In Miami, "Still The Same" Not Just A Bob Seger Song

Sebastian Pruiti of Grantland has a great illustrated article this morning analyzing the Heat's offensive action on their final play of overtime in last night's Eastern Conference Finals Game 4.  In peering at the tiny images of black-jerseyed men, what I found interesting is that, with Chris Bosh injured and LeBron James disqualified with 6 fouls, the Heat's remaining lineup in overtime was essentially their 2009-10 pre-Decision squad: James Jones, Mario Chalmers, Udonis Haslem, and Dwyane Wade, with a newcomer, Shane Battier, ably filling the lanky silhouette of Michael Beasley.  (Another player from the 2009-10 roster, Joel Anthony, started the game at center for Miami last night and played 15 minutes.)  Boston, with the same four stars that they now field, made short work of that Miami squad two springs ago, winning the first three games and finishing the Heat in the fifth.  The stat lines of Boston's top guys have not changed much since 2010's Game 4:  Rondo delivered 23 and 9 then, 15 and 15 yesterday.  Garnett posted 18 and 12 then, matched by 17 and 14 this year.  Pierce and Allen scored 16 and 15 then; they put up 23 and 16 last night.

What is worth marveling at is that Miami's holdover supporting players from 2009-10 -- Anthony, Chalmers, Jones, and Haslem -- were not even starters then on a mediocre team.  Miami's starters from the 2010 playoff series -- Jermaine O'Neal, Beasley, Quentin Richardson and Carlos Arroyo -- have long since been jettisoned.  Miami's overtime squad last night consisted of Dwyane Wade and a bunch of nobodies.  (Well, and the No-Stats All-Star.)  It would have been embarrassing, really, if the Celtics could not finish them off.  Yet Miami almost won, succumbing at the end when Wade's open three-pointer rimmed out.  Coach Erik Spoelstra, also a mainstay since before James and Bosh came aboard, has succeeded in inspiring these lesser players to play with the ruthless aggression modeled each night by the Heat's two star wings.

LeBron James and the Men of Causeway Street

With Philadelphia, Boston, and Miami all leading their respective series 3-1, chances are that we will eventually get another pairing of LeBron James against the Boston Celtics later this spring.  (While there is no guarantee that Miami will knock off the Knicks, Boston will best Atlanta, the 76ers will defeat Chicago, Miami will take out the Indiana/Orlando winner, and Boston will eliminate the Sixers -- in fact, the compound probability of all these events happening is probably under 50 percent -- this is the likeliest of the various possible scenarios.)  Below, JPO takes a look back at the last three meetings of James's teams against the men in green.

2008: The 66-win Celtics had an awfully hard time defeating their Eastern foes this year on their way to an eventual championship, requiring seven games to get past sub-.500 Atlanta and barely eking past James's Cavaliers (featuring the decidedly mediocre Delonte West, Joe Smith, Wally Szcerbiak, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, and an aging Ben Wallace).  James, though, shot only 35 percent from the field for the series and could not master the parquet floor at TD Garden: Boston won all four of its home games.  While the first six games were largely defensive struggles (Cleveland averaged 84 points through the first 6), James and Paul Pierce set precedent aside and combined for 86 points in the deciding Game 7.  Meanwhile, Kevin Garnett, who was Defensive Player of the Year that season, contributed 13 and 13.  Thanks to a better free-throw performance (82 percent out of 34 tries, versus 71 percent out of 35 tries for Cleveland) the Celtics won the game by just 5 points.  After the contest, James was oddly unfazed by what was surely a crushing loss, referring to himself as a "fan of the game" and a "winner".  Boston later took down the Pistons (making the last of their six consecutive Eastern Conference Finals appearances) in six games and the L.A. Lakers in six, celebrating the Larry O'Brien Trophy in the middle of June.

2010: After easily defeating a very young, eighth-seeded Chicago team (featuring the same core players -- Rose, Deng, Noah, Gibson -- who would finish with the East's best record in each of the next two seasons) James's Cavaliers met Boston in the conference semifinals again.  Until that point, Boston had looked sluggish all season; I recall that Kevin Garnett, still recovering from knee surgery after the 2009 playoffs, could barely keep up with Orlando's Rashard Lewis (hardly a noted speedster) in one mid-season televised contest.  The Celtics began the season 23-5, but then won only half of their remaining games, finishing 50-32.  They were hardly a good bet to make noise in the playoffs.  But against Cleveland, the Celtics were able to recreate their fire of '08, nabbing Game 2 in Cleveland and then Games 4, 5, and 6 to finish things.  Cleveland's loss to Orlando in the 2009 conference finals was surprising but still valiant; in this 2010 series, though, complaints about James "quitting" first arose.  I watched the pivotal Game 5 with my former co-blogger (who still lurks on this site and lobs idle chatter my way over email) on my sofa while he visited my town for some professional pontification.  We gaped as Boston piled up a 26-point margin in the second half alone (building on a slim 6-point halftime lead) to embarrass the Cavs on their home court.  James shot only 3 of 14 and looked uninterested at times (sparking speculation that he just wanted to end the season with failure so he could more easily leave Cleveland as a free agent); meanwhile, Ray Allen hit six three-pointers as the Celtics rolled.  In Game 6, James delivered 27 points and 19 rebounds, but his teammates did little; ballyhooed trade acquisition Antawn Jamison produced only 5 and 5.  20-10 games from both Kevin Garnett and Rajon Rondo paced the Celtics as they defeated Cleveland 94-85 in a game that was never quite that close.  Following Game 6, James poignantly referred to his second loss to the Celtics as a "nightmare" that was impeding his dream:



2011: By this time, James had migrated down to Miami, bringing Chris Bosh, Mike Miller, and Ilgauskas with him.  (As I noted in a post at the beginning of the 2010-11 season, Miami had more continuity in that campaign than has been usually recognized; they returned their head coach and 7 or 8 roster members from the desultory 2009-10 squad.)  In yet another second-round matchup last spring, James finally felled the proud Celtics, quickly dispatching them in five games before moving on to face Chicago in the conference finals.  Injuries to Shaquille O'Neal (heel, calf) and Rajon Rondo (elbow) truncated this series from what could have been another all-timer.  Boston's February trade of center Kendrick Perkins proved to be a bad gamble, at least in retrospect, as neither of Boston's O'Neals could contribute much in the middle, and Jeff Green proved ineffective against Boston's wing threats.  In the Heat's clinching Game 5, James and Wade simply outraced Green, Allen, and Pierce all over the court, pouring in 33 and 34 points, respectively.  Following the game, James knelt briefly on the court, likely overtaken with emotion after finally defeating his inveterate tormentor.  His vindication, though, did not lead to a championship last spring, and he may need to do everything one more time in late May and early June if his team and Boston advance to the conference finals.

High Casualty Rate in Boston

The Celtics are playing well so far (save for an odd one-point loss to Toronto), but soon they will fiercely feel the tension of thermodynamics' Second Law. The team is going to suffer with their older roster and their early crush of injuries. It is hard to roll over top-quality basketball players when your squad has the following infirmities:

Rajon Rondo is battling plantar fasciitis and a hamstring problem.

Jermaine O'Neal has chronic knee tendinitis.

Kendrick Perkins is recovering from major surgery to his knee ligaments.

Delonte West just broke his wrist.

Semih Erden has a nagging shoulder problem that could eventually end his season.

Avery Bradley is recovering from a serious ankle injury.

Besides their five starters, and the aforementioned injured guys, they have Glen Davis, Marquis Daniels, Nate Robinson, Von Wafer, and Luke Harangody. These lads may be spry enough to power the Celtics through wintry challenges that may come, but when the air turns vernal, they will need the bulk of their bigs and the defensive agility of West and Bradley. The Celtics were wise to sign fifteen players for their roster, the maximum allowed under NBA rules. Rather than prizing cost savings, Celtics ownership is showing that the real lucre is its desired catch.

Lakers in 5

My prediction could not be more clear. The Celtics are good, but several of their players (Rondo, Perkins, Garnett, T.Allen, Wallace, Daniels) are in various stages of recovery from injury, and Perkins risks suspension every time he tussles in the paint. Kobe Bryant is supposedly suffering from various ailments, but his performance in the Utah series and Phoenix series resembled Michael Jordan in a way I've never seen from any other player. Andrew Bynum can only give about 20 minutes per game due to a knee injury, but he does better when playing without Pau Gasol on the floor, anyway.

Who on the Celtics will score the ball? Perkins cannot score with his wrist injury; he has averaged 5.6 points in the postseason, down from 10.1 in the regular. Moreover, Bynum/Gasol can surely contain a reduced Garnett. Artest will do a much better job containing Paul Pierce than Vladimir Radmanovic or Lamar Odom could in 2008. Rajon Rondo has obviously improved greatly since two years ago, and he will likely carve up the Lakers' parade of inferior defenders: Fisher, Farmar, Vujacic, Brown. However, if Rondo is scoring, he is not distributing, and his teammates may grow frustrated. It may fall to the Celtics' reserves — Davis, Wallace, and Nate Rob — to spark Boston's offensive flow.

Boston can still play excellent D, but Los Angeles now has Bynum and Artest as additional offensive options compared to their '08 squad. It is hard to imagine Ray Allen containing Kobe Bryant's endless array of feints and parries, even if Bryant tires somewhat chasing Allen around curl patterns at the other end.

The Lakers have grown fat and happy since 2008, as Lamar Odom, Sasha Vujacic, and even Andrew Bynum have found some measure of womanly companionship. However, the stern bark of Kobe Bryant will keep them focused on the prize. Boston is very good, but the Lakers are better.

Fallacy of Enduring Franchise Traits

I'm tired of statistics showing the historical performance of teams in certain situations, spanning multiple decades. Take the following tidbit from an online Sports Illustrated article yesterday: "The Celtics ... are 32-0 in seven-game series in which they've taken a 2-0 lead."

That's simply not of interest to me. I might be interested in the historical performance of all teams in this situation (viz. teams that win the first two games of a series have a historical series win record of 217-14, 93%, and if we focus on teams that win the series's first two games on the road, they won 22 of 25 series, 88%), but why would the historical Celtics performance in this situation add any useful information? The Celtics as a Massachusetts corporate entity have some continuous legal life, and by convention, the current group of guys shares some virtual heritage with former teams called Celtics. Yet the 1959 Celtics of Russell and Cousy are no closer in composition to the 2010 Celtics compared to, say, the similitude of the 1979 Sonics to the current Celtics. There is little that has remained constant with the Celtics franchise over time, other than green uniforms and a stadium in downtown Boston. So why should we think that all-time Celtics statistics are informative for the current team's situation?

As Rick Pitino once put it, Larry Bird ain't walking through that door.

Celtics Fell Mighty Magic in Game 1

I was visiting Boston and communing with a fellow member of the JPO team yesterday, but due to the quirks of my travel schedule, I actually was not able to view most of the Orlando-Boston game and could only see highlights. The box score reveals a couple interesting quirks to me, though.

* Boston out-assisted Orlando, 21 to 10. Orlando had averaged nearly 19 assists per game in their first two post-season series. Look for Stan Van Gundy to emphasize more pick-and-roll action in Game 2, freeing up Vince Carter and Rashard Lewis for more easy shots.

* Relatedly, Orlando shot only 5 for 22 from three-point range, an unusually low clip compared to their regular-season percentage of 37%. Had they made a couple more of those, they could have nipped Boston.

Prior to this series, I told my co-bloggers that I predict Orlando in 6 games. I still stand by that prediction, although obviously my prediction now seems significantly less likely, both in a simple arithmetical sense and also due to what we learned about the teams' relative strengths.

You Got to Know When to Hold Em

This season one of the keys for teams like the Celtics and Spurs reminds me of the old Kenny Rogers song The Gambler.

At the Celtics game the other day, I was nervous more than a few times that KG was going to get injured on a play, and was relieved when he and many of the other starters were taken out of the game for the entire fourth quarter.

Aside from building team chemistry and practicing rotations, the regular season is almost irrelevant for these teams. Securing home court advantage in the playoffs doesn't seem worth serious injury risk to me. A bigger concern should be keeping the old players healthy. Doc Rivers and Greg Popovich will need to know when to hold their players in the game and when to take their players out at critical junctures in the game. Is a 10 point lead enough?

You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table.
There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.

Celtics Creaming Opponents

Yesterday I had the pleasure of watching the Jazz vs. Celtics at the TD Banknorth Garden.



As a ticket purchaser, the game was quite uninteresting. There was no drama, and the win was effortless for the Celts. Wish I had gotten tickets to a better game.

As a Celts fan, the win was amazing. The Celts didn't even break a sweat in surgically dismantling the Jazz, who I thought were a good team. It seems like the turnovers came to get them in the end, but still with a starting lineup of Okur, Williams, Boozer, Brewer, and AK, the Jazz have no excuses to get destroyed as they did.

Three points:

1) The Celts look incredibly balanced. Offensive production from every starter, and from those off the bench. Despite my qualms that Rasheed was slowly evolving into an Antoine Walker jack-up-threes-even-though-I-am-almost-7-feet-tall-and-should-be-posting-up clone, he didn't look half bad (at least his play wasn't half bad; not sure what to say about that growing gut.)

I also have to give him some credit as he appeared more than comfortable coming off the bench (contrast: Allen Iverson). Plus he had some nice new tats.

2) I didn't appreciate how good Paul Millsap could potentially be until seeing him live. If I were a betting man, the Jazz should bet their future on him over Carlos Boozer.

3) I was reminded by one of my friends at the game about some of the well known AK-47 stories. The one I had forgotten was when AK started crying about not getting enough minutes. My friend claimed that AK-47 had the highest salary to skill ratio of any player in the league. Kenyon Martin has a good claim to that list as well.

Oompa Loompa, Doompadee Doo

ESPN’s television broadcast the morning of the final Bulls-Celtics game listed the results of a website poll whereby web readers could pick from among four predictions for the game: Bulls in regulation, Bulls in overtime, Celtics in regulation, Celtics in overtime. I don’t recall the precise numbers, and the poll does not seem to be available any longer online, but something like 30% of respondents predicted the Bulls to win in OT and 21% predicted the Celtics in OT. So more than half of poll-takers thought Game 7 would go to overtime! (In the event, Boston won 109-99, in regulation time.)

Now, the raw proportion of all NBA games across the land, across years that go to OT is probably no more than 5%. To the extent you know that two teams are evenly matched (and Chicago and Boston minus Garnett certainly are), you are probably on relatively safer ground to predict that the game will go to overtime. But I would think that for these even-steven Bulls and Celtics, the most prudently correct answer to the question “Will the next game go to overtime?” is surely “No”. So over half of poll-takers got it wrong, no?


At first glance, this looks to me like an example of the representativeness bias, whereby, e.g., if you ask a poll respondent, “Who would you more likely find in a library: (i) a woman, or (ii) a middle-aged woman environmentalist with glasses?” many respondents will choose the latter because it sounds more quintessentially library-esque. But, of course, back in the real world, maybe 55% of library patrons are women, while about 3% are middle-aged bespectacled tree-huggettes. People don’t handle probabilities well. An overtime game between the Bulls and Celtics feels more emblematic of that series, so people feel, however wrongly, that it will recur.

Perhaps my point is weakened because 4 of the first 6 Bulls-Celtics games actually did in fact go to OT, so out of that sample, it’s actually safe to predict extra minutes. But sometimes crazy shit goes down, just by fluke. It’s hard to believe that I should update my probabilistic expectation of overtime from 5% to 50%. What do the numbers say? Consider the following Bayesian probability formula:

Such an updating would require that the proportion of Bulls-Celtics games out of all the overtime games played in 2008-09 is roughly ten times the proportion of Bulls-Celtics games out of all the NBA games played this season. So let’s consider some data. (I obtained all these numbers from the wonderful basketball-reference.com.) In 2008-09, there were 1230 regular-season games and 45 first-round playoff games, for a total of 1275 games, of which 70 regular-season and 4 playoff, or 5.804%, were overtime games. Out of all those 1275 games, the Bulls and Celtics played 3 regular-season games and 7 playoff games, for a total of 10 games, which was 0.784% of the 1275 games. Out of the 74 overtime games, 4, or 5.405%, were Bulls-Celtics games. So, the answer to my equational riddle up above is 5.405% * 5.804% / 0.784%, which equals 40.0%. Hmmm, maybe I was too quick to criticize the masses. 40% is pretty close to 50%, so predicting an overtime game based on the available data is not such a stretch. What if we make the analysis more precise by truncating the data set just prior to May 2nd, the date of Bulls-Celts game 7? This would put us in the position of a Bayesian observer filling out that ESPN poll just after game 6. This only deletes two games from our data set — Bulls-Celts game 7 and Heat-Hawks game 7. Now the correct Bayesian probability of overtime is 44.4% ! Wow! My initial supercilious dismissal of the silly plebes was way off. It seems that ESPN web users internalized the available observations quite well. 44.4% is still not high enough to predict that Game 7 will go to OT, but it's dang close.

Meanwhile, the Atlanta-Miami series also seems to be indicative that the teams are evenly matched, but in a wildly different way. If Atlanta had won three games by huge margins and Miami had won three squeakers, then we might say that Atlanta is a better team and Miami has been touched by kind luck. But actually, the first six games were all settled by double-figure margins, and no game saw a lead change after the first quarter. We might say that the two teams are mediocre at best, and equally likely to suffer horrible mental holidays.

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UPDATE JUNE 17TH: I just became aware of this June 10th blog post from Northwestern University professor of economics Jeff Ely. Check out the two Youtube animated graphs, showing the how the distribution of score differentials changes in the last 60 seconds of an NBA game, averaged over 12 years of data. Absolutely amazing stuff. The basic gist is that tie outcomes after 48 minutes are far, far more likely than 1-point victories or 2-point victories. You should also read the comments, which provide some speculative explanations for that data. I don't think this new information contradicts anything in my original post above.

Bringing Balance to the Force

I caught the Nuggets-Celtics game on television last night. Boston was getting bullied by defensive hustle plays: Nenê Hilario repeatedly ripped the ball out of Celtics’ hands; Renaldo Balkman, as advertised, always chased down loose balls, and quixotically got a lot of court time. Chauncey Billups was steady down the stretch and maintained the team’s cool every time Boston made a comeback.

Many critics have shredded Denver’s decision to jettison Marcus Camby for a draft pick last summer. But in light of this second trade, I think it makes more sense. The roster and salary structure were badly unbalanced in 2007-08. Denver was paying about $30 MM to the troika of Martin, Hilario, and Camby, three oft-injured big men. You don’t need to be paying star money to three of those guys. Two, maybe. Meanwhile, Denver had three volume scorers in Smith, Anthony and Iverson who couldn’t really co-exist together. Smith needed to be resigned in the summer of ’08, adding further pressure to the salary load. Iverson’s contract ends after 2008-09 and Denver was unlikely to re-sign him; they weren’t getting anywhere in the playoffs with him. So in 2009-10, Denver could (i) be paying $7.65 MM to Camby, or alternatively (ii) they could acquire a suitable point guard like Billups (who gets paid $12.1 MM that year) who could expertly run the show. Camby is older than Martin and Hilario (and his contract seems the most sensible of the three) so it was easier and more logical to trade him.

I think the outlook for Denver now is certainly better than it was six months ago. If only Carmelo could learn to play defense…

Daily Dispatch: The First and the Worst at MSG

It may only be pre-season, but good teams still look good, and bad teams still look bad. A few noteworthy points from courtside at last night’s game at the Garden:

• One would expect that the Knicks would be thoroughly outplayed by the Celtics. But it must have been disheartening for Knicks fans to see their team hammered by the Celtics’ second unit. The Knicks did manage to stage a comeback in the waning minutes of the 4th quarter but only after the Celts brought on their CBA squad.

• We, at JPO, love Leon Powe. Who wouldn’t respect a guy with a life story like this? And what NBA fan wouldn’t love what Powe did in Game 2 of the Finals when he single-handedly staved off a Lakers’ comeback? Mr. Powe did not disappoint on Tuesday night, Poweverizing the Knicks with 19 and 12. These weren’t mere garbage points. It seems that Powe has developed a nice 8-foot turn-around jumper in the lane. Mark my words: Powe will be one of the top sixth men in the league and key in the Celtics’ title run this year.

• Did someone forget to tell Kevin Garnett that it’s still pre-season? In typical KG fashion, the most intense athlete in the history of humankind was on his feet hollerin’ during pre-season garbage time, cheering on the Patrick O’Bryants and Brian Scalabrines of the world.

• You know what the Knicks’ problem is? Their most exciting and charismatic team member is their coach.

• I almost feel sorry for Starbury. It seems that the Knicks franchise is going out of its way to make him feel unwelcome. The Knicks’ pre-game montage features every single Knick player except Marbury.

• As my fiancée remarked: “Sam Cassell's head looks even more alien-like in person than on TV.”