Return of Nuggets 1: Forum #2 Comments From Late March 2008, Part 4

Forum commentary I did from March 2008 through July 2008, when I didn't have time to do the detailed and extensive reports that I like to do, is being posted in early October, 2008. The primary themes are how the Nuggets are blowing a great (and expensive!) opportunity to play the game of basketball in such a way that respects the sport and that takes as much advantage as possible of who they have on the roster. The 2006-09 Nuggets have turned out to be an excellent case study of how not to run a basketball team; many things you should not do if you are a basketball manager or coach can be identified from what the Nuggets actually did during these years.

In these comments, do not look for the usual huge amount of detail and proof that you see in the ordinary releases here at Nuggets 1. Some of this is more like everyday conversation than like top quality sports writing. On the other hand, some of the comments do include some detailed reasoning and proof that I pride myself on in the primary reports I release.
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LATE MARCH 2008 FORUM COMMENTARY ON THE NUGGETS, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THEIR MISTAKES

I will use this thread to report the descovery of more and more evidence that the Nuggets more or less failed this year, at least in the relative sense, because the coaching staff played an inferior backcourt. All they needed was to get the backcourt right and they could have done as well as everyone expected, but they couldn't do it right.

The first entry for here is what you find when you take a look at the plus-minuses for all possible 2-player combinations:

Proof the Nuggets Blew It

Starting from the top, you can look for the first combination you find which is two guards. The first one, sure enoiugh, is the Allen Iverson / J.R. Smith combination. There have been 1,671 points scored and 1,535 points given up with this lineup on the court. So the +/- is +136.

Near the bottom of this first page of 2-player combinations, you come to the Anthony Carter / Allen Iverson combination. While those two players have been on the court, the Nuggets have scored 3,180 points and given up 3,148 points, so the +/- is +32.

Now look at the per time plus minuses. The Allen Iverson / J.R. Smith combination, for every minute it is on the court has on average given the Nuggets an advantage of .159 points. So for every 10 minutes, the Nuggets have outscored their opponents by 1.59 points with the Iverson / Smith combination. For every 30 minutes, the Nuggets outscore their opponents by 4.77 points with the Iverson / Smith combination.

For the Anthony Carter / Allen Iverson combination, for every minute it is on the court the Nuggets outscore their opponents by .022. So for every 10 minutes, the Nuggets have outscored their opponents by 0.22 points with the Carter / Iverson combination. For every 30 minutes, the Nuggets outscore their opponents by 0.66 points with the Carter / Iverson combination, about 2/3 of a point.

The bottom line is that for every 30 minutes, the Nuggets have the following fates, on average:

Allen Iverson / J.R. Smith in the backcourt 30 minutes: Denver outscores it's opponent by 4.77 points.
Anthony Carter / Allen Iverson in the backcourt 30 minutes: Denver outscores it's opponents by 0.66 points.

The Iverson / Smith combination gives the Nuggets a little more than 4 more points of advantage over the opponents than does the Carter / Iverson combination. The Carter / Iverson combination gives the Nuggets only a very weak advantage, on average, over opponents.

So you obviously want a lot more minutes of the Iverson / Smith combination, and a lot fewer minutes of the Carter / Iversion combination. Let's check to see how many minutes have actually been given to these combinations:

Iverson / Smith: 800 minutes
Carter / Iverson: 1414 minutes

Ouch, it's roughly backwards from what it's supposed to be.
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You didn't really make a point. Are you claiming that high school and college coaches can often not judge what positions their players should play? That's ridiculous, I would think. I don't care how many players are playing the wrong position, especially in football. I know for a fact that only a few players in the NBA are playing the wrong position, Iverson being one of them.

If a coach repeatedly puts players in the wrong position, he is going to get fired. it's that simple. It's not as if that incompetence could be kept a secret. On the other hand, most high school and college coaches who lose a few more games than expected do not get fired, whereas that can happen in professional sports.

High school and college coaches are judged first and foremost by how successful they are in getting their players to the next level, in both the athletic and institutional senses. If you go to Mike Bailey's site, the dominant thing on Mike Bailey's page is a description of all the players who went on to various successful college and pro careers after he coached them. How many wins he got is shown, but is in no way highlighted on the page. Just as Bailey's camp draws business more by advertising player success stories than by advertising Bailey's win-loss record, high schools and colleges draw talented recruits by emphasizing their player success stories first; the winning percentage is not as important as these success stories. But for the record, Bailey was massively successful in terms of wins and losses.

I have to keep guessing at what you are arguing. I am going to guess that you are saying that there are X's, O's, winning and losing, public relations, political agendas (office politics) with the front office and the owner, and handling volatile millionaire players involved. How am I doing with your argument?

Even if NBA coaches are automatically better at the things that don't apply in high school and college, how would it follow that they are more qualified to determine what position a player plays? If you had to bet, you would bet that the NBA coaches would be less qualified to judge what position a player should play, since they can't get a head coaching position unless they can do all the non-basketball stuff well.
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Random chance is a major factor in determining which of thousands of possible coaches end up as the 30 NBA coaches. There is simple mathematics involved.
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Well at least you have said something half way concrete, I think. So apparently, you think that Larry Brown and George Karl are more competent than Mike Bailey and John Thompson, due to the level difference, and maybe also more competent than Jim O' Brian. Actually, you still technically did not make the argument; it had to be deduced. Maybe you are worried about getting sued so you could not state it directly, ha ha.

In any event, you next have to present evidence as to why Brown and Karl are more competent than Bailey, Thompson, and O'Brian, that would pertain to choosing which player on the team should be the starting point guard.

Note: this is the last time I am going to try to flesh out skeleton and vague arguments just to make a response. It's a little too much like arguing with myself. And I am beginning to think that I am being made a fool of for responding to these types of arguments, and that in order to look good on the forum, I am supposed to not respond to these. How do I know you actually believe what you are implying? In order for me to respond, I need complete, direct, logical arguments, with evidence if at all possible. I don't think I should be responding any more to statements that require a lot of deduction to figure out what is really being claimed. I think what I am supposed to do is ignore any argument that is too vague or too indirectly stated, with no evidence to boot.
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I don't care how many play one positon in high school and another position in pro. I already said that I am aware that pro coaches can change positions if they think it is the correct thing to do. The question for me is whether it was correct for Larry Brown to do that for his team. And the other question for me is whether George Karl, faced with the loss of his starting point guard for most of the season, made the correct decision for the Nuggets when he refused to start AI at the point.

I'm also not trying to prove that AI's career would have been better if he had stayed at PG. I think that is true, and I would like to prove it, but I have doubt that I can prove something like that beyond a shadow of a doubt.. (At least I don't think I will be able to at this time.} I can make that seem very plausible, which is what I am going to be doing.

What I am in the process of proving beyond a shadow of a doubt is that AI would have been of more value to his teams had he always played the PG position. Originally, I intended to just prove that the Nuggets would have been much better off if AI had been the PG starter, but then I realized the parallels between the Nuggets and the 76'ers are so obvious that I should see if I can prove it for the 76'ers historically as well.
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If true, that's relevant only if the high school and/or the college coaches, in your view, were generally in the wrong, and should have been playing the player at the position they would have in the pros. For example, was Gilbert Arenas' coach dumb for not playing him at PG at Arizona, and is this a typical dumb mistake that a college coach makes? Is that what you are saying, that many more player position mistakes are made by high school and college coaches than are made by pro coaches?

But I think you are saying something different: you are saying that the situations are so radically different that it is normal for players to play different positions from high school/college to the pros. I don't know what the actual, real number of position changes from high school/college to pro is, but I'm going to assume for the hell of it that it is a substantial number like you think.

If that is so, then I can't use the coach counts to prove that Iverson was moved to the wrong position, but neither can you use the coach counts to disprove the theory that Iverson should not have been moved. Because if the situational differences overwhelm the position assignment, then you can't prove or disprove whether Iverson was moved to the wrong positon by number of coaches and/or the levels of those coaches. (Because the situations dictated the position decisions.)

But I never intended to rely on the count of coaches as a huge part of my argument. I knew I had to point out that many other coaches have differred with Brown and Karl, or else hardly anyone was going to carefully consider the rest of the evidence. When I investigated the coaches, I knew that my best case scenario would be that there would have been very slightly more coaches who played AI at the point than at the 2-guard. The best case scenario is what played out, which gives me the green light to continue to make the project bigger rather than smaller, and I am going to continue to give this project the great attention that it deserves in the weeks and even the months ahead.

I am going to have dozens of reasons when I am through, and relatively few of them will be slam dunk, but all of them will help my side. If it were true that all or most of AI's coaches have played him at the point, I would never get a lot of people to agree that it was a mistake, regardless of how much evidence and how many arguments I had. This coach count is a preliminary argument, which gets my foot in the door. This was like a preliminary hearing in a court of law.

Unless there are fair and objective ways to compare Mike Bailey, John Thompson, Johnny Davis, and Jim O'Brien to Larry Brown and George Karl, the basic coach count may be all that anyone can do on the general coach comparison front. From here on out, the coaches will be compared with respect to the actual situations they faced at the times they made their point guard decisions, and whether their decsions were correct, incorrect, or ambiguous.

But I have succeeded in my objective on coach count and coaches in general already; all I had to do was show that there have been a substantial number of coaches who thought AI should play the point. It wasn't just the high school and the college coaches. Johnny Davis, Jim O'Brien, and Maurice Cheeks to some extent are 3 NBA coaches who exclusively or extensively started AI at PG.
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The school boards, the high school administrators, and the college administrators, as evaluation criteria #1, use how successful a coach is in developing his players, and how successful he is in inducing colleges and pro teams to recruit and draft those players up to the next level when they evaluate the value of that coach to the institution. The coach's employer, who obviously decides whether the coach will ever be fired or not, does NOT use wins and losses as the number one criteria at the high school and college levels. A possible exception to this would be a handful of college basketball and college football teams which are known to be the best teams in the land. This exception would be only a very small percentage of all college teams.

Of course, everyone other than the administrators of the schools uses wins and losses to evaluate the coach. But the smart coaches worry more about developing their players, especially their better players, and making sure those players get recruited or drafted to an impressive target school or team.
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Just as Bailey's camp draws business more by advertising player success stories than by advertising Bailey's win-loss record, high schools and colleges draw talented recruits by emphasizing their player success stories first; the winning percentage is not as important as these success stories except in a very small percentage of cases.
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See the above explanation. I agree that the general public does not care very much about who a coach has helped promote upward. As I explained, my point was that the employers of the coaches care about that even more than they care about winning and losing. Because if a school has a coach who can not develop players and make them attractive to recruiters and teams, because he assigns alot of players to the wrong positon for example, the school is going to have big problems recruiting new quality student-athletes to come to their school. Because the student athletes themselves and their parents are more concerned about where they will be able to go after they leave the high school or the college than they are about the win-loss record. So the student athletes and their parents have to see success stories to be induced to choose the particular school in question.