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A Nemo blog. Dealing with uncommon cents.

There is always good reason for Portland to celebrate having our local basketball franchise, the Trailblazers, in the NBA playoffs especially as they are returning for the first time in five years. Expectations were high going in to the first game at home against the Houston Rockets but unfortunately the Blazers got spanked losing by a 27 point margin and with it some home court advantage. They rallied for a strong win in game 2 beating the Rockets by four points and now they head to Houston to try and pull off two in a row in the Rockets’ house.

I am no basketball expert but I do enjoy watching the games and trying to work out the inner workings and efficacy of any of the teams. Without delving too deeply into the psychology of teamwork it is always clear that those team members who generate the best stats are the ones hailed as the ‘leaders,’ the ‘winners’ even the ‘legends.’ To coin a phrase – ‘the squeaky wheel gets the oil…’

Put simply, as fans already know, basketball stats are all based around points scored, rebounds caught or the number of assists per game – the higher a player is in those rankings the more he is seen as the teams leading player. If you take a look at the Blazers home page you will note that the players’ stats are proudly displayed in a prominent position. And if you look closely you will also note that the Rockets’ Shane Battier appears to come up short on those stats compared to all the other players. There is much more to those numbers than meets the eye.

Meet Shane Battier and consider this:

Michael Lewis – NY Times “Tonight the Rockets were playing the Los Angeles Lakers, and so Battier would guard Kobe Bryant, the player he says is the most capable of humiliating him. Both Battier and the Rockets’ front office were familiar with the story line. “I’m certain that Kobe is ready to just destroy Shane,” Daryl Morey, the Rockets’ general manager, told me. “Because there’s been story after story about how Shane shut Kobe down the last time.”

Last time was March 16, 2008, when the Houston Rockets beat the Lakers to win their 22nd game in a row — the second-longest streak in N.B.A. history. The game drew a huge national television audience, which followed Bryant for his 47 miserable minutes: he shot 11 of 33 from the field and scored 24 points. “A lot of people watched,” Morey said. “Everyone watches Kobe when the Lakers play. And so everyone saw Kobe struggling. And so for the first time they saw what we’d been seeing.” Battier has routinely guarded the league’s most dangerous offensive players — LeBron James, Chris Paul, Paul Pierce — and has usually managed to render them, if not entirely ineffectual, then a lot less effectual than they normally are. He has done it so quietly that no one really notices what exactly he is up to.”

Shane Battier is what Michael Lewis has coined The No-Stats All-Star and he is an efficiently deadly competitor. As Lewis says – “Here we have a basketball mystery: a player who is widely regarded inside the N.B.A. as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.”

The stats, as used by the NBA and also by every major sports team, do not always tell the truth. The Houston Rockets’ owner, Leslie Alexander, was a supporter of stats but also suspicious of the way the stats were interpreted. At one point he said that “I’m not even sure we’re playing the game the right way.” Alexander hired Daryl Morey to get to the bottom of all the data. When Morey arrived the Rockets had two highly paid and highly prized players – Tracy McGrady and Yao Ming – so Morey was tasked to find quality players cheap enough to keep the team under the NBA salary cap – in short time he came across Battier. When Morey presented Alexander with the idea of buying Battier he perplexed even the man who had hired Morey to rethink basketball. Lewis again – “All I knew was Shane’s stats,” Alexander says, “and obviously they weren’t great. He had to sell me. It was hard for me to see it.”

Consider this excerpt from the same Lewis article – “Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”

Morey discovered that stats make players selfish which makes sense if you consider that better stats are always going to be a plus for a players’ career. After watching Battier play for more than two years Morey considers him the most unselfish player he has ever seen – “Last season when the Rockets played the San Antonio Spurs Battier was assigned to guard their most dangerous scorer, Manu Ginóbili. Ginóbili comes off the bench, however, and his minutes are not in sync with the minutes of a starter like Battier. Battier privately went to Coach Rick Adelman and told him to bench him and bring him in when Ginóbili entered the game. “No one in the N.B.A. does that,” Morey says. “No one says put me on the bench so I can guard their best scorer all the time.”

And yet there is one set of stats that Battier does well in – plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. Michael Lewis again – “A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.”

Whoever works for the Portland Trailblazers checking the stats better be aware that on paper Battier is a marginal NBA athlete at best, yet in reality on the court he is a NBA superstar.

Game 3 is at Houston Friday April 24th 6:30PM on ESPN and locally on KGW.

Read Michael Lewis’ article.

Tags: Houston Rockets, Kobe Bryant, Michael Lewis, NBA, NemoHQ, Playoffs, Portland Trailblazers, Shane Battier

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Nemo Design, Portland, Thinking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.