Maybe Blake needs to play more

[Masbee]

I went over the 82games.com data, and looked at win% for our individual players.

Blake leads the team with an eye popping 92.3%

I am not kidding you. This is an amazing stat. Our 2nd best player (Roy) is at 69.1%

http://www.82games.com/0910/09POR1.HTM

Two words:

Sample

Size

 

[andalusian]

Two words:

Sample

Size

Like any other stat at this point in the year.

Still interesting to see.

 

[RR7]

One issue I just noticed while looking at 82 games, and it doesn't affect the win% at all, btu affects looking at many other advanced stats for Blake is, they show absolutely no time spent at the SG position this season. They show all of his time at PG.

 

[andalusian]

One issue I just noticed while looking at 82 games, and it doesn't affect the win% at all, btu affects looking at many other advanced stats for Blake is, they show absolutely no time spent at the SG position this season. They show all of his time at PG.

I am guessing they go by who he guards. He usually is the one running around/in front/behind the opposition's PG.

 

[RR7]

I'm not trying to say at all it invalidates anything in this thread. Just annoying more than anything. He covered Joe Johnson a deecent amount. He was covering Ben Gordon.
I don't know, other than watching every single game, a better way for them to determine it, but it's a annoying when trying to see a difference between what Blake has done at SG versus at PG, and it lists him at PG the entire time. Does that then give Joe Johnson, Gordon, etc. time at the point when they cover Blake? Oh well.

 

[mook]

I don't know the reason. It's definitely weird to see a guy with such a crummy PER have such a huge win%. Even with such a small sample size.

Maybe a few guesses:

We are at our most competent when we have don't have either Webster or Outlaw on the court at SF. When Blake plays, Roy is at SF.

We are at our best when Oden is fresh and out of foul trouble. He's most active and aggressive then. That happens at the beginning of the first and third quarters more than at any other time. Blake is always playing then.

The 3 guard lineup actually works, at least defensively. Yeah, it's wearing down Roy, but our ability to quickly switch on every screen when Blake is out there improves our perimeter defense. When Rudy comes in, we go away from that and play more zone. When Webster/Outlaw went in, we didn't switch as much.

A lot of our blowout wins seem to start at the beginning of the third quarter. The other team puts a valiant effort to stay in the game early on, but that's the point when we often run off a 10-2 run as the other team starts to crack under pressure.

Blake plays extremely conservative basketball. When he's in the rotation, turnovers are at a minimum. We may not score that well with him missing threes, but our offensive rebounders can clean up his mistakes, and his lack of turnovers reduces the opponent's transition baskets and allows us to set up our highly effective half court defense.

Or, as Masbee says, it's just a small sample size.

 

[hasoos]

What the fuck does that stat even mean, becauase there is no way that the Blazers won 90% of the games Blake played in.

 

[RR7]

What the fuck does that stat even mean, becauase there is no way that the Blazers won 90% of the games Blake played in.

Not the game, just the time he is on the floor.

 

[Nikolokolus]

It's an interesting phenomena and it completely flies in the face of reason and what my eyes are telling me when he's on the court (although I will say that he's playing pretty solid team defense by funneling his man into the interior of the defense ... though his man-to-man D is atrocious). I don't really know what else to say except that a lot of his other statistics and advanced statistics are abysmal right not and when I watch him on the floor in fourth quarters handling the ball getting trapped and having to heave up prayers at the end of the shot clock or turning it over I can tell you without statistics that he's certainly not helping this team close out games.

This will bear watching for the rest of the season but my strong suspicion is that at this time his suspiciously high win % is an anomaly or an outlier. At the end of the day all performances on the court are boiled down to one thing: Does your play help the ball go through the net or does it help prevent the other team from putting it through the net. On the first count I don't think there's any real good evidence that he's being particularly helpful on offense (increased turnover rate, lower assist rate, significantly lower shooting percentages), but on the other end maybe his contributions to team defense are just that good? Tough to say.

 

[BrianFromWA]

After a more in-depth look at 82games.com, it seems that, the total win% doesn't correlate with the weighted average of 5-man win %'s (no fault of Blake's of course). I don't quite get this, since I don't know their WP formula.

Blake's played 387 of the teams 629 minutes so far: 61.5%.

top 5-man units he's played with come to 322 minutes with a weighted WP of 64.3. The only WP's that were over 66% were 2 units (for a combined total of 59 minutes) that were at 100% WP. Who were those units?
PG: Blake
SG: Roy
SF: Webster
PF: LMA and Outlaw
C: Oden

He's also had some units that were stinkers. But even those (explained below) have faulty reasoning behind them, to my untrained eyes.

I don't quite get the WP% stat on 82games.com and am going to stay away from it until either the sample size increases or one of those guys responds to my email and explains it to me. Multiple reasons for this. First, the Blake/Rudy/Webs/LMA/Przy unit has an offensive rating of 1.17 (pretty darn good), a defensive rating of 0.7 (amazing), a +/- of +0.8/min (would be almost a 40-point margin of victory if extrapolated to 48minutes), and a WP of 25%, the lowest unit Blake has played with. How does that happen?
Additionally, Blake's crunch-time numbers are just the opposite. He has a +/- of -7 (don't know how many minutes that is for), an o-rtg of 94 (pretty low), a D-rtg of 112 (pretty high), a net48 of -18 (saying we'd get outscored by 18 if we played a whole game with that unit), but the WP% is 57%. I defy someone to tell me how we can win 4 out of every 7 games getting outscored by an average of 18points per 48 minutes.

Assuming that the stats are correct, the thread title may be right....if you add "With Roy, Webster and Oden" to it.

 

[hasoos]

This stat means absolutely nothing IMO. It is almost completely worthless.

 

[Minstrel]

Like any other stat at this point in the year.

Every stat is suffering from that, yes. But indirect stats (like +/- and similar stats that go by team performance with and without the individual) require larger sample sizes to yield meaningful results than direct stats (like PER or other stats that work directly from the individual's numbers).

Of course, one could argue that once you have that larger sample size, something like Adjusted +/- or win% is more powerful...but you need that sample size.

Taking this to an extreme, on a single play basis, direct stats tell you something while +/- tells you literally nothing. If Blake makes a steal and hits a three-pointer on one play, his shooting, steal and scoring numbers reflect it. If Blake makes a great pass to Bayless, but Bayless misses the shot and then on the ensuring rebound and transition, Cunningham gives up an easy basket, Blake's +/- or win% for that segment will be negative.

For quite a long time, direct stats have the decisive edge on indirect stats in terms of non-noise content. I've read statisticians say that you need several seasons worth of data for +/- types of statistics to provide meaningful conclusions.

 

[LittleAlex]

In the blizzard of numbers on 82games.com's profile of Blake you found one that is amazing.

There are others that are damning.

What to believe?

We don't have any statistics in basketball that really hold up in all cases. That's a sad fact.

The team does at times play much better with Blake at the helm.

Other times it plays it's worst.

Without Synergy sports giving us a feed of every single play Blake was involved in it's pretty hard to tell what his overall impact is.

I wish I had a couple hundred thousand dollars to get a subscription to that service. It would be amazing.

 

[PapaG]

This stat means absolutely nothing IMO. It is almost completely worthless.

This seems to be the common refrain pertaining to any statistic that makes BLANKY look like anything other than a horrendous player.

It's the board version of a poster closing their eyes, plugging their ears, and humming to make it all go away.

 

[andalusian]

In the blizzard of numbers on 82games.com's profile of Blake you found one that is amazing.

There are others that are damning.

What to believe?

How about we point to the specific damning ones and discuss them?

I have said, pretty clearly in this thread, that I do not know how to explain this one, but it is damn unusual because it's correlation to his individual stats is so out of whack.

What other stats are there that jump out at you? The clutch stats are bad, individually, but actually darn good in the context of the team members. Again, if you have interesting ones you think we should look at - I would be interested in looking at them.

Is it possible that Blake's amazingly high win% is a coincidence? Sure. It is a freaking small sample. But, it is interesting.

Minstrel has an interesting point about looking at multiple-years of +/- like stats - which win% is a less volatile one of - so I looked at his win% last year - he was 2nd highest win% last year with LMA - at 65%, behind Roy on the team) - Went back to 2007/2008 - 3rd best in the team, 2nd best of those that played significant minutes (James Jones, who was 2nd, played only 32% of the minutes) - behind Roy and over LMA.

What are we doing with it now?

Honestly, I do not know. But we have more than 2 years of data now that paint Blake as one of our best win% guys. Why? I don't know. I am not a coach. His individual stats sure don't explain it. Maybe it is the combination of low-risk play, ability to handle the ball and space the floor? Something that brings up the best in better players around him? I don't know. I am just looking at the data and wondering.

I have been working in the analysis industry for about 20 years now, while I am not an analyst - I have developed many tools that analysts work with - so I suspect I have a bit of experience looking at data and noticing patterns. Making the jump from seeing the patterns to having reliable interpretation of them usually requires someone with better understanding of the material subject - which I am not.

But, the pattern seems to be there. Blake has consistently been one of our best win% guys on this team.

Now, let's look at the 2006-2007 Denver Nuggets.

You want to guess who their 2 guys in win% are?

1. Andre Miller at 60%
2. Steve Blake at 59.2%

(They did not play together, if memory serves, Miller was traded for Iverson and they traded for Blake after that).

There is something that Blake does, that make him a high win% guy when playing next to good players. What it is? You tell me.

So in the context of multiple years, it does not look that bad and strange that Blake is a high win% guy, sure his win% this year is just ridiculously high - which is why it jumped at me when I looked at it - but Blake is consistently a high win% guy when he plays next to good players.

 

[andalusian]

Taking this to an extreme, on a single play basis, direct stats tell you something while +/- tells you literally nothing. If Blake makes a steal and hits a three-pointer on one play, his shooting, steal and scoring numbers reflect it. If Blake makes a great pass to Bayless, but Bayless misses the shot and then on the ensuring rebound and transition, Cunningham gives up an easy basket, Blake's +/- or win% for that segment will be negative.

Well, that's the truth for every kind of stat - you take a lot of individual occurrences and you try to notice patterns and outliers.

For quite a long time, direct stats have the decisive edge on indirect stats in terms of non-noise content.

I am not buying this one bit. If someone is a gifted passer but is saddled with lousy shooters and finishers as team-mates, their "noise" taints the value of the direct assists to really judge his ability as passer. If someone is a great rebounder and scorer but plays god-damn awful defense - his individual "noise" is less reliable than his win% "volatile" stat (See Randolph, Zach).

I've read statisticians say that you need several seasons worth of data for +/- types of statistics to provide meaningful conclusions.

Well, we have multiple years of win% data for Blake next to good players (2+ years in Portland, half a year in Denver) - and the numbers are still much higher than his individual stats will lead you to expect.

What now?