Welcome to my weekly mailbag.
With the time coming to retire my weekly chats, I wanted to find a new way to interact with readers and answer their questions. For now, we’re going to try out a mailbag. You can tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
Has A Rivers really turned it around, or just function of more PT? Is he legit rotation player (or starter) on a contender? #peltonmailbag
– shuggah21 (@shuggah21) January 28, 2017
This is an interesting question with Rivers considered the centerpiece of the possible return for the New York Knicks in a trade sending Carmelo Anthony to the LA Clippers.Editor’s Picks
Top 25 under 25: Which young NBA stars have the most upside?
Based on future potential, who are the 25 to watch? Amin Elhassan, David Thorpe and Kevin Pelton provide their rankings of the NBA’s best young talent.
Based on future potential, who are the 25 to watch? Amin Elhassan, David Thorpe and Kevin Pelton provide their rankings of the NBA’s best young talent.
On the plus side, Rivers is managing a career-high .551 true shooting percentage, right at league average. He’s also averaging 3.6 assists per 36 minutes, an improvement of 50 percent over last year’s mark (2.4 per 36). And yet Rivers continues to rate poorly by ESPN’s real plus-minus; his minus-2.4 rating ranks 53rd among point guards.
Digging into the lineup data yields a conclusion that surprised me: playing Rivers off the ball doesn’t seem to be working all that well. Per NBAwowy.com, the Clippers have a minus-5.0 net rating per 100 possessions with Rivers as their lone point guard, which is better than it sounds given Doc Rivers’ tendency to separate his starters and his reserves. Overall, the Clippers are outscored by 6.5 points per 100 possessions without Paul, so having Rivers at the point improves on that.
Lineups where Rivers plays with Paul have been more problematic. Naturally, Rivers has gotten many of those minutes in place of the injured Blake Griffin, so let’s separate out whether Rivers is on the court by Griffin’s availability.
Admittedly, we’re slicing these samples pretty thin. But at the very least this analysis suggests Rivers’ poor RPM is not the result of playing behind a superstar point guard like CP3.
Given that Rivers’ newfound efficiency is almost entirely the product of his improvement from 3-point range (he’s hitting 40.4 percent beyond the arc after coming into this season a career 32.9 percent 3-point shooter), I remain skeptical of his value. He isn’t a huge liability as a backup on a contending team but his $11 million salary could be better spent elsewhere.
“The league has focused so much on 3s, it seems like defense still hasn’t adjusted as much as it should. Basically they should overplay the 3 and risk giving up an open jumper. I’m always amazed watching games and seeing guys get open 3s, especially off a pick-and-roll.” – Peter Rosenblum
Well, I think the tradeoff is typically less about giving up an open 2-point jumper instead of a 3 and more about giving up a shot at the rim instead of the 3. So that makes the equation a lot more difficult. The Houston Rockets’ offense, most notably, is completely designed around forcing opponents to make that choice.
That said, some of the most intriguing NBA research I’ve seen recently was Chris Baker and Stephen Shea using SportVU data to show that in 2014-15 (the last season full data is available), the best defenses either aggressively helped (even trapping) and conceded 3s or stayed home on shooters and took away open 3s. Their data suggests that trying to balance those two goals resulted in accomplishing neither.
@Josh_Macri If nba all star had MLB-style rule requiring at least 1 player from each team, who would be the worst all star? #crowdnoise
– Jason McGensy (@jpmcgensy) February 2, 2017
We actually answered this question on Thursday’s NBA Lockdown podcast, but I liked it so much I decided to add it to the mailbag. There are 12 teams who did not have a player selected for the All-Star Game, and here are the contenders I’d name for each of them:
BKN: Brook Lopez
DAL: Harrison Barnes
DEN: Nikola Jokic
DET: Andre Drummond
LAL: Lou Williams
MIA: Hassan Whiteside? Goran Dragic?
MIN: Karl-Anthony Towns
NYK: Kristaps Porzingis
ORL: ???
PHI: Joel Embiid
PHX: Eric Bledsoe
POR: Damian Lillard/C.J. McCollum
With all due respect to his All-Star burger, Barnes is probably the answer from a purely statistical standpoint. Despite scoring a relatively efficient 20 points per game, Barnes rates right at replacement level by my wins above replacement player (WARP) metric, and while ESPN’s real plus-minus (RPM) gives him a bit more credit, he’s still rated below average by RPM. The Mavericks have the lowest-rated WARP leader (Dwight Powell of all people, with 2.4 WARP) in the league.
And yet, in the spirit of the question, the answer has to be whoever you consider the Magic’s best player, right? The fact that there isn’t an obvious choice — I guess I’d go with Serge Ibaka if forced to decide — kind of says it all about Orlando’s inability to find a star talent through the draft.
“What do you think of the recent changes in the Blazers starting lineup? Is it finally finding the right use for Evan Turner, and are [Al-Farouq] Aminu and [Maurice] Harkless improving the moribund bench lineups?” – Jamal Raad
It was surprising to me because it seemed to be a case of fixing something that wasn’t broken. The starting lineup with Aminu and Harkless was actually quite good, but as you note the bench lineups were dreadful.
Six games is a preposterously small sample, but so far the new starting lineup has been even better than the incumbent group, posting a plus-15.7 net rating per NBA.com/Stats.
With the caveat that Harkless has missed two of the six games with a strained calf, the other part of the equation hasn’t yet come to fruition. Portland continues to struggle when either Lillard or McCollum is on the bench, and more specifically when Meyers Leonard (minus-11.4 net rating) has been on the court. Ed Davis’ return from a sprained wrist on Friday could push Leonard out of the rotation, and we’ll see whether that helps.
@kpelton #peltonmailbag Assuming Nick Young opts out, what kind of contract do you think he would get this offseason and from whom?
– John Smith (@StrykeJohn) February 2, 2017
Looking at this summer’s market, I see seven unrestricted free agent wings clearly ahead of Young: Kevin Durant (player option), Gordon Hayward (player option), Danilo Gallinari (player option), J.J. Redick, Andre Iguodala, Dwyane Wade (player option) and Rudy Gay (player option).
That puts Young in a tier with Matt Barnes, Gerald Henderson, Kyle Korver, C.J. Miles, Thabo Sefolosha and P.J. Tucker. I think those guys are all looking at the mid-level exception ($8.4 million) or something near it. You can see based on that why it makes sense for Young to opt out: he’s due $5.7 million next year and should beat that and also get more long-term security. I would guess he’ll get a three-year deal.
The “from whom” is tougher to say. I would look at Houston, Indiana, Memphis, Minnesota, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Sacramento and Washington as teams that might be in the market for a mid-level wing. Young’s past might rule out some of those teams, and others might prefer a better shooter (Korver) or player who can slide to the 4 (Barnes or Tucker), but that’s the general range.
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