Bye Bye Buddy
Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2018 12:50 pm
The Buddy Pedraza era came to an end this season after eight and a half years. Buddy’s career thus far has been remarkable. He has averaged between 19 and 26 points a game every year. He has averaged 10 rebounds a game three times. He is a six time All-star and four time All-League player. He has been truly great. His teams, however, have not been great. He has made the playoffs four times and only advanced to the second round once. It isn’t clear why this happened. Nets GM RPF has put together a lot of good teams over the 9 seasons since drafting Buddy seventh overall. He has acquired and successfully developed promising prospects, he has signed free agents, he has traded for upgrades. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. I have really felt for RPF and Buddy as I’ve watched them from the other conference. I’ve been through similar experiences myself with Derrick Rose and Dirk Nowitzki. I decided it might be fun to study the team that brought Buddy’s tenure to an end. Let’s look at this year’s Nets squad and figure out what went wrong this time around.
The first thing I did was run a regression on all teams with their winning percentage as the dependent variable and the average of the current player ratings of their top 8 players by minutes played per game. This gives me coefficients that indicate how much the expected win percentage changes for each additional current rating point per category. I then took those coefficients and multiplied them by the average current ratings of the top 8 players by minutes for this year’s pre-Buddy-trade-Nets. This is what the math looks like.
So based on 30+ years of results, we would expect a team like the Nets to win about 66% of their games on average. This is noisy though and I use averages. Each team has their own idiosyncrasies that won’t stick out in averages. Here are some of the reasons I think the Nets failed to reach their potential this year.
Kevin Whittaker is a revolving door
There is reason to believe that Kevin Whittaker is actually just too bad at defense to play 30+ minutes on a good team. He is listed as an undersized small forward. His post defense rating is 20 and his perimeter defense rating is 25. In the entire history of the league, only one team has ever played a SG or SF with post and perimeter defensive ratings below 30 more than 30 minutes a game and ended the season with a win percentage above .500, the 2021 Boston Celtics. This suggests that maybe the league is changing and maybe there is a place for a player like Whittaker moving forward but there is a huge difference between Whit and the Celtics matador, Jaylen Brown. JB has steal and block ratings of 56 and 63 respectively while Kev has ratings of 34 and 12. So it just might be that Kevin Whittaker is too bad to play this much on a winning team.
F. Cole Medina is a chucker
On paper, F. Cole Medina looks like a dream of a point guard. 83 handles, 100 passing, 97 perimeter defense, 60+ in all scoring categories. But Medina has a problem that doesn’t show up in the index, his propensity to shoot 3s. Medina heaves up about 4 and a half three balls a game. That is not a ton but considering he hits less than 30% of them, it isn’t great news. This season he is shooting more jump shots too. All in all this amounts to 1.1 shots per game, which is not what you want from a guy shooting 15 times a game. No team have ever had a winning record with a player playing more than 30 minutes a game, chucking up over 300 3 pointers in a season, hitting less than 31% of them and posting a ts%<.500. Only three have ever ended over .500 with such a player hitting less than 31%, the 1990 Dallas Mavericks with Steve Kerr, the 1996 Portland Trail Blazers with Jamal Mashburn, and the 2012 Utah Jazz with Ricky Rubio. I really like Medina and he has shown that he can be a key player on good team but it would probably be best if he was on a team with 3 other scorers chosen as key players to limit his shots and take advantage of his passing.
No tree to block shots
Buddy is a great player buuuut he doesn’t block shots. At all. Marquese Chriss is a good player. He will be a great player. He can even block shots buuuuuut he is only 6’9” and he was the tallest guy on the team. Only one team has ever finished the season over .500 whose tallest player in the top 8 in minutes played was shorter than 6'10", the 1995 Lakers with Penny Hardaway, Dennis Scott and Jerry Stackhouse. You need rim protection. You need a guy that can match up against other bigs. Buddy and Chriss just can’t do that, no matter how good they are at defending and scoring in the post. There was a time when I was planning on Barger and Bagley as my front court of the future. I’m really glad I traded for Reading and I’m really glad I wrote this article. You can’t teach height and you can’t avoid the need for it.
There are other problems with this team. They really miss TJ Warren. Oladipo just isn’t really effective enough anymore to be playing these kinds of minutes. Chriss is still a little raw. They are undersized are essentially every position. But still the lineup of Medina, Whittaker, Buddy, and Chriss looked pretty good on paper. It is sad to see this team break up without bringing postseason glory to Brooklyn. For now, the future looks bright with a core of Medina (for now), Agustin, Irvine, Whittaker, Chriss, Okogie, and the Djoker.
The first thing I did was run a regression on all teams with their winning percentage as the dependent variable and the average of the current player ratings of their top 8 players by minutes played per game. This gives me coefficients that indicate how much the expected win percentage changes for each additional current rating point per category. I then took those coefficients and multiplied them by the average current ratings of the top 8 players by minutes for this year’s pre-Buddy-trade-Nets. This is what the math looks like.
- nets_predict.PNG (20.78 KiB) Viewed 659 times
Kevin Whittaker is a revolving door
There is reason to believe that Kevin Whittaker is actually just too bad at defense to play 30+ minutes on a good team. He is listed as an undersized small forward. His post defense rating is 20 and his perimeter defense rating is 25. In the entire history of the league, only one team has ever played a SG or SF with post and perimeter defensive ratings below 30 more than 30 minutes a game and ended the season with a win percentage above .500, the 2021 Boston Celtics. This suggests that maybe the league is changing and maybe there is a place for a player like Whittaker moving forward but there is a huge difference between Whit and the Celtics matador, Jaylen Brown. JB has steal and block ratings of 56 and 63 respectively while Kev has ratings of 34 and 12. So it just might be that Kevin Whittaker is too bad to play this much on a winning team.
F. Cole Medina is a chucker
On paper, F. Cole Medina looks like a dream of a point guard. 83 handles, 100 passing, 97 perimeter defense, 60+ in all scoring categories. But Medina has a problem that doesn’t show up in the index, his propensity to shoot 3s. Medina heaves up about 4 and a half three balls a game. That is not a ton but considering he hits less than 30% of them, it isn’t great news. This season he is shooting more jump shots too. All in all this amounts to 1.1 shots per game, which is not what you want from a guy shooting 15 times a game. No team have ever had a winning record with a player playing more than 30 minutes a game, chucking up over 300 3 pointers in a season, hitting less than 31% of them and posting a ts%<.500. Only three have ever ended over .500 with such a player hitting less than 31%, the 1990 Dallas Mavericks with Steve Kerr, the 1996 Portland Trail Blazers with Jamal Mashburn, and the 2012 Utah Jazz with Ricky Rubio. I really like Medina and he has shown that he can be a key player on good team but it would probably be best if he was on a team with 3 other scorers chosen as key players to limit his shots and take advantage of his passing.
No tree to block shots
Buddy is a great player buuuut he doesn’t block shots. At all. Marquese Chriss is a good player. He will be a great player. He can even block shots buuuuuut he is only 6’9” and he was the tallest guy on the team. Only one team has ever finished the season over .500 whose tallest player in the top 8 in minutes played was shorter than 6'10", the 1995 Lakers with Penny Hardaway, Dennis Scott and Jerry Stackhouse. You need rim protection. You need a guy that can match up against other bigs. Buddy and Chriss just can’t do that, no matter how good they are at defending and scoring in the post. There was a time when I was planning on Barger and Bagley as my front court of the future. I’m really glad I traded for Reading and I’m really glad I wrote this article. You can’t teach height and you can’t avoid the need for it.
There are other problems with this team. They really miss TJ Warren. Oladipo just isn’t really effective enough anymore to be playing these kinds of minutes. Chriss is still a little raw. They are undersized are essentially every position. But still the lineup of Medina, Whittaker, Buddy, and Chriss looked pretty good on paper. It is sad to see this team break up without bringing postseason glory to Brooklyn. For now, the future looks bright with a core of Medina (for now), Agustin, Irvine, Whittaker, Chriss, Okogie, and the Djoker.