Co-Opting Marc Gasol

Yesterday, our own Grady O’Brien dissected some action the Blazers like to run to free LaMarcus Aldridge up to create from his favorite area: the left block. As Grady showed, however, even when Portland’s action was crisp in their 91-85 loss to Memphis, good looks were hard to come by. It was hard not to notice one bearded seven-foot reason why that was the case.

The havoc Marc Gasol wreaked on Wednesday is the kind of thing that hoops nerds live for and is the exact reason analytics gurus are up nights attempting to quantify defensive impact. 

Marc Gasol Shot Chart (Courtesy nba.com/stats)On the offensive end, Gasol put together an efficient night, finishing with 23 points on 10-of-17 from the field. This was made all the more impressive considering the Grizzlies were playing without Zach Randolph, causing Gasol to set up on the low block far more often than his favored location at the elbow. While Gasol finished with only 3 assists, he routinely found cutters and spot up shooters with passes that many other centres can not make.

On the defensive end, Gasol blew up pick and rolls, forced bigs off the block, and generally made life miserable for every Blazer on the court. 

LaMarcus Aldridge Shot Chart (Courtesy nba.com/stats)LaMarcus Aldridge had a terrible shooting night, finishing with 10 points on 2-of-13 from the field, for his third lowest scoring output of the season. While Aldridge certainly missed some shots that he routinely makes, Gasol forced him to set up further and further from the hoop, and—on this night at least—Aldridge seemed willing to give up that territory.

Aldridge did finish the game with 6 assists, and as Grady’s post demonstrated, he did a great job of setting up on the left side and finding teammates. However, notice how far from the hoop LaMarus is in those situations. 

Let’s take a look at two possessions from the fourth quarter that illustrate how differently the two big men operate on the block. 

First, here is Aldridge fighting for position after an offensive rebound. Notice how he starts at the elbow and by the time he accepts the entry pass he is closer to the three-point line. Aldridge does a good job of regaining this position as he backs down, but Gasol crowds him and makes it impossible to get a shot off. Aldridge, to his credit, out hustles Gasol for the offensive rebound and is rewarded with free throws.

This is the kind of defence Aldridge had to deal with the entire game, and it clearly forced him out of his comfort zone. At the same time Gasol was able to move around the court and establish deep post position on many occasions. 

In the following clip, Gasol starts on the weak side and walks JJ Hickson into the post for an easy look. At this point Hickson is at least battling, on a subsequent possession JJ gave up deep position to Gasol on the left block and it resulted in free throws—simply inexcusable.

Gasol accomplishes all of this by knowing where he is on the court at all times and using his body—rather than his athleticism—to create opportunities on both ends.

While Gasol plays physically, he doesn’t chase rebounds without first boxing his man out, he defends the pick and roll masterfully and rarely gambles for steals or blocks. 

The Blazers’ bigs should all steal a page from Marc Gasol’s playbook, the team would be better off for it. 

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New Roster and Some Programming Notes

Regular readers here at PRS know that it’s been a year of transition for the blog. In the months since I took over as the owner and publisher, life has done what it does. Our former editor, Andrew Tonry, is sunning himself in Los Angeles, drinking at the great Happy Hour in the Sky for former hoops bloggers. He is joined by many others of his ilk. Opportunity and necessity has come calling for our other contributors, whose work you’ll no doubt see for a long time yet. In short, it was time for the blog to turn a new leaf. Today, we’re taking the first step.

I’m thrilled to announce approximately one million new contributors to the Society, who. I’ll introduce below. They hail from far and wide, Blazers fans and NBA agnostics, X-and-O wizards and hoops newshounds. To my everlasting chagrin, there is a Duke graduate. They are united in a love of hoops and an unfashionable intense desire to share it. Without further adieu, they are:

Cole Patty: Cole was lucky enough to sit on Muhammad Ali’s lap as a little kid, and he knew at a young age his life wouldn’t get much cooler than that. When it comes to specific team fandom, he is as lost in the NBA as Bon Iver is in the woods. When it comes down to it, Cole enjoys watching the entire NBA. Then he enjoys writing and talking about the league during his free time.

Mark Levesque: Mark is an Portland native and soon to be graduate of the University of Oregon. A life-long sports fan, Mark was the guy in high school who figured out how to stream March Madness games into the classroom which may or may not have have contributed to a deteriorating relationship with his history teacher. He aspires to one day follow in the footsteps of Duke basketball legend, Brian Zoubek, and open a cream puff shop.

Joel Gunderson: Joel grew up a die-hard Blazer fan; he even locked myself in his room after the 2000 Western Conference Finals for two days. He’s not ashamed to admit it. Nowadays, he lives with his wife and daughter in Gresham, where he is pursuing his degree in journalism. He is devoting his life to covering sports, because lord knows he wasn’t good enough to actually play them.

Sunny Ahluwalia: As a self-diagnosed hoops addict, Sunny has been fortunate enough to contribute here, log video for Synergy Sports, and cover British Columbia basketball for northpolehoops.com. While his background is in economics, his passion is unequivocally for basketball and specifically for Xs and Os.  He’s located just outside of Vancouver, BC and he travels to Portland often as it’s not only his favorite city, but also the closest NBA town.  He apologizes in advance for his spelling of the word centre…it’s apparently a Canadian thing.

Joe Swide: Raised in Southwest Portland, Joe has been a Trail Blazer expat living in Seattle since 2006. He graduated from the University of Washington in 2010 and since then has been making vintage athletic clothing for Ebbets Field Flannels. His interests include the 1998-99 Blazers’ bench, Plains Indian history, and tacos. He once high-fived Jake Voskuhl.

Grady O’Brien: Grady’s biggest love is human professional basketball. He went to Duke University where he majored in History and Music while also playing roughly 10,000 hours of pick-up basketball at the gym (imagine a 5’10”, 140-pound version of Rip Hamilton). He feels compelled to tell you that he has an obsessive love of chocolate.

There will be other contributors. From time to time you will see Jeremy Conlin, a contributor to TrueHoop Network blogs ClipperBlog and HoopSpeak, and the work of Jacob Schraer, a freelance Portland scribe who has written on the Blazers and on books for the Mercury. As you can see, PRS now boasts a tremendous depth of talent and character, and we aim for nothing less than to become one-stop reading for all things Blazers.

More changes are coming, but it’s time to get to work with the new team. Don’t be shy about dropping us a line at portlandroundballsociety [at] gmail [dot] com if there is something more you want out of your Blazers coverage. We hope you’re as excited as we are.

Portland's "Triangle"

LaMarcus Aldridge loves the left block. If you don’t believe me you can look at the numbers. Aldridge takes 15.3 percent of all his shots from the left-side area between the low and high post. He’s effective, too, shooting 42.7 percent from this range. Clearly, any play to get him a touch here is a smart move by the Blazers. Despite taking a tough loss in Memphis Wednesday night, they showcased some sets that let Aldridge operate from his cherished spot.

The first play actually ended up not working, but could be a smart set when used correctly. Damian Lillard brings the ball up and passes it to Will Barton in corner. Lillard then sets a screen for Aldridge, who is standing at about the free-throw line, in order to get him position down low. 

Barton’s job is to now make the entry pass to Aldridge who can either continue a drive or use the position, ideally with Lillard’s defender switched onto him. Rather unfortunately, Barton did not make a great pass and Memphis’ manic turnover forcing defense (2nd highest opponent turnover rate in the league) gets to the ball before Aldridge. 

The reason this play could be promising is because instead of Barton, Wesley Matthews can be put in the corner position. Matthews is a 39.1 percent 3-point shooter and converts a startling 50 percent from the left corner (Barton shoots 14 percent from 3). Add in the fact that the 3-man unit of Aldridge-Lillard-Matthews sports an offensive rating of 105.4, which would rank 10th in the league and far better than Portland’s overall 102.5, and this combination would seem advantageous. 

Portland utilized another triangle-like set last night that actually resulted in a couple of baskets. In the play below, Aldridge has the ball on the left side, pretty close to the corner. J.J. Hickson will set a back screen for the entry man, Nic Batum. Batum the fades to the top of the key for a potential 3-point look, a shot he makes at a 37-percent clip.

With the defense paying attention to Batum, Hickson will make an aggressive slip to the basket where Aldridge finds him underneath (with quite a nice pass) for an easy basket.

The Blazers obviously felt good about this set because they used it just a few possessions later with a slight variation. This time they had Wes Matthews enter the ball and take the screen from Hickson. Except instead of fading out along the 3-point line, Matthews made a hard cut down the lane.

Ed Davis gets caught out of position and again Aldridge is able to make a deft pass leading to another shot at the rim.

These last two sets remind one a little bit of what the Lakers allowed Pau Gasol to do when they won their championsihps. It’s no surprise that when you have a skilled big man, putting the ball in his hands to pass or turn and score in his favorite place is a solid primary strategy. It helped in particular last night because with Marc Gasol defending him, Aldridge shot just 2-13, so he needed to distribute in order to be effective offensively. The Blazers will meet Memphis’ stingy defense twice more this season, so perhaps we will see a few of these plays again. 

Neil Olshey at Sloan Sports Analtyics Conference

I spent the weekend in Boston at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, catching up on the cutting edge of advanced stats, metrics and tracking. So did Neil Olshey. TrueHoop’s Kevin Arnovitz sat down with Neil at the conference to talk about the role analytics play in an organziation and Neil’s own experiences with them. Here’s part one:

Part two on the limits of analytics, and the role a GM should have as a daily presence:

Breaking Down the Trade for Eric Maynor

Leading up to the trade deadline, the Blazers were relatively quiet among the rumored moves, with the possibility of moving J.J. Hickson for a draft pick the only serious option. However, minutes before the deadline, Neil Olshey completed an unexpected move, acquiring Eric Maynor from the Thunder in exchange for a trade exception and the rights to Giorgio Printezis. It’s a smart move involving virtually zero risk, which gives the Blazers more options both throughout the remainder of the 2012-13 season and this summer.

It’s no secret that the backup point-guard position has been the biggest flaw on a Blazers roster that is full of them. Ronnie Price and Nolan Smith have formed a tandem of uselessness that has not only rendered the team utterly unwatchable when Damian Lillard was off the floor, but forced Lillard to play close to the most minutes in the league as a rookie. Price was waived to make room on the roster for Maynor, and I’m hard-pressed to find anything I’ll miss about him.

Maynor has been pretty awful this season as well, falling out of the Thunder’s rotation completely and losing minutes backing up Russell Westbrook to Reggie Jackson. But Maynor is coming off a torn ACL that sidelined him most of last season, which largely explains his dropoff in production. Unlike Smith, he’s proven in the past that he’s at least capable of playing a solid backup point. In his last full season with the Thunder in 2010-11, he appeared in all 82 games and averaged 10.4 points and 7.1 assists per 36 minutes while shooting 38.5 percent from three-point range.

What Maynor gives the Blazers this season is irrelevant. As the clock ticks on the season and their currently losing streak continues, they’re likely out of the playoff hunt at this point, and Maynor won’t change that. Dumping Hickson for a pick would have gone further in positioning Portland for the draft lottery, but since that deal apparently wasn’t there to be made, they’re essentially staying the course with a slight short-term upgrade at their weakest position, albeit one that won’t make a big enough difference to impact their record in any meaningful way.

The significance of the Maynor acquisition is the options he gives the Blazers this summer. Assuming they extend him the $3.4 million qualifying offer, he will be a restricted free agent. Given how he’s underperformed this year the correlating vanishing of his minutes in Oklahoma City, it’s doubtful he’ll get any sort of offer on the market that the Blazers wouldn’t be comfortable matching. If Maynor takes the qualifying offer, the Blazers will have a cheap, serviceable backup point guard locked up for next season. It’s also possible that Olshey could negotiate a multi-year deal for Maynor at a lower per-year figure. And in the unlikely event that Maynor gets an offer from another team that Portland doesn’t want to match, owning his Bird rights and the right to match any offer gives them leverage to collect future assets or picks in a sign-and-trade deal. It’s certainly more realistic to picture someone giving up a second-round pick in a sign-and-trade for Maynor than it is for Nolan Smith, Luke Babbitt, or any of the other free agents-to-be on Portland’s roster.

Outside of trading Hickson, this was essentially the best-case scenario for what Olshey could have reasonably hoped to pull off at the deadline. Maynor cost next to nothing to acquire, gives Portland a controllable asset to either keep or use in a future move, and is in all likelihood significantly better than either of the team’s other current options to back up Lillard. There is absolutely no downside to making this move from the Blazers’ perspective, and Olshey took advantage of the opportunity for no-risk improvement when it presented itself to him.

Suns 102-Blazers 98: "Nothing is Slipping Away"

After dropping their sixth straight loss, this one at home to the worst team in the Western conference, the Blazers are uncharacteristically out of lockstep.  “We’re running out of time,” said Damian Lillard after the game. “Nothing is slipping away,” Terry Stotts told reporters.

It’s dangerous to read too much into canned post-loss quotes, but these Blazers have built their season on a foundation of charismatic, willful ignorance. They have long been swimming against the tide of perception and metric analysis to churn out the sort of improbable win they couldn’t quite come up with Tuesday night. A huge part of this has been the team’s insistence on irrational confidence, an unearned equipoise that has allowed the team to take for granted what nobody else even thought possible. As the realities of their season start to take mathematical form, however, that sense of unity may be threatened.

Tonight’s game was the sort of effort that has served as the anchor on any expectations for the season. The Blazers ran up a twelve point deficit in the game’s opening minutes and let the Suns shoot better than 60% from the field in the first half.  Goran Dragic had ten of his career-high eighteen assists in the first quarter, and it’s possible that a Phoenix big man was not boxed out until sometime early in the third quarter. This felt like a few other Blazers losses that have served as inflection points, except with the added grimness of looming schedule inevitability.

Before the game, the mood was predictably rested and energetic in the arena. Nic Batum showed off a Cancun sunburn, and Terry Stotts and I talked about the difference in physicality between different eras in the league. After the game, the mood was as subdued as it has been all season. It was as pronounced an emotional whiplash as I’ve experienced, and Stotts’ postgame presser was telling. As usual, the coach was professionally euphemistic and diplomatic in his responses, but his tone and face belied the text of his remarks. He seemed unusually worn out, even paused for a moment to lightly admonish a reporter for a phone noise during the conference. There was a sense of fraying and weariness, but even still, he stuck to the script that has served the team so well.

Nicolas Batum, typically one of the more candid and secure post-game interviews gave a stone-faced “no” when asked if the playoffs were slipping away. Unexplained, monosyllabic answers aren’t the norm for Nic, and it was clear that he was protesting too much, treating the very idea as a transgression even as the Blazers fell four games below .500 and another game behind Houston for the 8 seed.

Lillard alone among those I listened to acknowledged the reality: “We need to be going uphill, and right now we’re falling more games below .500. With 25 wins, we need to start winning some games now.” I don’t put too much stock in the difference between this response and Batum’s or Stotts’, except to say that the Blazers risk a fractious lame-duck portion of the season as the losses pile up.

Perhaps the greatest thing the Blazers’ wins have afforded them is protection. Protection from a media that presses a little harder on individual players when the losses blend together. Protection from acknowledging the serious talent deficiencies of the roster. I’m not being glib; I really believe that for a young team in the early stages of an organizational cycle, there is an incalculable value to the security that comes from winning. You feel capable, and your faith in your ability to prepare is strengthened with every win.  But if the Blazers can’t right themselves quickly, the question of a playoff chase will quickly become moot as they struggle to keep the team from fissuring in the absence of belief. Because whether the Blazers’ hopes this season have been rational or not, they have been hopes, and they’re in danger of being rudely dashed. 

The Pick or the Playoffs? Thoughts for the Stretch Run

The Blazers have spent their season resisting definition. Oscillating between stretches of shocking competitiveness and desultory losses, this team has refused to declare its true nature or intentions.  But it’s February 19, and that means they don’t have much choice any longer. Whether by decisive action or relative stasis, the Blazers have eight weeks to cement the descriptors by which they’ll be remembered.

The two biggest issues are the playoffs and the pick. Really, they’re two sides of the same question. The Blazers sit three games out of 8^th place in the West today, having lost five straight before the All-Star break blessedly helped them pump the brakes.  It’s an uphill climb into playoff contention—Hollinger’s Playoff Odds have the Blazers at less than 8%, behind both the Lakers and the Mavericks—and for some fans, even attempting to make that climb seems like a bad idea.

The reason is this year’s playoff pick, which the Blazers owe to the Bobcats if they end up with a pick lower than 12^th. My sense is that most fans would be comfortable punting on the pick if it were a guarantee that the Blazers would make the playoffs, but the chance of the team finishing just short of the 8 seed and still losing the draft pick is too much to swallow. I understand this thinking, but my strong sense is that the organization disagrees with it; barring a surprising J.J. Hickson trade within the next few days, I think the Blazers believe it’s in their best interest to keep trying to win as much as possible.

Often lost in this discussion is the fact that, should the Blazers retain their first-round pick this year, they would owe it to Charlotte next year. So the question is not, then, whether the Blazers are best served by falling just short of the playoffs—it’s whether a pick in the 12-14 range this year is more valuable than one, presumably, in next year’s 10-20 range. Discussing draft scenarios in the future, I am begging for complicating factors to make me look like a fool, but at present it seems the Blazers have their choice of picks with roughly equal value, and they have to give up one. So then the question becomes: is there any reason it’s better to have a first-round pick this year and not next?

I say no, for a few reasons. First, of course, there is the fact that this year’s talent pool is apparently shallower than usual. Even setting that aside though, I’d argue that the Blazers may be at a better point to add a mid-round talent next offseason than this.

The Blazers’ biggest needs are back-court scorers and centers. In both cases, one of each may be on today’s roster in nascent form; Meyers Leonard and Will Barton have not been best-case scenarios, but neither has done enough to dissuade the organization that they could be important rotation contributors in a few seasons. With cap space for this offseason and several potential fits at the Blazers’ areas of need, the Blazers may well be improving regardless of how they draft.

Further, whether they draft this year or next, it is unlikely they’ll be finding an instant contributor. If this proves to be the case, I say it’s preferable to be nurturing talent along on a team a year further along in the winning process. The Blazers have every reason to believe they’ll be making a run at the playoffs next year, and raw talent on a steep development curve has a little more value to a team that doesn’t so desperately need an infusion of production. Put it this way: if the Blazers were starting a Kosta Koufos-type player this year, how much more secure would you feel about Meyers Leonard’s presence? I feel most confident about a mid-round talent on a team with a more stable culture and roster, so I don’t see any reason this year’s pick is preferable to next.

All of which is a long way of saying that I think we’re in for eight more weeks of ambush wins and tightly contested games. I just can’t really see a reason why the Blazers don’t keep exerting maximum organizational effort. The myth of tanking’s magic has taken on water in the past few seasons, but even so we exist in a climate where blowing a team up is the preferred hypothetical to unspectacular results. But the Blazers have proven themselves closer to health than many would have predicted,  and it may be that there is no dramatic reveal of the team’s true character in store. In fact, given the way the season has played out to this point, staying the course may well prove the most exciting possible conclusion to this year.     

Terry Stotts and the End of Dogma

I was preparing a mild-mannered little game and stretch-run preview this morning when I read an article by Jordan Brenner of ESPN the Magazine that brought my writing to a needle-on-vinyl halt. It’s an in-depth profile of the Blazers’ newly beefed-up analytics operations, and Terry Stotts’ role in them. It has been widely known, or at least widely whispered, that Stotts is at the cutting edge of pro hoops in his adoption of advanced metrics, but Brenner’s article articulates exactly how uncommon that is, and how uniquely the Blazers translate data to the hardwood. 

Brenner’s piece is online in full for Insiders, but there is one passage that stuck out to me in particular. The Blazers’ basketball analytics manager Ben Falk is discussing how to create a game plan against the ferocious defense of the Pacers, when the Blazers find an unlikely source of points:

“Normally the midrange two-pointer is one of the least efficient shots in basketball. An analytically proficient offense would instead generate attempts at the rim and open corner three-pointers (the corner three is a 39 percent shot over the past five seasons; other threes are just 35 percent). But the Pacers are the best defensive team in the league, particularly in the metrics that matter. They rank first in effective field goal percentage, allow the second-fewest shots at the rim and give up the second-fewest corner threes. Falk knows that basketball is a game of constantly shifting probabilities, so tonight the Blazers go against the stats. “Baseline percentages are only broad summaries,” he says. “They may not always apply for a lot of reasons, including the other team’s scheme and personnel. Against a team like Indiana, getting open shots for the right shooters, even if they are in midrange, can be a better-percentage play than forcing a tough shot at the rim.”

Stotts goes on from this realization to develop a practice around big men taking mid-range jumpshots off the “half-roll” rather than going hard at the rim—a seamless translation of data to actual practice. But the real reason I’m so drawn to this anecdote is that it shows a total, heartening disregard for dogma on the part of organization. In the constant climate of disagreement that forms online, stats loyalists and more metric-skeptical observers rarely move outside their trenches and beyond their strawmen to discuss the pragmatism of analysis. Lionel Hollins and Doug Collins are taken to the shed on Twitter for their stubbornness about analytics, while the other party crows about the deficiencies of catch-all metrics. Brenner’s article is a reminder of how pointless that debate is. 

The Blazers don’t look like the face of analytics, unless you want to say that Terry Stotts looks like a tall CPA, in which case I agree with you. They have “retreads” on the bench and a GM who does not carry the sexy MBA outsider shininess of the Cult of Morey. They are, in fact, built around a player in LaMarcus Aldridge whose mid-range proficiency seems to make him a kind of analytic Kryptonite. But as the article shows, the proper use of analysis is intellectual flexibility, not rigidity. It’s not as if the slide-ruler half of the organization is crowing at the personnel half to bench the guys with lower WARP; this is an entire organization dedicated to augmenting its talent with analysis. Yes, you want shots at the rim or from beyond the arc, but nimble minds use what they have at their disposal to find the shots that are actually available on the court, and sometimes those are seventeen footers.  

It’s almost comical how refreshing I find this article and its lessons. But it also goes some distance toward demystifying the Blazers’ performance this year. Analytics devotees and their detractors alike have conistently marveled at Portland’s over-performance this season, but the fluidity with which the team approaches knowledge explains why the organization isn’t so surprised. Most coaches, players, and fans are ideologues of one sort or another, but the Blazers know better, and they’re the only ones who saw this season coming.