The morning after a devastating loss either brings hope for a new day, or constant nagging second thoughts about everything you had hoped would be true. This morning brought nothing but the latter to this fan. Advanced stats etc. from Game 1 after the jump.
Here's our handy new advanced stat tracker, enjoy, but don't look too closely at the defensive numbers.
Let's take a step back and think about what happened last night. I came up with a list of things that truly concern me after game 1:
- Offense over defense: In our conference call with Eddie Jordan shortly after he was hired I asked him if he'd base playing time on offensive performance over defense. He hemmed and hawed and didn't really answer. My concern is that Speights' offensive explosion last night will be looked at through that filter only, and not through the filter of a -12 in +/-. Speights wasn't the only guy to blame on defense, and as I said before, the effort was there. Jordan didn't overtly do anything out of order at the C position (other than sitting Sammy with 2 fouls for all but 1 minute of the second quarter), but Speights is not ready to be the full-time center on this team, mainly because the Sixers don't have enough overall offensive talent to allow teams to score in triple digits regularly and be a winning team.
- Center of the offense: Even when the team was playing well, in the first 12 minutes, far too much of the offense was dependent on Sammy. I'm all for giving him token touches, but he shouldn't be handling the ball more than Elton Brand, I don't care how gimpy Elton Brand is. Sammy attempted 8 shots in 15 minutes of work. Brand attempted 7 in 25. That's out of whack.
- Brand on offense: The aggression was there on offense early, but was the lift? I don't know. I didn't see enough of him to make an honest appraisal, but I'm still not feeling comfortable about what I've seen. The team should've gone to him on the blocks with Ryan Anderson checking him, and they should've punished Orlando for using Howard to double 10-15 feet away from the hoop. They did neither.
- Brand on defense: Ryan Anderson was 4/7 from three and I don't think he even had a hand in his face for any of the 7 attempts. Brand's interior defense was fundamentally sound, and made an impact, but he was loathe to follow his man outside the lane. This will be an issue against any team with a four who can extend to three-point range (a trend in the league these days). Brand needs to be able to defend inside and out on players like Anderson (and Rashard Lewis) especially.
- Defensive philosophy: I've now watched 48 minutes of regular season basketball, 96 minutes of preseason hoops in person and I still have no idea what their defensive philosophy is. More importantly, I don't see how it's changed to correct the flaws from last season, namely three-point defense. The Magic are the best 3pt team in the league, and last night they were especially hot (55.2% on 29 attempts), you don't expect a team to hit that high of a percentage even if every attempt is wide open. The problem isn't the result so much as the anecdotal evidence. For most of those shots they were wide open. Help and doubling came from the wrong people, at the wrong times and the rotations were slow, sloppy or nonexistent. Randy Ayers is supposed to be a defensive guru, he has the personnel, so what's the problem?
- Rotations, rotations, rotations: The Sixers' depth is questionable. Even if it was a little more clear exactly how the bench players will produce, I still don't want to see five of them on the floor at the same time in a close game. One of Andre Iguodala, Thad Young or Elton Brand must be on the floor at all times. No exceptions until someone really steps up from the bench or one of these three proves he can't handle the responsibility.
- Slow down Iguodala: He started last season in the same frenetic way. Trying to do too much, not letting the game come to him. He's going to be fine. He's going to be more than fine in this role, we just need him to settle down and play his game. We aren't going to win many games with him shooting 3/11 from the floor and making poor decisions with the ball.
- Go small: Coming into the season I was worried Jordan would rely on a small lineup too much (with Brand at the 5). Last night, he used it for a total of two-and-a-half minutes. That's unacceptable, especially considering what was happening in the flow of the game. With Anderson torching the Sixers from the outside, he should've found a way to get Thad to the 4 to stick with him. He could've used Kapono or Carney as the extra "small" and been much better prepared to rotate on the perimeter. Perhaps he didn't want to stick Brand on Howard, but Howard only played 28 minutes, there was ample opportunity to at least try this out. Orlando doesn't have much size at the four, the small lineup could've matched up well.
- Kapono shoots, that's all he does: Granted, the game was out of hand anyway, but in the fourth quarter on at least three occasions, the Sixers got out on the break with Jason Kapono trailing the play. Each time, they drove the ball into the lane (the correct move). Each time, Jason Kapono found his way to the three-point line, wide open (the correct move). Each time, Orlando packed the lane with every available defender (the correct move). Each time, the Sixer controlling the ball tried to score one-on-two or one-on-three at the rim (the incorrect move). When Kapono is in the game and you get the ball on the break, he should be your number two option. Number one is an uncontested dunk, number two is Kapono for an open three.
- The big three: In Washington, Jordan was able to spread the shots out between his three most-productive players. For the Sixers, that should be Iguodala, Thad and Brand (until further notice on Brand). I didn't see enough of a effort to work the ball to those guys in the offense. This was the first game, and I seriously question how much of the offense has been properly installed, so you can't kill Jordan yet. But this is definitely something I'm going to keep an eye on.
That about covers it. Leave your thoughts and concerns in the comments.
As I understand it, the PO features the ball moving through the center, so it shouldn't be too surprising that Sam's getting the touches. Sam should just be savvy about what's a good percentage shot for him to take and be careful with his passes.
I wish I had tape of the Wizards to see if Haywood was handling the ball more than Jamison. For some reason, I doubt it.
I think your #5 point (defense) is the biggest concern for me. You won't have any chance at all allowing 16 made 3s (which as you said were mostly wide open) and it wasn't as if they let up all those threes but at least shut down Howard, who still got his points. And this was without last year's leader in 3 pointers made in the lineup (Rashard Lewis).
They had no clear defensive mandate. Just five guys running around freelancing and not doing a good job of it. Pitiful.
I did not watch the complete game. But in the 1st quarter, I saw Thad's guy wide open several times shooting from the outside. That concerns me, no one w/in 15 feet of him. Am I missing something? I thought we played 1 on 1 with each person defending a guy? And, if we cannot shoot average, we will not win no matter what we do.
I saw the same disappointing team as last year. Honestly, no difference as game 5 in the playoffs. Glad my Phillies won!
Overall, their offense was ugly, but they didn't shoot poorly at all. In fact, even when Orlando was blowing their doors off in the second quarter they were still scoring (thanks mostly to speights).
The problem was defense, and it wasn't purely on Thad or anyone other player, it was a team failure that starts w/ the head coach, then goes to the defensive guru.
I can't believe there is no comment about Jason Williams in either of these weak blogs. It's clear you didn't even watch the game. You were too busy watching the Yanks getting spanked. Jwil took the game over and put it out of reach by the end of the half. The guy had 14 points, 5 assists in only 14 minutes. He was 4-4 from field, 3-3 from Downtown and shot 100% at the foul line. When all was said and done, the Magic scored 70 points in the first half.
I wouldn't be so hard on the Sixers. They just finished playing the best team in the NBA. Orlando went undefeated this preseason and so far are invincible in the regular season. And with arguably the most exciting point guard to ever play the game coming off the bench, I expect them to annihilate all competition.
behindthebacksports.com still lives!
Brian,
Good analysis. I did see most of the game. (I find baseball too stressful to watch when I care who wins.)
I'm not surprised by Speights' poor +/-. Where do you get those stats? I made a half-hearted effort to find +/- stats this afternoon, because I wanted to see if Speights was better or worse than Dalembert. I suspect he was worse even though many comments on Philly.com raved about Speights' play.
I was most concerned with the play of Brand. I thought he looked old and slow. I hope that's not all there is to Elton Brand.
My second concern was for the horrible defensive effort. I'm not knowledgeable enough to figure out what their defensive philosophy was, but whatever it was, they didn't do it well.
I'm hoping they do better tomorrow night. I should get more insight watching in person than on TV.
Plus/minus stats are affected by who you are on the court with; when Spioeghts first came in for Sam the starters were still on the floor and it was back and forth for both teams.I will be the first to rip him for lack of defensive effort but not last night.He tried hard to defend Howard one on one, an impossible task, and had a nice weakside block,he wasn!t the problem, the fact that we played Howard straight up most of the time and still gave up open threes is all about effort and having a gameplan,so we better hope they do.
This is a good point, and it's also a reason why I chose to track rotations etc. (by the way, you can see +/- stats on ESPN box scores, or yahoo sports box scores).
So let's take a look at the rotations from game one and see how Speights performed with each lineup he was part of:
So some interesting trends here.
So when Speights played with 2 or more starters (roughly 17 minutes), he had a +/- of -1. The team fell to pieces when he was out there with the second string. Pretty interesting splits when you break it down like this.
Personally, I think this further supports my theory that Speights plays up/down to the other players on the floor. Play him with starters, against starters, he remains focused on both ends of the floor. He may get beat on defense, but the effort is there. Play him with scrubs, against scrubs, and all he cares about is getting shots up.
That's a really intriguing hypothesis. We know Speights certainly can play pretty good defense. We've seen flashes of great defense/rebounding in the past. He's just really inconsistent with it, more often only half-hearted about it. It's probably not good for him to be on a team where he sees a lot of half-hearted effort out at the perimeter (he might be too willing to think, "if they're not chasin, why should i?").
It'd be interesting to observe the games to see if that's a real correlation. What exactly gets his defensive motor sparked and gunning? Is it the Sam Treatment (feed the dog and he'll guard the yard)?
I think if you could accurately answer that question, you'd have a future as a sports psychologist. For the time being, this is definitely something to keep an eye on. Like I said in my wrap, I thought the effort was there for Speights in this game. As for the defensive results, well, there's not a whole lot anyone can do against Howard except foul him when he has an open dunk.
The Bucks don't have any superheroes on their team, so I'm really looking forward to seeing the effort level tonight. I think it's not only about who Speights is playing with, but who he's playing against that dictates his activity level on the defensive end.
Good analysis, Brian...this is similar to the data from last season on 82games.com, which very clearly suggested that Speights is a different player when he is out there with the starters than when he is out there with mostly reserves.
Simple answer - start him.
Well, more important is how the starting rotation performs with him in it, rather than how he performs in the starting lineup. If they're +50 with Dalembert and even with Speights, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to put Speights in just because he personally performs better with that group.
This wasn't the case last night, but it was the case last year.
A little different situation last season, in that Brand was not around...and the question was should Speights start over Willie G. and his impact numbers with the starters versus the bench guys could be looked at in that context. With Brand back in the mix, it is now a Speights vs. Sammy decision and, of course, if Sammy's +/- with the starters is higher than Speights, then that is another thing entirely.
My concern is that the decision on whether to start Sammy or Speights will be - at least in part - decided by factors other than +/-...which concerns me. This team does not have THAT much talent that we can keep somebody in the starting linup that is not as good as somebody who is on the bench (even forgetting the player development benefit that Speights gets from the minutes)...this isn't Iavaroni versus Bobby Jones...or bringing Manu off the bench...to keep Sammy out there because he loses some perceived "trade value" if he doesn't start...or because they are concerned that he'll sulk and not be effective off the bench...I don't think the team has that luxury.
If the numbers show that Sammy is a better starter than Speights, I will respectfully back down...but I sure would like to give it a shot and see what happens.
Completely agree that it has to be about which is the best lineup, maybe to be more accurate, which combination results in the best team (speights' scoring may really be needed off the bench, you may just need to get him in better rotations from that role). I don't care about sulking and that other stuff, and I'd hope the team doesn't either. To this point, I believe the team is better with Sammy out there, and the numbers back it up. If those numbers reverse, then absolutely start Speights.
from what I've read three point defence was a big problem for Jordan's Washington teams.
It's early, so I'm not going to get on the "should've brought in a defensive coach" soapbox yet, but man I'm itching to.
Definitely too early to make any conclusions after one game.
Just add 3 pt defense to the list of potential concerns and areas to watch. along with a whole litany of other things (which is the case for most non-elite teams entering a new season.)