Nets Are Scorching

The NBA lockout may have essentially taken professional basketball away from this continent, but it hasn’t stopped statistical madman John Hollinger from diving into his cauldron of basketball-related intelligence (or BRI for short) to provide player projections for this NBA year that’s never going to happen. Each day, Hollinger is releasing a new team’s worth of player reports, having tackled the Dallas Mavericks and Miami Heat thus far (Insider only).

In the Miami Heat profiles, Hollinger talks a bit in the LeBron section about “assist value,” which in loose terms refers to the worth of a player’s assist. Assist values vary depending on two factors: the shot’s distance from the basket (shots at the rim are worth more as they’re higher-percentage shots), and the point value of the shot (two-pointers versus three-pointers). The league average assist value for all players is 0.67 points per assist, i.e. the average assist by any player in the league was worth 0.67 points to that player’s team.

By this measure, Jordan Farmar ranks as one of the worst playmakers in the league, ranking fifth-lowest^[1] with an assist value of just 0.59. The only point guards lower than Farmar are Brandon Jennings and Darren Collison, two players with considerably more upside than Farmar.

According to HoopData, Farmar assisted on 120 shots at the rim, 63 three-pointers, and 185 other two-point field goals. That means slightly less than half of Farmar’s assists were on dunks, layups, and three-pointers, the most high-quality shots. Across the league, an average point guard^[2] assisted on 153 shots at the rim, 99 three-pointers, and 155 other two-pointers. That’s 62% of assists on “high-quality” shots.

I’ve maligned Farmar for this issue before, but it’s worth noting that some of the discrepancy in assist quality is undoubtedly contextual. When there aren’t a lot of players attacking the rim or spotting up from outside, it’s difficult to get assists in those areas. The only Nets to routinely attack the rim last season were Derrick Favors and Kris Humphries, while mainstays in the rotation Brook Lopez, Travis Outlaw, Johan Petro, Sasha Vujacic, and Stephen Graham primarily shot jumpers from inside the arc. Even three-point shooter extraordinaire Anthony Morrow still attempted 16′-23′ shots almost three times per game last season.

Across the board, the average team in the NBA last season took 52% of their shots at the rim or beyond the arc; the Nets only attempted 47%, fifth-worst in the league.^[3]

That’s not to say that Farmar’s 5th-worst ranking is due primarily to the team dynamic. Farmar has always been a shoot-first point guard, not consistently looking to create off the pick & roll or set up big men down low. In roughly the same amount of minutes in a Nets uniform, Devin Harris assisted on more shots at the rim and from beyond the arc than Farmar, with a higher percentage of high-quality assists (55%). It’s worth noting that Deron Williams’s small sample size looks about as rough as Farmar’s, with 48% of his assists coming on “good-quality” shots, but since those came in 12 weird games and are far from his career numbers, that’s more likely an aberration than the norm.

With Deron Williams hopefully manning the point at some point this (next?) season, it doesn’t make much economic sense for the Nets to invest $8 million in a backup who’d bring the offense to a screeching halt for 10 minutes per game. The fact that his assist value is this low by a weighted measure only adds fuel to that notion.

Hollinger will profile the few New Jersey Nets remaining under contract on December 16th.

I could talk about Rod Thorn’s charisma, the slight twang in his accent, how he always came off as an affable, upstanding man. I could talk about how Thorn arguably was the fairest Executive VP of Player Operations the league has ever seen, curtailing the violent play of the 80s and 90s as he ruled with a calm iron fist. I could talk about how his NBA playing career influenced his future in front office politics.

But those things are only a modicum of your overall impact. Truthfully, your record defines your greatness. And Rod Thorn’s front office record with the Nets is nothing short of phenomenal.

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February 19, 2008 represented a changing of the guard in New Jersey. Fed up with the Nets franchise’s inability to compete, Jason Kidd demanded a trade. Dallas owner Mark Cuban wanted Kidd back and was willing to make a decent value deal for him. Enter one of the biggest deals in Nets history, involving eight players, two draft picks, and $3 million in cash considerations — yet none of it really mattered outside of the two key pieces: Jason Kidd and Devin Harris.

That the Nets were able to get someone — anyone — for a guy who had mentally checked out of the franchise was a godsend. Too often these deals end up like salary dumps, with no talent going the other way.

Just look at how the Nets acquired Vince Carter. And then dealt Vince Carter.

But Devin Harris? Devin Harris was somebody. No one really knew what yet — he’d been hidden in Dallas’s system for the first four years of his career, and even as a starter hadn’t fully reached his potential. He was efficient, but with limited impact.

Joining the Nets gave him free rein of the offense, and finally allowed his career to take that next step. New Jersey gave Harris the opportunity to become… whatever it was Harris was supposed to become.

And what was that? I’d call Harris a trickster, a player who maximized his efficiency in unorthodox ways. In 2008-09, Harris walked a tightrope between poor shooting and efficient scoring as well as anyone. As he began to use more possessions than ever, he used his exceptional ability to draw contact and get to the free throw line at an unprecedented rate.

In 2007-08, Harris averaged 4.7 free throw attempts per game – a career high at that point. In 08-09? 8.8 attempts per game. Despite this new offensive responsibility plummeting his shooting percentages, Harris’s ability to adjust his game and become a scorer-distributor-foul magnet cemented him as one of the most valuable point guards in the league.

The team may have only won 34 games, but given the Nets roster — composed of Harris, a 32-year-old Vince Carter, a rookie Brook Lopez, and no one else — it was a surprise they even made it that far. They have Harris to thank for it.

(In case you forgot how bad that team was: the team’s fourth-best player was Keyon Dooling. Keyon Dooling! Keyon Dooling has started 84 games and has never averaged 10 points per game in his career. I like Keyon Dooling and he’s the ultimate in NBA fashion, but if he’s your seventh-best player, you’ve got problems.)

The year after is when it began to turn sour: without Carter in the backcourt to alleviate the offense, Harris began to fall off the tightrope. His free throw attempts and shooting both declined, he began drifting on defense, and his body struggled with the abuse withstood attacking the basket. Without anyone other than Brook Lopez to rely on for offense, the perfect storm reared its ugly head and the Nets barely missed historical infamy. After that season, the writing was on the wall.

When we look back on the Nets franchise 10, 15, 20 years from now, I’m not sure Harris will be known for much more than being a stopgap between the Jason Kidd era and the Deron Williams era (whether it’s one strike-shortened year or beyond). The lineage is as direct as it gets — the Nets traded Kidd for Harris, rode the Blur for a few seasons, then flipped him for D-Will. Whether it’s his fault or not, in 212 games over four seasons with Harris at the helm, the Nets made the playoffs zero times and recorded an abysmal 67-145 record. That kind of record leaves a bad memory.

But I’ll also remember his first game in New Jersey, when he came off the bench, hit his first six shots, led a 20-5 run, dunked on Andrew Bogut, and scored 20 points in 21 minutes as he led the Nets to victory. I’ll remember him dropping 41-13 on Dallas and Kidd as “THANK YOU CU-BAN!” rained from the rafters. I’ll remember him getting to the line 24 times against Detroit when no one else could score. I’ll remember him scoring 47 in a huge comeback victory against Phoenix, hitting all 17 of his free throws. I’ll remember his 31-point outburst against the Knicks in The Garden, and the time he outscored Derrick Rose 42-9 to keep the Nets in the playoff hunt. All in victories.

I’ll remember how Harris darted in and out of the lane, always looking to score, but also looking to create. I’ll remember his insane end-to-end speed as well as his ability to change direction in an instant. I’ll remember how quickly everything changed post-Kidd for this franchise, and even though I was wrong in this last one, I’ll remember feeling that the Nets had found a guy that could make us forget about Jason Kidd.

And, of course, I will always, always, always remember this.

Time for another arbitrarily arranged list based on nothing but my opinion. Given the amount of interest generated by current Nets PG Deron Williams, I thought I would rank the top Nets point guards from years of fandom (1992-current). I’m going to exclude DWill from this list since he wasn’t even on the team for half a season. I’m sure the #1 choice for this list is painfully obvious, but hey, I invite all of you to argue about the ranking of everyone else:

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The 2008-09 season was an era of great transition for the New Jersey Nets, as they moved away from being a perennial playoff contender into a rebuilding team that was more focused on stockpiling assets like younger/cheaper players, draft picks, and veteran contracts that were set to expire before the much bally-hooed “summer of LeBron” in 2010.  Right before the 2008 NBA Draft, the Nets traded fan favorite Richard Jefferson for the underachieving Chinese import Yi Jianlian and Bobby Simmons. After this deal, only Vince Carter remained as part of the vaunted “big three” of VC, Jefferson and Kidd.

It also is a personal favorite season of me in an odd way. The play of Devin Harris and Brook Lopez gave me hope that despite what the pundits were saying, the Nets were well set headed into 2009-10 and beyond. Guess it goes to show how little I actually know about basketball!

Anyway, the Nets had a strong draft, grabbing Lopez and PF Ryan Anderson in the first round, and Chris Douglas-Roberts in the second. During free agency, the traded cash considerations for veteran PG Keyon Dooling to back-up Devin Harris, who was acquired at the trade deadline the season before in the Jason Kidd blockbuster.

With their young nucleus of Harris and Lopez, and the veteran leadership of VC, the Nets were a surprise team through the season’s first three months, hovering around the .500 until the middle of January. Harris’ play in the first-half of the season (21.8 points, 6.5 assists) made the Kidd-trade look like a lop-sided affair in the Nets favor, while Carter seemed to embrace his veteran leadership role, hitting numerous game-winning shots and reportedly evolving as a locker room leader. Harris was selected to his first all-star game.

But a five-game losing streak in the  middle of February, pushed the Nets towards the back of the pack, and injuries started to mount, most notably to Harris and Yi. A second five-game losing streak in March sealed the team’s fate, putting them at 30-44. They finished the season 4-4 and stood in 9^th place in the Eastern Conference with a 34-48 record; making it the second consecutive year the team didn’t make the playoffs.

Read more…

Jason Kidd is once again in the spotlight as his Dallas Mavericks are one win away from a berth in the NBA Finals. When the Mavs traded for Kidd, pundits panned the deal and claimed that the Nets got the better side of it. Today, that debate has been revisited by SB Nation’s Tom Ziller and Sports Illustrated’s Zach Lowe.

Zach Lowe argues that since the Mavericks are winning with Kidd as a central part of the team, they won the deal. However, Lowe does point out that the Nets used Harris as a part of the blockbuster deal that gifted the organization Deron Williams, and it’s hard to truly evaluate the deal in retrospect.

Ziller says that looking at the current value of the players involved in that swap is not a correct way to evaluate the trade. Instead, he claims that Devin Harris’ value when the trade was made was equal or greater to that of Kidd. He also says that future success can’t necessarily define the trade either, because the Mavs also made the Finals with Harris running the point guard show.

Personally, I don’t think any of the teams “won” the trade. Both teams have moved on significantly from the deal. Harris is no longer part of the Nets, and Kidd is not one of the Mavs’ best players. One could argue that the addition of Tyson Chandler is the reason for the Mavs’ success, just as one could argue that Harris was a bust in New Jersey. However, most Nets fans are probably happy with D-Will at this point.

Let’s take a trip back in time.

It’s December 1st, 2010. The 6-12 Nets are without Devin Harris and are competing against the 12-6 Oklahoma City Thunder. Kevin Durant is also out, but the Nets don’t really stand a chance in this one, so we think. By “we,” I mean my lady friend and I, who watched this game together. I highlight that point because I’ll always remember this night as the one that she – a die-hard Celtics fan – started using the word “we” when referring to the Nets. She’s a fan first, and she started chanting things like “we’ve gotta get this stop!” or “what are we doing out there!?” It was in this tumultuous game that she became emotionally invested in the Nets. The biggest of small victories.

We had to have one bad one, didn't we? (AP Photo/Bill Kostroun)

Anyway, we picked it up late. I had a game of my own to play that evening, and as a result I don’t start watching the Nets until the fourth quarter. I turn it on, and see the Nets down 77-69 with about eight minutes to go.

I figure it’s over, but the Nets don’t die right away. Brook Lopez carries the Nets through the fourth. Anthony Morrow hits an improbable three as regulation expires. The Nets quickly build a lead in the first overtime, but Russell Westbrook brings the Thunder back, and the game goes into a second overtime. Again, the Nets build a lead, and look to have it in the bag, until…

Stephen Graham.

We’ve made some silly notes about the incompetence of Stephen Graham on the basketball court before, and I’d like to make it clear: he seems like a very nice man that has absolutely no business being on an NBA roster. To his credit, he can hit an open 18-footer about 50 percent of the time, and occasionally bug opposing guards into poor shooting nights. At his essence, though, Graham is a 6’7″ mass that, in the most literal sense, occupies a space on the floor. He’s what Ron Artest would be if Artest had no work ethic, desire, or trace of insanity; just a lifeless mass floating across the landscape of basketball courts.

By this point, December 1st, 2010, I didn’t really mind Stephen Graham all that much. This is mostly because he hadn’t really played yet – outside of a blowout victory against the lesser Los Angeles, Graham hadn’t been a regular in the rotation. He’d only played in 11 of the first 18 games, and had played less than five minutes in over half of them. He was playing his role as an 11th man, and in that role, I found solitude.

But at this moment, Stephen Graham did the unthinkable, and set the tone for the remainder of his season.

With five seconds left in double overtime, the Nets held a 110-107 lead and a foul to give. The Thunder, inbouding in their halfcourt, set a double screen on Travis Outlaw & Kris Humphries, allowing Jeff Green to catch the ball at the top right of the key. Graham starts off doing the right thing, immediately sensing the screen and picking up Green as he catches the ball.

At this point, Graham has 2 options:

1) Play Green up tight, but since he’s 29 feet from the basket and not the best offensive player on the floor, keep your hands up to contest and don’t foul right away

2) Give the foul, but do so in a way that absolutely prevents Green from shooting

Graham, of course, chose door number three.

Graham grabs down but without strength (see right), allowing Green to shoot. The shot is wild but surprisingly close, bouncing on the rim a few times before finally falling out. The foul is obvious, though Graham appears to gesture at the referee in disagreement. The crowd is in shock. Rookie Damion James shakes his head in disbelief. I slumped back in my chair, almost laughing at the utter madness of the play. Graham is quickly taken out of the game, Jeff Green hits all three free throws, and Westbrook takes over again in the third overtime. The rest is history.

In case the status granted to this play by this award doesn’t make it clear, the moment Stephen Graham reached in to foul Jeff Green was perhaps the single greatest mental lapse by any Nets player in a season chock-full of them. If you foul in that situation, you take a guy down. There is no way he gets a shot up. Either way, fouling that quickly is a huge question mark, especially considering that it would have taken at least another second to create a real shot, more if he decides to pass it off to James Harden.

Instead, Jeff Green recognized the contact being initiated, quickly formed a shooting motion, and was a rim-bounce away from turning Graham’s mishap from the Nets’ worst play of the year into the Nets’ worst play of the decade.

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What’s even more shocking to me than anything else when looking at this in retrospect was how this game somehow predicated Graham’s inclusion in the lineup. Morrow’s injury had a part in that, but the Nets also had Sasha Vujacic at this point and didn’t need Graham to play a bunch of minutes. He wasn’t really providing anything at any point that made his inclusion in the lineup a necessity.

(Read those last two sentences again. Try to fight the urge to drown yourself.)

That said, this game seemed to have the opposite of the expected effect on Graham’s playing time. Before this game, Graham played in 11 of 18 contests, averaging less than 7 minutes per game. Afterwards? 18.7 minutes per game, in 46 of the 62 games. According to Basketball-Reference, Graham had a Game Score of less than 0 in 20 of these 46 post-play games (25 total). Ironically, one of Graham’s best Game Scores came in this triple-overtime game – and that score was 7. I guess those scores just don’t count mind-numbingly stupid fouls that completely change the course of the game.

But alas, I wasn’t the genius that summed it up. That credit goes to the lady, the newfound Nets fan. After 22 years of watching the Celtics, she was unsure of how to react to Graham’s error. It was like she couldn’t process what had happened; she was used to intelligent basketball at this point and these sorts of mistakes just did not compute. After a second or two, she sighed, turned to me, and said something I don’t think she’d said in a long time:

“Wow, we suck.”

The story of the Nets 2010-11 season was supposed to be that of the Nets acquiring a superstar player from the Western Conference. We all felt that that player was supposed to be Carmelo Anthony. When reports surfaced on September 24, the Nets and all players involved in the rumored deals were put in a long, elaborate game of “he said, she said”. The hype of this deal seemed to be even more amplified due to the growing presence of NBA writers on twitter, each tweeting anything and everything in regards to Carmelo Anthony, the Nets and the Knicks who was the other suitor of Anthony and his desired destination.

As the trade deadline approached, the Nets kept sweetening their deal, thus putting heavy pressure on the Knicks to add pieces to their deal they were originally reluctant to include, like, Danilo Gallinari and Timofey Mozgov. Potentially a stroke of chess playing genius by Mikhail Prokhorov and the Nets front office brass.

When the Knicks completed their deal for Anthony on February 22, the Nets again looked to be the losers of the deadline, left with a roster full of players who had been in open trade talks all season, and lacking a true superstar which their owner desperately coveted.

Two days later, the Nets fulfilled their season long story, acquiring a western conference superstar, in a deal completely opposite of the Melo deal. No hype, no rumors, nothing made public. Just two GM’s getting a deal done the old fashioned way, over the phone and with limited fan fare, and just like that the Nets were back on the map.

This year’s Executive Move of the Year, in an absolute no-brainer, was the acquisition of Deron Williams. Anytime you can land a player of Williams’ caliber, you pull the trigger and worry about the rest later. The Nets know this, having turned the franchise around in a similar fashion when they acquired Jason Kidd in 2002. A dynamic point guard can mean wins for your organization, now it’s time for Williams to prove the Nets made the right choice.

In the deal, the Nets received Deron Williams from the Utah Jazz. In return, the Nets sent the Utah Jazz Devin Harris (who’s time in New Jersey was wearing thin, and there was rumblings of tension with him and Avery Johnson. The parting of Harris was welcomed by both sides.), Derrick Favors (Lots of upside, but ultimately an unknown commodity. Trading an unknown for a known commodity is always something that makes sense, and that’s what the Nets did.), two first-round draft picks (including the Nets pick for this year’s draft, which is being viewed historically as one of the weakest draft classes.) and cash considerations.

From a basketball standpoint, the Nets got a top shelf point guard. He’s able to create for others as well as himself. The Nets instantly became a better basketball team the moment Deron Williams entered the lineup. From a business standpoint, the Nets have a “face” to their franchise. Someone they can build a team around and someone fans can attach themselves to.