Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

Playing time. It’s always been a strong point of debate within the Celtics blogsphere. That debate includes us here at CelticsHub, where myself and two esteemed colleagues have been making the case for months to keep the veterans minutes down, particularly those of Ray Allen and Paul Pierce.

Doc has a history of leaning on these two too much, for mostly logical reasons (lack of depth, injuries, etc.) in the past couple years. A contingent of C’s fans may argue that these extra minutes has been partially response for both players’ regression in on-court performance (Allen) and injury woes (Pierce), but that’s an argument for another day.

This year, with the additions of Marquis Daniels and Rasheed Wallace to the bench, things were supposed to be different. This team would now have depth, as well as a couple shooters to space the floor, reducing the need for Pierce and Allen to play major minutes with the second unit.

Unfortunately, like most things involving this team, this setup didn’t exactly go as planned. Thanks to injuries to Daniels, Tony Allen, and Glen Davis, the second unit was left shorthanded for nearly three months. This, combined with some spotty (I’m being kind), performances by the 2nd unit’s supposed shooters, left the need for Pierce/Allen to anchor that unit nearly as critical as last year.

The onus fell even harder on Ray Allen, along with Rajon Rondo to a lesser degree, with the injuries to Pierce and Kevin Garnett in December-February. Bench players were being shuttled back and forth between the starting lineup and bench, leaving no continuity between either unit, as well as a dependence on Rondo and Allen to lead the way offensively with the 2nd team on any given night.

That was the story with this squad through February. Thanks to this, the minutes per game for those guys, along with the rest of the starters (when healthy, at the All-Star Break were high. Let’s take a look at the breakdown.

Pierce: 35.5
Allen: 36.7
Rondo: 36.9 (career high 33.0 min)
Garnett: 30.6
Perkins: 28.6

It was the same old song and dance from last year. This squad was primarily old, weren’t getting much rest, and to top it off, the team was floundering for two months.

Fast forward to the month of March. Finally, this team is healthy and has gone 7-3, albeit against primarily inferior opponents. It’s progress nonetheless. The thing I am most encouraged by in this month though, is the minute management by Doc. A closer look at how it is all breaking down recently, after the jump » More: Minutes Watch: A Positive Report

People who think advanced stats are stupid (people like this guy, who should be looking for a new line of work if he believes what he wrote) should read this post Hoopdata’s Tom Haberstroh wrote at Hardwood Paroxysm last week. Go read it.

No matter how complicated the math behind them might be, the best advanced stats are rooted in common sense. They represent attempts to test out hypotheses smart people already think about before the stat exists or before they are aware of a stat’s existence. In the pre-Internet mid-1990s, I had a sense (as did many of you, I suspect) that walks were a very good thing for a baseball player to get, and I wondered why more announcers didn’t seem to care about them. Then I went to college, logged onto the Internet and found a dude named Rob Neyer writing at ESPNnet.sportzone.com and realized a whole discussion had been going for years about walks, slugging percentage and other stats I’d never heard about.

The math can be complex, but the conclusions they try to get at are easy to grasp.

Case in point: Haberstroh’s piece on assists. There’s all sorts of nasty-looking math in there (though it’s actually not that hard), with parentheses and capital letters next to lowercase letters in symbols like wAPG.

But it’s a fairly simple concept: Assists aren’t all equally valuable, and if you want to know who the world’s best passer is, you should find the guy who racks up the most valuable assists, right? » More: Rondo’s Smart Passing

Nate Robinson has played nine games for the Celtics. I realize this is a tiny sample size, and we will all forget about these nine games if Nate catches fire in the playoffs.

But so far, this is not the player for whom the Celtics traded Eddie House (and Bill Walker, and J.R. Giddens). I’ve never really liked Nate Robinson (that’s an understatement, actually), but I backed the trade because Robinson brings two skills Eddie House doesn’t really have. In order of importance:

1) Ability to get to the rim;

2) Ball-handling/passing—i.e., passable point guard skills. 

I haven’t noticed much of either so far, and the numbers back up that impression. » More: Nate’s Slow Start

The post-’07 Celtics have always been a foul-prone team, but they didn’t start off this season as such. And that was a good thing, because the 2010 Celtics just haven’t been as good—so far—as the ‘08 and ‘09 versions. A team can maintain an elite record when its talent level drops by becoming smarter and doing the little things better—like playing great defense without fouling.

The C’s were doing that until about mid-January. At that point, they ranked in the middle of the pack in opponent free throw attempts per field goal attempt after finishing in the bottom 10 in that category in each of the two prior seasons.

In mid-January, Boston opponents were attempting about 23.5 free throws per game—a league average mark, and about two attempts fewer per game than Boston allowed last season.

Since then? The C’s appear to be back to their foul ways. » More: Alarming Long-Term Trend: Opponent Free Throws