Thursday's Friday Funkadelic

[Monster]

These are some great stats for conversation. I would have liked to see how the teams ranked for efficienty in each area of offense.

To me Flip putting Wiggins in the post so much ended up looking really smart. He was able to work well there and it led to him attacking out of the post as well. The Wolves got to the line and I like that aspect ALOT because the Wolves have been bad at that most of their existence. I do think the critisims of Flip's offense are valid and comparing to these varied offensive teams is a great idea. I do also think the Wolves have a somewhat unique bunch of players and it's even moreso this year adding Towns and Bjelica. It would also help if we had some more talent healthy or otherwise than last year. It was pretty brutal. It would be nice if we can get some true volume 3 point shooters going. I don't know if we have really added much in that department from last year. I think Lavine could be a big boast in that area. I would like to see all the PGs really ready to load up on that shot when they are open.

[Q12543 [enjin:6621299]]

Monster, You are absolutely right that LaVine could become a high-volume 3-point shooter. He has the height and release to get that shot off, even while under duress. He certainly wasn't shy in Vegas!

The problem with LaVine is that right now he's a much better spot-up shooter than he is as the ball handler on the pick and roll or in isolation. His propensity to take difficult pull-up jumpers hurts his efficiency. However, in the event someone else is handling the ball and breaking down the defense, he has shown a solid ability to make the catch-and-shoot 3-ball. Hopefully he keeps improving in both areas.

[Monster]

Monster, You are absolutely right that LaVine could become a high-volume 3-point shooter. He has the height and release to get that shot off, even while under duress. He certainly wasn't shy in Vegas!

The problem with LaVine is that right now he's a much better spot-up shooter than he is as the ball handler on the pick and roll or in isolation. His propensity to take difficult pull-up jumpers hurts his efficiency. However, in the event someone else is handling the ball and breaking down the defense, he has shown a solid ability to make the catch-and-shoot 3-ball. Hopefully he keeps improving in both areas.

Playing off the ball or at least not playing PG most of his minutes should put him in better spots to chuck up 3's. I would be curious how many 3's a game he was putting up that last stretch of games.

Lavine is one guy that seems to be ready to get up a shot and we need guys willing to do it from deep. Thats one reason I like Rudez. That's almost all he does but he shoots it well has the size to shoot over guys and all that. He doesn't seem likely to pull a Mike Miller and try to become a PG or someone thing he will fire it up there. :) Of course who knows how much he really gets on the floor but yeah.

[MikkeMan]

Really interesting team stats, mikkeman...thanks for the research, as usual. A few thoughts:

1) I take it that you are making the point that Flip's offense is not very efficient, and the data seems to uphold this contention. Flip is a smart guy and not incapable of change...I hope he is listening.

2) PG is such an important part of offense, I sense that the data is polluted by Ricky being out most of the year. I'm interested in how these stats will look if h is healthy.

3) I think your conclusion that the Wolves are not effective in post-up is incorrect...their ppp in post ups stands up very well compared to the other teams you document.

This is good stuff...I hope you post updates throughout the season.

LST, my take on your 1st point is that these stats tell that with last years players, it wouldn't have been possible to run much more efficient offense than what Flip did. Since only effective options in Wolves offense were putbacks, transition and cuts, it is not easy to try increase the share of those plays since they are mostly opportunistic plays. If Wolves would have tried to get more putbacks, it might have resulted even worse transition defense and they were pretty bad in that already by allowing 4th most transition points to their opponent. Wolves could have tried to run even more but it would have required better defense that would have lead more missed from their opponents and better defensive rebounding to get opportunity to run. Rubio's injury also hurt for sure a lot Wolves transition offense and probably also limited the amount of cuts as offense plays since others are not that good for delivering the ball for open guy. Many of us hoped that Flip would have used more pick&roll instead of running off screen and post-up plays but these team offense efficiency stats tell that it would not have improved their overall efficiency since Wolves post-up, off screen and pick&roll (when you consider both rollman and ball handler)efficiency was almost identical.

I agree that Rubio's presence should help. It's bad that you cannot filter these play type stats in nba.com so that you could see how they looked like when Rubio played last year and since they are not available from previous years either, even comparing last year to previous one is not possible. Of course that comparison wouldn't make even sense since there was so many different players then and even coach has changed.

Wolves were OK in post-ups compared to those 4 teams but overall they were not efficient even there. They ranked 15th of all teams with 0.85ppp but still they used post-ups 2nd most of all teams. Only Memphis used more post-ups and they ranked 4th in efficiency with 0.92ppp. Dallas led all teams in post-up efficiency with 0.97ppp but they still used that play only 5.5% of their possessions. I guess this was mainly because Dirk was most of the season their lone post-up option and they wanted to save him for post season.

[MikkeMan]

As for Wiggins, yes, he's a good post-up player relative to his age, but he still isn't very efficient at it. .84PPP isn't that great, yet 20%+ of his offense was derived from post-ups last season. I'd much rather see him get more offense off of cuts, dribble drives, and spot up 3-pointers. Post-up plays should be reserved for where there is clearly a size mismatch.

Last season Wiggins was about equally efficient from post-up, isolation, spot-up and off screen plays. So it wouldn't have changed much even if they would have used less in post-ups for him. Partially this was because more than half of his spot-up plays were two pointers. If he would have been able to get more cut or transition plays, his efficiency would have increased.