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?
If it helps, I believe the Warriors had a 120+ ORTG in Steph and non-Wiseman minutes (on a pretty substantial sample size).
And the biggest factor in increasing our ORTG would be having another creator to run our bench lineups. Poole helped with this a bit (and hopefully continues to grow into the role), but our rORTG was the worst in league history halfway through the season when Wana and Wiggins were running our 2nd unit.
Poole + Klay can probably help with that though. Someone like Jeff Green or Rudy Gay would also be great as they would be another guy that can shoot, pass and dribble.
Is there enough data to compare how non-Steph lineups did with Poole, Wiggins and JTA did? It seemed that by the final ~1/3 of the season, they had a pretty good rhythm together. Poole got better at initiating the offense, JTA was really good at keeping the ball moving and Wiggins realized he could be more aggressive when not deferring to Steph. Having Klay out there with those guys should only help.
By the end of the season, I wasn’t curled up in a ball afraid to look at the TV when Steph would rest.
Haha I was still so nervous during those last two play-in games. Settling for so many bricked jumpers :( To be fair I have always been nervous, even when Steph plays -- it was the fact that we had at least two (Klay and Steph, and then later KD) players waiting to explode anytime that got me through the playoffs in the past.
Yeah, outside of Curry, the only high volume high efficiency player on the Warriors last year was Jordan Poole, and it took half a year of Wanamaker's putrid .468 TS until Poole got into the rotation.
Otherwise, Oubre (.529 TS and 1.6 assists per36) and Wiseman (.552 TS and 1.1 assist per36) being the 3rd and 4th options on the team for most of the year tanked the OffRtg so hard that the end of season smallball run couldn't pull it out of the gutter.
I guess to summarize, replacing Oubre's .529 True Shooting on 15.4 FGA per36 with Klay's career .575 True Shooting on 17.4 FGA should provide a good boost to the Warriors OffRtg.
Then after that, drafting/signing another good volume good efficiency scorer would be great, hence the interest for Moody and Kispert.
Yea, looking at those TS numbers is what always surprises me, that a "mere" 5% difference separates Poole and Klay (Klay is career 57.5% TS). That means replacing 10 Poole possessions with 10 Klay possessions buys us only a 1pt ORTG gain, 20 possessions --> 2pt ORTG, or a 1 possession advantage in a game. It feels like such a little gain in the high variance game that basketball is, and makes keeps me nervous.
One underrated thing - of course Klay may only be 58% TS next year, but he's gonna get really tightly guarded at all times. That means when Poole/Curry are driving, that's one less defender that is gonna rotate over to help. Basically, this increases the efficiency of everyone else around them.
Ah, right, like a line-up/team-dependent TS%. Probably not enough data due to all the different permutations of lineups, but that would be an interesting kind of quantity to look at, to better assess the apparent variance in players' performances.
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!
Been saying from the start of the finals that it's team vs talent which is why despite CP3 I'm rooting for the Suns.
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?
If it helps, I believe the Warriors had a 120+ ORTG in Steph and non-Wiseman minutes (on a pretty substantial sample size).
And the biggest factor in increasing our ORTG would be having another creator to run our bench lineups. Poole helped with this a bit (and hopefully continues to grow into the role), but our rORTG was the worst in league history halfway through the season when Wana and Wiggins were running our 2nd unit.
Poole + Klay can probably help with that though. Someone like Jeff Green or Rudy Gay would also be great as they would be another guy that can shoot, pass and dribble.
Is there enough data to compare how non-Steph lineups did with Poole, Wiggins and JTA did? It seemed that by the final ~1/3 of the season, they had a pretty good rhythm together. Poole got better at initiating the offense, JTA was really good at keeping the ball moving and Wiggins realized he could be more aggressive when not deferring to Steph. Having Klay out there with those guys should only help.
By the end of the season, I wasn’t curled up in a ball afraid to look at the TV when Steph would rest.
Haha I was still so nervous during those last two play-in games. Settling for so many bricked jumpers :( To be fair I have always been nervous, even when Steph plays -- it was the fact that we had at least two (Klay and Steph, and then later KD) players waiting to explode anytime that got me through the playoffs in the past.
Yeah, outside of Curry, the only high volume high efficiency player on the Warriors last year was Jordan Poole, and it took half a year of Wanamaker's putrid .468 TS until Poole got into the rotation.
Otherwise, Oubre (.529 TS and 1.6 assists per36) and Wiseman (.552 TS and 1.1 assist per36) being the 3rd and 4th options on the team for most of the year tanked the OffRtg so hard that the end of season smallball run couldn't pull it out of the gutter.
I guess to summarize, replacing Oubre's .529 True Shooting on 15.4 FGA per36 with Klay's career .575 True Shooting on 17.4 FGA should provide a good boost to the Warriors OffRtg.
Then after that, drafting/signing another good volume good efficiency scorer would be great, hence the interest for Moody and Kispert.
Yea, looking at those TS numbers is what always surprises me, that a "mere" 5% difference separates Poole and Klay (Klay is career 57.5% TS). That means replacing 10 Poole possessions with 10 Klay possessions buys us only a 1pt ORTG gain, 20 possessions --> 2pt ORTG, or a 1 possession advantage in a game. It feels like such a little gain in the high variance game that basketball is, and makes keeps me nervous.
One underrated thing - of course Klay may only be 58% TS next year, but he's gonna get really tightly guarded at all times. That means when Poole/Curry are driving, that's one less defender that is gonna rotate over to help. Basically, this increases the efficiency of everyone else around them.
Steph's the best exponent of this.
Ah, right, like a line-up/team-dependent TS%. Probably not enough data due to all the different permutations of lineups, but that would be an interesting kind of quantity to look at, to better assess the apparent variance in players' performances.
Thanks for that! It seems like we have a sizable chunk of bad possessions to improve upon.
Thank you for winning Bucks. But please please stop playing Jeff Teague for God's sake.
Are the suns this good or is everyone else that bad
They are pretty good but are going to luck into the easiest championship ever.
They wouldn't be able to handle Steph and Dray at the 5 lineups.
Suns are damn good. Also have been very lucky this year.
Clips had that ass and are in the finals of Kawhi doesn’t get hurt
At a moment in time with no elite teams, they’re this good. If we had Oubre, Chriss and Lee healthy, I’d pick the Warriors to beat them in a series.
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.
Almost made a double-eagle on 17 (might have been 18, can't recall) on the final day. Never got to see Dell going in the lake though :D