A Reason for Hope: The Biggest Surprise in Boston’s Season
Posted by Zach Lowe on Jan 18, 2010
Just two months ago, I wrote a worried post pointing out that the Celtics ranked near the bottom of the league in three of the so-called four factors of winning on offense. This seemed like a bad thing, since no team in the last decade that ranked 20th or worse in three of the four factors had even made the conference finals.
At the time of that post, the Celtics ranked:
#2 in effective field goal percentage, which adjusts for the fact that a three-pointer is worth more than a two-point shot. This was the C’s lone above average ranking in any of the Four Factors;
#18 in turnover rate, or the percentage of a team’s possessions that result in a turnover. That’s a below average ranking, but it still represented a huge improvement for Boston, which ranked 29th in that category in each of the last two seasons. I predicted the C’s would fall closer to the bottom of the league.
#25 in offensive rebounding percentage, a measure of how often a team rebounds its own misses;
#25 in foul shot attempts per field goal attempt, a measure how good a team is at getting to the line.
Those last two rankings were disturbing, if not surprising. The C’s ranked in the top 10 in each category in ’09, but they had since lost their best offensive rebounder and foul-drawer (Leon Powe) and replaced him with an aging player (Rasheed Wallace) who does neither of those things well.
We’re about to reach the halfway point of the season. How do things look now?
Not as bad, because the Celtics, incredibly, have jumped all the way to #5 in free throw attempts per field goal attempt, a jump I did not see coming. I predicted a slight improvement with the return of Glen Davis, but to jump from the basement to the penthouse is completely unexpected. Only Denver, Toronto, Portland and the frisky l’il Thunder get to the line more often—per shot attempt—than Boston.
I’ll get to how this has happened in a second. A brief aside: This stat is both a reason for hope and a reason to be even more furious at the team’s continued sloppiness with the ball. Simply put: The Celtics need those free throws because they attempt so few field goals. In fact, the Celtics are dead last in the entire league in field-goal attempts; no team has taken fewer shots.
This isn’t a good thing (obviously), but it’s not necessarily a killer of championship aspirations. The C’s actually ranked last in the NBA in field goal attempts in 2008, when they won the title. They ranked 28th last season.
The lack of shot attempts is partly the result of the C’s slow pace (only nine teams average fewer possessions per game), their ability to draw shooting fouls (which nullify shot attempts) and, most of all, their nearly unmatched skill at coughing up the basketball.
Yes, it turns out the C’s couldn’t maintain that ranking of 18th in turnover percentage. They’ve fallen back down to their comfort zone—29th in the league, turning the ball over on 15 percent of their possessions. That is awful.
It’s awful, but not out of line with previous seasons. But in the past, the C’s have made up for their turnovers in three ways: 1) Playing all-world defense; 2) Grabbing an above average number of offensive rebounds; 3) Getting to the foul line.
Two of those trends—the defense and the foul shooting—have carried over to this season. The offensive rebounding, regrettably, has not. The C’s are still stuck at 25th in offensive rebounding rate.
Back to the original point of this post: The 2010 Celtics badly need those free throws, because they’re rarely going to take more field goals than their opponents and they’re not going to score a lot of second-chance points. Without those FTAs, the C’s would likely be a (slightly) below average offensive team.
So how have they climbed all the way to 5th in getting to the line?
• Kendrick Perkins has doubled his foul shot attempts—from 2.1 per game last season to 4.3 per game this season (and 5.3 per 36 minutes, which ranks just outside the top 50 in the league). The evolution of Perk’s offense has been fun to watch. Of course, he still turns the ball over more often than anyone on the team. Cut the traveling calls, Beast!
• Rajon Rondo is getting to the line at a career-best rate (more than four times per game) over the C’s last 20 games after barely shooting any FTAs during the first part of the season. We covered that here.
• Big Baby has done a nice Leon Powe impersonation in his 10 games this season. Baby has—for now—forsaken his beloved mid-range jumper and focused on his post game, and he is attempting about 6.3 foul shots per 36 minutes. That would rank about 25th in the league (right beside noted foul-drawers Brandon Roy and Gerald Wallace) among players who had logged 200 minutes this season. Baby was near this number during his rookie season (5.7 FTAs per 36) but fell all the way to 3.9 FTAs per 36 last season, a natural trade-off for developing a reliable jumper.
One of the interesting things to watch will be whether Baby spends more time on the perimeter—and away from the charity stripe—once his shooting hand feels better.
• Kevin Garnett is quietly taking one more foul shot per game (3.2, up from 2.3 last season). KG will never be the foul-drawing machine he was during his prime with the T’Wolves, but every little bit helps.
Kudos to these guys for pulling the C’s out of some dubious Four Factors territory. It would be nice to see some improvement in turnover rate and offensive rebounding, but I don’t see it coming.
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