21 Comments

Suns have no weaknesses. Milwaukee has a bad coach and horrible depth. Can Giannis will the Bucks to a title? I'm rooting for the Deer and the Greek!

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Question for everyone: What's a good way for better grasping/estimating ORTG changes from roster additions and deletions? Right now a 7.5pt ORTG difference can be the difference between top rated (Nets) and 20th rated (Warriors). Granted, 7.5pt difference is 3-4 possessions, which becomes increasingly hard to make up the later into a game one gets/the fewer possessions are left on the clock. This slim difference also makes me better appreciate good after-time-out coaching and home court advantage (538 recently assessed that it gives a 2~3pt advantage, using before & after stadium reopening results).

Context: I've been trying to wrap my head around where and how large of an upgrade we need to jump back into the conversation for top contender. But I don't have a good *intuitive* grasp of how much improved production is needed to increase ORTG. Naively, increasing ORTG by +5 to achieve a top offense looks deceptively tractable: a couple Wiseman points here, a couple Poole points there, maybe a Haliburton-level production from a rookie, easy, right?

However, I was surprised to see that the scoring efficiency between Draymond (49%) and Klay's career average (55%) is as small of a gap as it is. Even if we were to trade Draymond-level production for Klay-level production, a +5pt ORTG change would need trading off 50 such possessions to get a +5 increase in ORTG (the difference between 50 and 55 points scored off of those 50 possessions)! But I don't think we had 50 Draymond-level scoring possessions to improve upon... most of the Warriors roster had eFG more like 53%. Alternatively, swapping 25 Draymond-level production for 25 possessions of Durant/Curry 60% eFG production can also make up for that 5pt ORTG. Or swapping 35 possessions of roster-average 53% eFG for Durant. Even then, +5 to our ORTG would only bring us to roughly a top 10 league offense.

Put this way, increasing our ORTG to the top seems very very hard, especially if we also expect to lose a couple points of offense from decreasing Curry possessions (I don't want to have to rely on Curry carrying so hard and playing so many minutes...).

Am I thinking about this correctly? How much more production, and how efficiently, do we need to add to move up to a top-10 offense? Is a Patty Mills enough? A draftee who can manage Tyrese Haliburton level production? Marquese Chriss? Or maybe we need to focus on consistent, lower-variance scoring with high floors, and executing better?

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Thank you for winning Bucks. But please please stop playing Jeff Teague for God's sake.

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Are the suns this good or is everyone else that bad

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Like you say, I don't know that anyone hates the Bucks -- yet. But if they let CP3 take home a championship, I'm going to like Milwaukee a LOT less.

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