Rondo: “I Don’t Think Anybody Can Beat Us”

By Zach Lowe, CelticsHub.com @ March 17th, 2:25 pm 11 comments »

Rajon Rondo is either appropriately confident or the guy standing outside his burning house telling anyone who will listen that the house isn’t actually on fire. Because he had this exchange with HoopsTV (hat tip: Kevin Arnovitz at TrueHoop):

HTV: The East is very tough this year with talented teams like the Cavs and Magic front runners for a trip to the Finals. The Celtics have kind of been left out of conversation regarding who may make the NBA Finals this year. What are your thoughts on that subject?

RONDO: Nothing. (It means) we beat ourselves if we don’t win it. I don’t think anybody can beat us. Atlanta swept us already, Cleveland is up two to one (now 3 to 1), Orlando is up two to one, but at the end of the day I think that we can beat any of those teams (in a playoff series).

The best part about this is how Rondo lists—accurately!—Boston’s horrid record against the East’s other three elite teams and then says, basically, Who cares?

What would Rajon say if he were on the Nets?

No Eddie Tonight; Lotsa Bill Walker?

By Zach Lowe, CelticsHub.com @ March 17th, 12:29 pm 5 comments »

And no Wilson Chandler, either, according to Newsday’s Alan Hahn (via NBC Sports). Eddie is dealing with an Achilles problem I hadn’t heard about, and I wonder how close we are to having the Achilles tendon renamed the Beckham tendon.

In any case, that’s a downer. I’d have liked to have seen Eddie play. Chandler is obviously a bigger cog in New York’s offense and has served as Mike D’Antoni’s preferred power forward for long stretches. The C’s enjoyed posting up KG in that match-up. What do the Knicks do now? The obvious move would be to slide Al Harrington into Chandler’s spot in the starting line-up. Harrington has hurt the C’s this season.

Still: This marks a second straight came against a bad team even further depleted by injuries. Good thing—the schedule is about to get brutal.

The Anatomy of an Offensive Stinker

By Brendan Jackson, CelticsHub.com @ March 17th, 12:15 pm 2 comments »

I am a glutton for punishment.  That is the best conclusion I can draw for what I did last night.  I did something so horrendous that it actually borders on masochism. 

I rewatched the first quarter of the Celtics loss to the Grizzlies from last week.  Not only did I rewatch the first quarter, but I dissected every play- but before we launch into that, let me explain a little bit about why I would impose such a terrible thing onto myself.

I knew the Grizzlies game was bad, so naturally it took me a whole week to actually look at the box score and quarter-by-quarter breakdown.  After seeing that the Grizzlies outscored the Celtics 27-12 in the first, I thought for sure that this was the lowest and most lopsided quarter the Celtics had allowed this season.  The scary part? I was wrong.

» Read more: The Anatomy of an Offensive Stinker

Daily Dime: Nate vs. Eddie

By Brendan Jackson, CelticsHub.com @ March 17th, 9:01 am 8 comments »

AP

Nate Robinson is slowly starting to make a noticeable impact on the Celtics while his numbers say the Celtics are better off with him than Eddie House.  There is no doubt that Nate brings a lot of athleticism, typified by that impressive alley-oop dunk on Monday night.  I explore the deal a little further in a piece I wrote for today’s Daily Dime.  Check it out here.

Rondo’s Smart Passing

By Zach Lowe, CelticsHub.com @ March 16th, 3:48 pm 9 comments »

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? » Read more: Rondo’s Smart Passing