Let's talk about Ben McLemore some more. Some called him the best prospect in the draft. Most of the way through his rookie season, impatient Kings fans are already dangling the dreaded B word. Where did we go so wrong?
I'm not going to tell you where, but I think I might know when. December 7th, 2013 is the date we're looking for. Let's go back in time for a minute to that fateful day... <-- time travel ellipse
Totals for the first 18 games of the season:
181 points (10ppg)
59 rebounds (3.3rpg)
18 assists (1apg)
18 TO (1topg)
16 steals (0.9spg)
4 blocks (0.2bpg)
170 shots taken and 64 shots made (38% fg)
81 3s taken and 28 3s made (35% 3pt)
30 FTs taken and 25 FTs made (83% ft)
18 games, 436 mins (24mpg)
Nothing here looks particularly bad, especially for a rookie playing his first month of NBA ball. You'd like to see those percentages come up, but 18 games is a pretty small sample size in any circumstances and even more so for a player who took 48% of his shots from behind the three point line. At this point in the season I don't think there was anything to be alarmed about. If anything, the signs were looking good. Since Williams joined the team he and Ben had sparked some instant chemistry (an understanding shared perhaps only by players who live above the rim) and Ben's averages were up for that 5 game span: 13.4pts 4.4reb 1.6ast 1.8stl. This includes consecutive performances of 20pts 6rebs and 15pts 9rebs on the Dec 6th to 7th home/away back-to-back against the Lakers and Jazz.
So what happened? Ben's minutes didn't get cut, at least not until January when such a move was entirely justified. Okay, why pretend. We all know what happened. The Rudy Gay trade happened and Isaiah Thomas moved into the starting lineup to replace the departed Greivis Vasquez. This gives me an opportunity to test out a little pet theory I've been developing regarding McLemore and Williams' lack of production this season. I'll call it the...
10 shot standard.
Before the Rudy Gay trade, Ben McLemore played in 18 games and he took at least 10 shots in 10 of those games. (55%). Why am I using 10 as the standard? It's a nice big round number and easy to identify on game logs. Since the Rudy Gay trade, Ben McLemore has played in 49 games and has taken at least 10 shots only 12 times (24%). Sidenote here -- only JT, IT, and Ben have played in all 67 games for us this season. That's a pretty dramatic change. Let's look at what happened in those games:
12/17...@CHA 2-10......7 pt 3rebs 3asts
12/20...@MIA 8-13....20pt 4rebs 1ast
12/31...@HOU 5-12....13pt 4rebs 3ast
1/22.....@HOU 3-10....11pt 1reb
1/26.........DEN 6-12......18pt 3rebs 3ast
1/27......@UTH 6-12....14pt 9rebs 2ast
2/7........@BOS 3-11.......8 pt 4rebs 2ast
2/9........@WSH 5-12....11pt 6rebs 1ast
2/23......@DEN 2-10.....6pts 4rebs 1ast
2/25..........HOU 4-16....15pt 1reb
3/7........@TOR 4-11....14pt 2rebs 1ast
3/15.......@Chi 3-12........6pts 6rebs 1ast
His averages on these 12 games are 11.9pts 3.9rebs 1.5asts 1.2stls 1.5to in 30mpg
He made 51 out of 141 fgs (36%) 18 out of 64 3s (28%) and 23 out of 26 fts (88%).
Aside from the big drop in 3pt% (and Ben's big fat 0 for 7 against Chicago this weekend didn't help matters there), there's not much in those numbers that's off from his averages before the trade. His minutes went up slightly and so did his averages in every category. I went back and added in steals and turnovers and those match up with the slight increase in minutes as well. Just for the hell of it, he also had 3 blocks in those 12 games compared to 4 in the first 18 (small sample size alert!). It's not forward progress, but it's not a disaster either.
Ah, but 12 games out of 49 does not a successful season make. The point I'm trying to make here though, is that Ben's apparent lack of consistency is more a factor of the circumstance he now finds himself in than a complete failure on his part to develop his talent. While MCW and Oladipo have been given free reign to fire away on their mediocre teams to the tune of 15 and 12 shots per game, respectively, our own Ben McLemore is afforded that same privilege in only 1 out of every 4 games.
Which is not to say that MCW's performance wouldn't be impressive under any circumstances (it is) and Oladipo's all-around game is developing nicely as well, but more to the point -- McLemore has been asked to play off the ball on a team with three players each averaging 20+ points per game (and a combined 48 shots between them). If you sort out all the times when he's in the game but may as well not be for all the attention his teammates pay him, he's actually meeting expectations for the most part or at least close to it. And when you're talking about a first year player, everything is about projection.
One last note here, because it's so blatant I can't not mention it, is the puzzling disparity between home and away games which meet the 10 shot standard. 10 of the 12 games that met the standard were on the road. I have my own tentative theory for why this might be the case, but think about it for a minute while I move on to DWill and we'll come back to this at the end.
Derrick Williams and the 10 shot standard:
I'm not going to go into as much detail with Derrick Williams, basically just focusing on points and rebounds here. In reverse order, this is every game in which Derrick Williams has taken at least 10 shots since being traded from Minnesota (starting with the most recent game on Sunday):
3/16..@MIN ....26 and 11
2/28..@LAL ......26 and 12
2/11..@CLE ......10 and 3
2/7....@BOS ......11 and 12
1/27...@UTH ....17 and 15
1/22...@HOU ....22 and 11
1/15...@MIN ......16 and 5
1/14...@ORL .......9 and 6
1/10.......ORL ......14 and 6
12/15.....HOU ....11 and 6 [Rudy Gay's first game]
12/13..@PHX .....14 and 4
12/11......UTH ......13 and 7
12/9.........DAL .......31 and 5 [Isaiah Thomas' first game as the starter]
12/3.........OKC .......13 and 0
11/29.......LAC ......12 and 6
That comes out to averages of 16.3pts and 7.6rebs over those 15 games. Not bad. In fact, if these were his averages for the season we would all be lauging at Minnesota's blunder and how lucky we were to score our new SF for nothing. In these 15 games Williams took 187 shots and made 90 (48%). Unlike Ben, Williams actually thrived initially after the Rudy Gay trade -- mostly because Rudy Gay was sitting on the bench and we'd traded every other legitimate SF on the roster (actually, scratch that we had none to begin with). Williams took at least 10 shots in 4 straight games right up until Rudy Gay suited up, at which point he promptly disappeared for almost a month. He resurfaced again in mid-January as Malone's go-to sixth man and then as emergency injury relief when we lost both Rudy and DMC in Houston (this must have felt like last season all over again for him). The sightings since have been few and far between.
So what to make of all this?
Let me explain my theory and the reason for the 10 shot standard. Everyone is probably familiar with the "good numbers on a bad team" phenomenon. We've seen a lot of it over the years here in Sacramento. There's a corollary to this phenomenon though which is less often discussed -- and it has to do with opportunity. Every game has a limited number of possessions. You can get yourself more by gaming the shot clock ala Mike D'Antoni or by forcing a lot of turnovers, but essentially every team has a fixed number of possessions in which they control the ball. What you choose to do with those possessions constitutes your offense. That means a team in last place has just as many possessions to use (more or less) as a team in first place. And that means there's sometimes (not all the time) an opportunity for a mediocre player to stand out statistically amid a weaker pool of available talent.
A casual basketball fan (often a fan of another team) will glance at a boxscore and take note of who's scoring the ball, who's working the boards, who's setting up their teammates and so on. Us hardcore fans watch the games and see where the performance aligns with the stats and where it doesn't. But I'm here to tell you that you've all been tricked!
Both groups of fans are wrong.
The casual fan is wrong because they aren't familiar with the personnel on the team and how they interact and they aren't seeing the plays which don't add up statistically. The numbers don't tell the whole story. The hardcore fan is wrong because they're living within a relative standard where players are comparable only to other players in the same system. Statistics are supposed to allow you to compare players from one team to players from another but they don't work that way because not every player has an equivalent level of opportunity. You're probably not watching more than one team's games on a regular basis unless you're employed by an NBA team or a complete junky (which, admittedly, there are a few). And without intimate knowledge of every team's system and players to compare them to, your intimate knowledge of your own has only the illusion of credibility.
Not even the best scout has time to watch every single player in every single game.
There has to be an easier way. Let's build backwards. What happens when you take a prototypical "good numbers on a bad team" player and remove him from the equation? You open up an opportunity for someone else to fill that void. Given the same number of opportunities, will they perform better or worse than whomever they've replaced? There's no way to know until you actually try it out. Hypothesis --> Experiment --> Analyze Data. We need some kind of theory though or we're just shooting in the dark. Which brings me back around to the 10 shot standard. What you thought I forgot? Here's the theory in a nutshell:
Minutes played is a poor indicator of individual opportunity. We've all seen first-hand that offensive possessions are seldom distributed on an even playing field. To better level the field, I suggest that there should be some standard applied which takes individual opportunity within the offense into account.
[Note: As I mentioned before, I chose 10 shots for arbitrary reasons,
a better average could probably be measured and agreed upon]
Let's apply it to a comparison of Derrick Williams and Rudy Gay.
Gay has played 43 games as a Sacramento King and taken 10 or more shots in 40 of those games. That 43 number includes the Houston game where he played only 6 minutes because of injury but somehow managed to put up 5 shots anyway in that time. I'm not going to go through all 40 games and add up the numbers this time, let's just cheat and use his totals for the 43: 20.4pts 5.6rebs 3.2ast with 645 shots taken (Rudy really likes to shoot) and 318 made (49%). Not bad. Those are All-Star numbers right? Compare that to William's averages with the 10 shot standard applied: 16.3pts and 7.6rebs on 48% shooting. What do these numbers mean? Well, I'm suggesting that this is a way to approximate what we might see if Rudy Gay left the team and Derrick Williams took his place. That level of production would actually be pretty good if he could keep it up. And presumably, with Gay departed his relative level of opportunity would allow for him to keep it up.
It's not a 1-to-1 swap, but considering Gay makes $19 million a year and is probably looking at a new contract in the $12-15 million per year range while Williams is only 22 and is almost certainly going to cost less than $10 million a year with his best years still ahead of him, it's a much closer call than it would appear to be on the surface isn't it?
One last thing...
Did you notice that home/away pattern again with Williams' games? He had 13 games since December 7th in which he took 10 or more shots and of those 13, 9 were played on the road and 4 were played at home. It gets even worse -- 2 of those home games were before Rudy Gay joined the team. Both BMac and DWill consistently fail to meet the 10 shot standard in home games. How consistently? It's happened 3 times in 2014. That's combined, between the two of them. I told you I had a tentative theory here. And I'll share it with you, but maybe someone else would like to take a crack at solving that mystery first?
I'm not going to tell you where, but I think I might know when. December 7th, 2013 is the date we're looking for. Let's go back in time for a minute to that fateful day... <-- time travel ellipse
Totals for the first 18 games of the season:
181 points (10ppg)
59 rebounds (3.3rpg)
18 assists (1apg)
18 TO (1topg)
16 steals (0.9spg)
4 blocks (0.2bpg)
170 shots taken and 64 shots made (38% fg)
81 3s taken and 28 3s made (35% 3pt)
30 FTs taken and 25 FTs made (83% ft)
18 games, 436 mins (24mpg)
Nothing here looks particularly bad, especially for a rookie playing his first month of NBA ball. You'd like to see those percentages come up, but 18 games is a pretty small sample size in any circumstances and even more so for a player who took 48% of his shots from behind the three point line. At this point in the season I don't think there was anything to be alarmed about. If anything, the signs were looking good. Since Williams joined the team he and Ben had sparked some instant chemistry (an understanding shared perhaps only by players who live above the rim) and Ben's averages were up for that 5 game span: 13.4pts 4.4reb 1.6ast 1.8stl. This includes consecutive performances of 20pts 6rebs and 15pts 9rebs on the Dec 6th to 7th home/away back-to-back against the Lakers and Jazz.
So what happened? Ben's minutes didn't get cut, at least not until January when such a move was entirely justified. Okay, why pretend. We all know what happened. The Rudy Gay trade happened and Isaiah Thomas moved into the starting lineup to replace the departed Greivis Vasquez. This gives me an opportunity to test out a little pet theory I've been developing regarding McLemore and Williams' lack of production this season. I'll call it the...
10 shot standard.
Before the Rudy Gay trade, Ben McLemore played in 18 games and he took at least 10 shots in 10 of those games. (55%). Why am I using 10 as the standard? It's a nice big round number and easy to identify on game logs. Since the Rudy Gay trade, Ben McLemore has played in 49 games and has taken at least 10 shots only 12 times (24%). Sidenote here -- only JT, IT, and Ben have played in all 67 games for us this season. That's a pretty dramatic change. Let's look at what happened in those games:
12/17...@CHA 2-10......7 pt 3rebs 3asts
12/20...@MIA 8-13....20pt 4rebs 1ast
12/31...@HOU 5-12....13pt 4rebs 3ast
1/22.....@HOU 3-10....11pt 1reb
1/26.........DEN 6-12......18pt 3rebs 3ast
1/27......@UTH 6-12....14pt 9rebs 2ast
2/7........@BOS 3-11.......8 pt 4rebs 2ast
2/9........@WSH 5-12....11pt 6rebs 1ast
2/23......@DEN 2-10.....6pts 4rebs 1ast
2/25..........HOU 4-16....15pt 1reb
3/7........@TOR 4-11....14pt 2rebs 1ast
3/15.......@Chi 3-12........6pts 6rebs 1ast
His averages on these 12 games are 11.9pts 3.9rebs 1.5asts 1.2stls 1.5to in 30mpg
He made 51 out of 141 fgs (36%) 18 out of 64 3s (28%) and 23 out of 26 fts (88%).
Aside from the big drop in 3pt% (and Ben's big fat 0 for 7 against Chicago this weekend didn't help matters there), there's not much in those numbers that's off from his averages before the trade. His minutes went up slightly and so did his averages in every category. I went back and added in steals and turnovers and those match up with the slight increase in minutes as well. Just for the hell of it, he also had 3 blocks in those 12 games compared to 4 in the first 18 (small sample size alert!). It's not forward progress, but it's not a disaster either.
Ah, but 12 games out of 49 does not a successful season make. The point I'm trying to make here though, is that Ben's apparent lack of consistency is more a factor of the circumstance he now finds himself in than a complete failure on his part to develop his talent. While MCW and Oladipo have been given free reign to fire away on their mediocre teams to the tune of 15 and 12 shots per game, respectively, our own Ben McLemore is afforded that same privilege in only 1 out of every 4 games.
Which is not to say that MCW's performance wouldn't be impressive under any circumstances (it is) and Oladipo's all-around game is developing nicely as well, but more to the point -- McLemore has been asked to play off the ball on a team with three players each averaging 20+ points per game (and a combined 48 shots between them). If you sort out all the times when he's in the game but may as well not be for all the attention his teammates pay him, he's actually meeting expectations for the most part or at least close to it. And when you're talking about a first year player, everything is about projection.
One last note here, because it's so blatant I can't not mention it, is the puzzling disparity between home and away games which meet the 10 shot standard. 10 of the 12 games that met the standard were on the road. I have my own tentative theory for why this might be the case, but think about it for a minute while I move on to DWill and we'll come back to this at the end.
Derrick Williams and the 10 shot standard:
I'm not going to go into as much detail with Derrick Williams, basically just focusing on points and rebounds here. In reverse order, this is every game in which Derrick Williams has taken at least 10 shots since being traded from Minnesota (starting with the most recent game on Sunday):
3/16..@MIN ....26 and 11
2/28..@LAL ......26 and 12
2/11..@CLE ......10 and 3
2/7....@BOS ......11 and 12
1/27...@UTH ....17 and 15
1/22...@HOU ....22 and 11
1/15...@MIN ......16 and 5
1/14...@ORL .......9 and 6
1/10.......ORL ......14 and 6
12/15.....HOU ....11 and 6 [Rudy Gay's first game]
12/13..@PHX .....14 and 4
12/11......UTH ......13 and 7
12/9.........DAL .......31 and 5 [Isaiah Thomas' first game as the starter]
12/3.........OKC .......13 and 0
11/29.......LAC ......12 and 6
That comes out to averages of 16.3pts and 7.6rebs over those 15 games. Not bad. In fact, if these were his averages for the season we would all be lauging at Minnesota's blunder and how lucky we were to score our new SF for nothing. In these 15 games Williams took 187 shots and made 90 (48%). Unlike Ben, Williams actually thrived initially after the Rudy Gay trade -- mostly because Rudy Gay was sitting on the bench and we'd traded every other legitimate SF on the roster (actually, scratch that we had none to begin with). Williams took at least 10 shots in 4 straight games right up until Rudy Gay suited up, at which point he promptly disappeared for almost a month. He resurfaced again in mid-January as Malone's go-to sixth man and then as emergency injury relief when we lost both Rudy and DMC in Houston (this must have felt like last season all over again for him). The sightings since have been few and far between.
So what to make of all this?
Let me explain my theory and the reason for the 10 shot standard. Everyone is probably familiar with the "good numbers on a bad team" phenomenon. We've seen a lot of it over the years here in Sacramento. There's a corollary to this phenomenon though which is less often discussed -- and it has to do with opportunity. Every game has a limited number of possessions. You can get yourself more by gaming the shot clock ala Mike D'Antoni or by forcing a lot of turnovers, but essentially every team has a fixed number of possessions in which they control the ball. What you choose to do with those possessions constitutes your offense. That means a team in last place has just as many possessions to use (more or less) as a team in first place. And that means there's sometimes (not all the time) an opportunity for a mediocre player to stand out statistically amid a weaker pool of available talent.
A casual basketball fan (often a fan of another team) will glance at a boxscore and take note of who's scoring the ball, who's working the boards, who's setting up their teammates and so on. Us hardcore fans watch the games and see where the performance aligns with the stats and where it doesn't. But I'm here to tell you that you've all been tricked!
Both groups of fans are wrong.
The casual fan is wrong because they aren't familiar with the personnel on the team and how they interact and they aren't seeing the plays which don't add up statistically. The numbers don't tell the whole story. The hardcore fan is wrong because they're living within a relative standard where players are comparable only to other players in the same system. Statistics are supposed to allow you to compare players from one team to players from another but they don't work that way because not every player has an equivalent level of opportunity. You're probably not watching more than one team's games on a regular basis unless you're employed by an NBA team or a complete junky (which, admittedly, there are a few). And without intimate knowledge of every team's system and players to compare them to, your intimate knowledge of your own has only the illusion of credibility.
Not even the best scout has time to watch every single player in every single game.
There has to be an easier way. Let's build backwards. What happens when you take a prototypical "good numbers on a bad team" player and remove him from the equation? You open up an opportunity for someone else to fill that void. Given the same number of opportunities, will they perform better or worse than whomever they've replaced? There's no way to know until you actually try it out. Hypothesis --> Experiment --> Analyze Data. We need some kind of theory though or we're just shooting in the dark. Which brings me back around to the 10 shot standard. What you thought I forgot? Here's the theory in a nutshell:
Minutes played is a poor indicator of individual opportunity. We've all seen first-hand that offensive possessions are seldom distributed on an even playing field. To better level the field, I suggest that there should be some standard applied which takes individual opportunity within the offense into account.
[Note: As I mentioned before, I chose 10 shots for arbitrary reasons,
a better average could probably be measured and agreed upon]
Let's apply it to a comparison of Derrick Williams and Rudy Gay.
Gay has played 43 games as a Sacramento King and taken 10 or more shots in 40 of those games. That 43 number includes the Houston game where he played only 6 minutes because of injury but somehow managed to put up 5 shots anyway in that time. I'm not going to go through all 40 games and add up the numbers this time, let's just cheat and use his totals for the 43: 20.4pts 5.6rebs 3.2ast with 645 shots taken (Rudy really likes to shoot) and 318 made (49%). Not bad. Those are All-Star numbers right? Compare that to William's averages with the 10 shot standard applied: 16.3pts and 7.6rebs on 48% shooting. What do these numbers mean? Well, I'm suggesting that this is a way to approximate what we might see if Rudy Gay left the team and Derrick Williams took his place. That level of production would actually be pretty good if he could keep it up. And presumably, with Gay departed his relative level of opportunity would allow for him to keep it up.
It's not a 1-to-1 swap, but considering Gay makes $19 million a year and is probably looking at a new contract in the $12-15 million per year range while Williams is only 22 and is almost certainly going to cost less than $10 million a year with his best years still ahead of him, it's a much closer call than it would appear to be on the surface isn't it?
One last thing...
Did you notice that home/away pattern again with Williams' games? He had 13 games since December 7th in which he took 10 or more shots and of those 13, 9 were played on the road and 4 were played at home. It gets even worse -- 2 of those home games were before Rudy Gay joined the team. Both BMac and DWill consistently fail to meet the 10 shot standard in home games. How consistently? It's happened 3 times in 2014. That's combined, between the two of them. I told you I had a tentative theory here. And I'll share it with you, but maybe someone else would like to take a crack at solving that mystery first?
