ibaka, and Jonas Valanciunas. That was the easy part. Who else? I’ll assume that who the coaching staff trusts in the clutch minutes of the game will roughly correspond to who they’ll trust in the playoffs. You can see the bench player who sticks out right away: Fred VanVleet, who’s fourth in total clutch minutes. After that it’s Pascal Siakim and Delon Wright — there’s your backup point guard, wing, and big already.

That’s a solid 8-man rotation, but as you can see last playoffs, they arguably used 9-to-10 guys with a significant amount of minutes. If I had to add one more in, I’d say it’s Jakob Poeltl, or perhaps it’ll be CJ Miles based on the match-up. When they have a series where they can go big, they’ll use Jakob; when they go small, Miles. Also, I could see, based on performance, Pascal getting behind Poeltl in the rotation. They have many options, and I don’t even think Toronto truly knows what it’ll do yet.

This is a fun little one. Both guys play the same position, roughly, for the Thunder, and one has been making a ton of press while the other is still somewhat unknown. If you’re talking about this season, then yes, Jerami Grant has been more effective. Carmelo Anthony has been hugely inefficient, doesn’t pass, and is a poor defender. Grant has been taking on a smaller role, but he’s well above average on efficiency and a plus on defense to boot. I wouldn’t pay too much attention to their raw plus-minus scores — Carmelo plays with the starters, and his only asset as a player at this point, scoring, has taken a dive because he hasn’t been hitting shots. Going forward, I could see Grant’s numbers regressing a little, but Carmelo is old enough that I would not be optimistic there. It’s quite possible that Grant will be more effective from here on out, no matter how famous Carmelo is.

Luckily, you’re not the first person who’s wondered this. Back in 2015, Mike Honkasalo studied this question and found that, yes, LeBron James indeed was getting fewer triple-doubles than expected for his averages — he was getting stuck on nine assists often, for example. (Unfortunately, the images have been lost to the sands of time, but you can find an archive of it here.)

Next: Stating the case for every Coach of the Year candidate

But that was back in 2015. Has anything changed? It appears so. I looked at every game he had with at least nine in every category and compared that to his total triple-doubles as a ratio for a basic check. From 2016 to the present, that ratio has been 0.66, which is in line with the other triple-double kings of the modern era (Magic Johnson, Jason Kidd, and Russell Westbrook.) Before 2015? That ratio was 0.53. That’s not terrible though; Larry Bird’s was 0.49. You can see in the histogram below that while he’s had few games with exactly 10 assists, he has a large number of 11 and more.

So I’d say he’s not significantly under-performing for his triple-double totals anymore — that under-performance is being saved for the defensive end now.