A Tale of Two Garnett’s

On TNT tonight, the 35 year old Kevin Garnett is huffing up and down the court, playing good d and doing the little things to try to keep his Celtics in the game against the Orlando Magic.  He’s good, a credible starter, but clearly a role player doing his best to fit his niche on the court.  With 3 minutes left, he’s exhausted on the bench.

On NBAtv tonight, the 24 year old Kevin Garnett is carrying his Minnesota Timberwolves in game 7 the 2004 Western Conference quarter finals.  He’s played both forward positions, the center, and actually manned the point position to give Sam Cassell a break in the 4th.  He’s used hooks, up and unders, fadeaways, cross-over blow-by dribbles for dunks, and timely cuts with strong finishes to dominate the interior against a deep King’s team.  He’s also done it on defense, protecting the paint and guarding the top of Flip Saunders’s 3-2 zone.  As the game tightens up at the end, every play is run through KG, and there’s nothing Sacramento can do about it.

When you watch Boston play today, it’s easy to forget that The Kid was once the best player in the league.

Alternate Win Score Shenanigans

Reading Paul’s link to Neil Payne’s article ranking point guards by Alternate Win Score motivated me to see what the hell Alternate Win Score might be. Turns out it’s the same thing as Dave Berri’s linear weighted metric Win Score — (Win Score = PTS + STL + ORB + 0.5*DRB + 0.5*AST + 0.5*BLK – TOV – FGA – 0.5*FTA – 0.5*PF) with additional weights regulating the relative value of offensive and defensive rebounds as well as field goal attempts and free throw attempts. (Oh snap! I’ve got NBAtv on, and Brandon Bass just earned a Tommy Point! Hell yeah!) Basically some smart math guy discovered that making these adjustments delivered a more predictive result and eliminated the need to correct for positions.

Here’s a quick spreadsheet I put together using career per-game data beginning from the 3 point era – initially sorted by Win Shares and then resorted by AWS after I performed the calculations.

Lots of these guys make the list.

For those too lazy to click the links, here’s the breakdown by position with overall ranking in parentheses.

PG – Magic Johnson (3), Chris Paul (7), John Stockton (25), Kevin Johnson (32), Isiah Thomas (43)

SG – Michael Jordan (1), Clyde Drexler (15), Dwyane Wade (16), Kobe Bryant (23), Vince Carter (34)

SF – Larry Bird (2), LeBron James (4), Julius Erving (12), Alex English (18), Shawn Marion (20)

PF – Charles Barkley (5), Karl Malone (10), Kevin Garnett (11), Dirk Nowitzki (13), Chris Webber (19)

C – Hakeem Olajuwon (6), David Robinson (8), Shaquille O’Neal (9), Tim Duncan (14), Kareem A-J (17)

Boy, we’ve got a lot of the right names in there, don’t we? The order is funky, but that’s because the stats aren’t pace-adjusted or minute adjusted. Still if you consider that AWS is an offshoot of a metric that once measured Dennis Rodman as a more valuable member of the Bulls than Michael Jordan, it’s a nice step. It certainly isn’t meant to be used to measure players between generations the way we have here, but I’m actually pretty fond of the results though I had nothing to do with them. I’d probably get better results working year to year or in 5 year clips instead of as an all-time ranking this way.

I can’t figure out how Clyde could possibly outrank Wade, but I think it might have something to do with offensive rebounding and low turnovers – see Paul’s article regarding the benefits of Drexler’s possession creation here. Kobe of course is almost always rated lower than we’d expect by metrics. Too many misses and turnovers, plus low-production and low-efficiency in his teen years. If I set age limits, he would move up. So would LeBron and Garnett probably. Though if I set maximum age limits some of that might be reversed. Actually maximum age is probably why Pippen is below Marion.

No one position is massively underrepresented at the top. No decade is missing (though the newer players like Rose and Durant didn’t have the opportunity to make the list since I made it based on career Win Shares.

One of the things I like about the Win Score model is that it’s accessible to the mathematically challenged among us and has a very comprehensible logic about it. There have always been a couple of fundamental flaws with the formula though. One problem is the way the stat considered a shot to be as bad as a turnover which the Alternate formula corrects by factoring the 30% chance of an offensive rebounding. The other issue is that the stat weighted rebounds with no regard for the diminishing value of grabbing a defensive board. The Alternate formula factors in the likelihood of a team losing a rebound on either side of the ball and adjusts by that percentage.

I’ll work with this model a little more in the future to see if we can factor AWS into the Grand Ole Double Dribble NBA Player Ranking System (TM).

Paine on Point Guards at Prospectus

Neil Paine’s latest available for you at Basketball Prospectus.  He ranks point guards over the last calendar year.  Here’s a snippet:

To rank point guards, I gathered every NBA boxscore over the past 365 days–through Tuesday’s games–and determined the starting point guard in each game (most were obvious, some were judgment calls). I then calculated Alternate Win Score, the best linear-weights metric, for both point guards in a matchup, tracking how often each point guard outproduced their counterpart.

Check it out.  Do it.

Dwight Howard’s Twenty-Twenty Games

Dwight Howard posted yet another game of at least 20 points and 20 rebounds last night.  24 and 25 to be exact.  That’s the fourth time this season he’s done this.  This is all the more impressive because the Orlando Magic have only played 14 games thus far.  I decided to look up the totals for 20-20 games on Basketball Reference.  As you can see from the table below, Howard’s rate is astounding.  He is in career number territory on this stat after just six seasons.

BIG NOTE: These stats are provided by Basketball-Reference.com, the best website on earth, and the box scores in the database only go back to 1986.

Rk	Player	Pos	From	To	Count
1	Charles Barkley*	F	1986	1998	42
2	Hakeem Olajuwon*	C	1986	1998	38
3	Dwight Howard	C	2006	2012	36
4	Shaquille O’Neal	C	1993	2005	34
5	Kevin Garnett	F	1998	2008	27
6	Kevin Willis	F	1986	1995	23
7	Tim Duncan	F	1998	2010	20
8	Patrick Ewing*	C	1986	1997	19
9	Kevin Love	F	2010	2012	13
10	David Robinson*	C	1990	2001	13
11	Karl Malone*	F	1988	1998	12
12	Rony Seikaly	C	1990	1994	12
13	Bill Laimbeer	C	1986	1990	10
14	Buck Williams	F	1986	1991	10
15	Moses Malone*	C	1986	1989	9
16	Dikembe Mutombo	C	1992	2001	9
17	Zach Randolph	F	2003	2011	9
18	Chris Webber	F	1995	2006	9
19	Elton Brand	F	2001	2006	8
20	Marcus Camby	C	2001	2008	7

Provided by Basketball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 1/19/2012.

LeBron’s 30 point 10 rebound night

Last night against San Antonio, LeBron James scored 33 points and pulled down 10 rebounds. This is his 88th time going for at least 30 and 10 in the same game which is an awful lot for a perimeter player 12 games into his 9th season. I realize that box score statistics are antiquated, and you’ve lost all respect for me just for bringing the subject up. Points and rebounds don’t even account for pace! Well, too bad. It’s what we have to use right now, and the all-time list is pretty interesting.

BIG NOTE: These stats are provided by Basketball-Reference.com, the best website on earth, and the box scores in the database only go back to 1986. That is why Wilt and Oscar and Kareem and Elgin aren’t way, way, way, way, way, way, way out in front. Also the games include playoffs, which only go back to 1991.

Educate your brains on the below tabled data!

Rk	Player	Pos	From	To	Count
1	Karl Malone*	F	1987	2004	343
2	Shaquille O’Neal	C	1993	2009	296
3	Charles Barkley*	F	1986	1999	205
4	Hakeem Olajuwon*	C	1986	1999	200
5	Patrick Ewing*	C	1986	1999	156
6	David Robinson*	C	1990	2001	144
7	Tim Duncan	F	1998	2010	134
8	Dirk Nowitzki	F	2001	2011	134
9	Michael Jordan*	G	1987	2003	91
10	LeBron James	F	2004	2012	88
11	Dominique Wilkins*	F	1986	1997	81
12	Chris Webber	F	1994	2006	74
13	Kevin Garnett	F	1998	2008	72
14	Amare Stoudemire	F	2003	2011	70
15	Larry Bird*	F	1986	1992	56
16	Dwight Howard	C	2007	2012	50
17	Antawn Jamison	F	2000	2011	49
18	Moses Malone*	C	1986	1992	49
19	Kobe Bryant	G	2000	2011	47
20	Tracy McGrady	F	2001	2008	47
21	Chris Bosh	F	2005	2012	44
22	Clyde Drexler*	G	1986	1998	44
23	Paul Pierce	F	1999	2011	44
24	Alonzo Mourning	C	1993	2000	42
25	Zach Randolph	F	2003	2011	42

Provided by Basketball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 1/18/2012.

Note how Karl Malone’s consistent productivity over his 40 year career separates him clearly from the rest of the pack. Observe the domination of Shaq, who is 96 games ahead of the next center on the list. Tremble in fear at the way 6′ 4″ Charles Barkley has more 30-10 games than Hakeem, Ewing, Duncan, and Robinson. Saucer your eyes in sheer wonder at the audacity of Michael Jordan breaking into the top ten as a guard (the only other guards in this top 25 list – Kobe Bean and Clyde the Glide).

I do think if one were to subjectively list the top 8 big men to play since 1986, when the stats for the above table begin, the results would match what we show in the top 8 of the table. Maybe shoehorn Garnett in somewhere, but otherwise I think Shaq, Hakeem, Duncan, Malone, Barkley, Robinson, Ewing, and Dirk is pretty hard to argue with if the count starts in 1986.

I’d like to close this bit of statistical tomfoolery with an apology:

If unadjusted stats offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While this table did appear.