The Thunder defense has been terrible this year. Everyone knows this. 104.9 DRtg (bottom half of the league) 8th worst in the league in opponents FTA/FGA. It has been ugly and lazy (looking at you Russ).
Let's look at some numbers. KD back and the world seems to have tilted back to its proper axis. That may be extreme but the Thunder certainly got back into a flow immediately. In his first game back from a strained hamstring, a minute restrictionless KD put in 30 minutes of clinical scoring then sat the entire fourth quarter. It was the absolute best outcome any Thunder fan could hope for. Take a gander at any Thunder blog around and you will feel the sigh of relief coming from Thunder fans. This is the team that beat San Antonio to start the season. This is no longer the team that struggled to score 80 against the Knicks at home.
A suddenly rejuvenated Thunder took it to Utah from the outset with a couple quick KD buckets, but it looked like this would be a back and forth game. I know I was certainly exasperated at the end of the first quarter when we went out only up 3. The second quarter is where the domination began, and it did so on the back of an all bench lineup. Trust me, I'm loathe to admit anything good can come from a 2015-16 Thunder bench lineup, but it did and it might continue to. With KD back in the equation and Billy coming to his senses the second unit has rounded itself out in a way everyone hoped it might. Morrow overtaking Singler, Waiters attempting to play intelligent basketball, and Collison being the voice that can keep Kanter under control defensively. This team was hamstrung in more ways than KD's leg. Rotations were out of whack. Players were playing minutes they didn't deserve. An allstar point guard stopped playing defense. It was an ugly period, but there is hope circling Thunder Alley. Justified hope.
I've done a lot of playing with stats in the recent days and have delved pretty deeply into VORP. VORP is an estimation of a player's value above a theoretical replacement. It's a fairly simple stat in baseball, all things considered. It is much more difficult to make an assumption as to the value of a theoretical replacement. A bunch of work was done by a bunch of smart guys that use a derivation of BPM to come up a player's value over replacement. This stat is interesting because it works in conjunction with salary (A player with twice the VORP will typically make twice the salary) and also is easily converted to wins attributed to said player. For these reasons as well as my work on predicting winners against the spread I've fallen into a trap of probably overvaluing the statistic. I'm not upset by this because it leads me to doing research such as this. I'm not convinced much will be learned from this but I find it interesting.
Oklahoma City Thunder. All the talent in the world, just lacking the originality and understanding of the drive required to be successful. The lack of originality isn't an indictment of in game play, but more of the coaching staff. The most noticeable issue is with the substitution patterns. I've thrown together a quick picture to help visualize the complete lack of originality in Coach Donovan's substitutions.
In last night's games my predictions went 4-2 with its failures coming in the OKC Memphis game and Dallas Philly. I'm not too upset with the failure in the Philly game. Dallas only beat Philly by 6 rather than the 8 projected by Vegas. No one in their right mind is betting on Philly this year so you throw that one out as bad luck and roll with it. The OKC Memphis game has me upset on a fan level and a personal level. I really need to start incorporating injuries into the predictions I'm making. No KD and Roberson is a recipe for disaster with this OKC team and we saw the disgusting results last night. I will try to come up with a way to accurately incorporate injuries.
How can a team take an 11 point lead in the middle of the third quarter and turn it into a fifteen point loss? How does a two point lead at the start of the fourth quarter dissolve into a 13 point deficit in a 5 minute 23 second span? Well, as a devout observer of Thunder basketball, it isn't a shocking turn of events. This has been the Thunder way for years. Usually, there is a magic KD and RW that can turn things around and grind out a victory. Usually there is superlative shot making and free throw drawing that can counteract these deficits. With Kevin Durant out and a stark lack of defense in the final 6:37, no victory would materialize.
After putting together the Layman metric I posted the top 100 current players based on career averages. I also spouted off some R^2 numbers that didn't necessarily mean a lot without being able to visualize the data. Google (of course) has come up with just about the niftiest free tool I've ever run across. Within their version of Excel in Google Docs there is a chart option called a Motion Chart that gives you an interactive scatter plot. These charts can be published and displayed on NBA blogs such as this allowing couch potato nerds to world over to interactively display their data.
After the break, I have posted a smart chart with cumulative stats for current players such as OWS, OBPM, USG%, TS%, and a couple of my custom metrics. Unfortunately, I do not believe there is a way to display trend lines and R^2 values with this chart, but visuals can tell us more than enough in many instances.
Tonight, I am interested in two games. Indiana vs Orlando and Golden State vs Detroit. Looking at the results so far this season I'm not inclined to think GSW will cover the 13 point spread they are facing tonight. VORP has so far shown to be the best predictor of point spread in games, and there is a relatively small differential between these two teams in that statistic (0.5). We see a 1.2 differential in both the CHI vs PHI and MEM vs LAC games tonight. I'd expect to see greater MOV's by CHI and LAC than GSW tonight.
Sorrowful that there is no Morrow. Come on Billy. I don't know what stats are being used to justify Singler over Morrow, but something has to change. Every single possible statistic says Singler shouldn't be on the floor.
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