APBRmetrics

Houston is on pace for 3rd straight season with W-L within 2-3 wins of .500, the place where several speakers at past Sloan conferences say you particularly don't want to be. Only 2 teams in the last 21 years have had 3 straight seasons of 38-43 wins. One team (Hawks) bounced off that to a couple of nice regular season records but didn't get out of the second round.

Should Houston blow it up or should they have done so already?

Conventional wisdom seems to say they should / should have.

They tried to trade Scola but didn't, yet. His efficiency has dropped sharply to career low due to shooting, defensive rebounding and turnovers.

Martin is getting older.

Lowry is a a success story, Dalambert a pretty good pick up and Budinger a nice enough role player but that isn't a lot of strong assets. Half the rest of the team is just near average on player performance (which is ok for role players, but you don't want just ok) and the other half suck, with no sign the 3 bust top draft picks recently acquired are going to break out of that status.

Are they going to climb out of mediocrity with that and without high draft picks soon? Doesn't seem particularly promising.

Kevin Martin has one year left, so they probably aren't too worried about his contract. Scola has several years left at over $10M, which looks bad, but Houston also has numerous players with team options, including Dalembert, Thabeet, Flynn, Hill, Williams, Patterson, and Budinger. Aside from Scola they have no other large contracts. Houston should be a big player on the free agent market (remember the minimum salary is 85% of the cap, moving up to 90% in a couple years). Right now they're a 1/2 game out of the 8th spot, so I imagine they are trying to make the playoffs. Perhaps, that will help attract free agents.

Do good free agents flock to possible 8th seeds without superstars?

Don't they tend to get players mainly looking for the most money, like Dalambert?
Maybe nice but not enough to become elite?

It will be interesting to see what they get from free agency, the most expensive, probably least productive way to build a team historically.

With all those pieces that they can shed this year or next, what do they build around that is above average besides Lowry? If the plan is to shed most or all of those guys, why not get at it some already? If the plan is to completely re-tool how long til you have them assembled and working well together? Is McHale the right coach to do a complete overhaul then finetune job?

Kevin Martin was at the bottom of my "most improved" list, until recently being displaced by Luis Scola.
If these 2 had recreated last year's rates in their first 21 games, they'd have created another 1.5 eWins.
In eWinsLand, that's up to 3 more team wins. At 16-8, they'd be one of the top 3 teams in the West.

Dalembert has been great, Jordan Hill has been fine, Dragic has developed into his role, and of course Lowry has been a story.
If not for epic dropoffs by 2 stars, there's no question whether they'd been doing the right things, is there?

p.s. -- only a couple of teams are both younger and better: OKC, possibly Mem or Min.

Martin is now estimated to be having his 8th straight season with a negative prior informed RAPM. Even on less refined APM and RAPM that basic trend information was available to them before they traded for him. But I guess it wasn't considered a reason for not taking a player that a franchise turned bad during his tenure wanted to give away and seemingly no one else bid very highly on then or now that the Rockets have tried to shop him.

Martin and Scola didn't replicate last season but instead both have career lows on TS%.

The Rockets are 10th on minutes weighted average age but the average age of their best 3 players is almost 28 and more than 2 years above the rest of the team. They would not be near .500 without them, and the plan is to be without 2 of them soon? No player on the team younger than 25 has a winshares /48 above Budinger's .137. Is that young and very promising?

7 of their young guys were traded or dropped by other teams and none of them are meaningfully above average on ws/48 this season. But maybe next season or the one after that or the one after that?

Marcus Morris, their top draft pick last year, with the 2nd worst ws/48 of any rookie- first round, second or undrafted- at -.240.


On the other side of the evaluation, 8 of their top ten most used lineups are performing well, including the most used one. The performance of the rest of the lineups which are getting a bit more than half the total minutes is looking bad though (around -100 for the season). The question is do they tighten the rotation, play the better lineups more and maybe make the playoffs but still likely lose in the first round to a top seed; or do they experiment more and try to develop players more or even try to tank and get a better pick in what may be a very good or great draft? A high-level strategic choice. Are folks supporting option A? I am not wild about that path. Maybe you can make it work, maybe they could surprise and win an upset in the first round, but how much weight to put on that? It is, at minimum, not the clearcut best choice IMO given historical evidence of difficulty breaking out of mediocrity to true contender status (the real point of it all right?). A team that has tasted great success in the moderately distant past wants that again. Unfortunately it may not be willing to endure being really bad to help get there in the peculiar NBA process. Houston hasn't experience that much recently, wouldn't allow it.

I will be curious to see what happens with the Rockets this season and the next half decade.


Philly has broken out of 10 years of records under .600 with only one below .400. It still remains to be seen where they end the season. They broke out largely because of the right coach for the situation and even still they had a tough time doing it. 10 years is a long time to wander in that middle zone that GMs say you don't really want to be in. And will Philly get to or out of the second round anytime soon? And looking back in 3 years will they be satisified with the path taken as the best path given the goal of getting past the second round? Time will tell.

I think most teams get to the second round sometime in a decade so waiting 8, 9 or more years without like the Sixers have is probably a below average performance and may not speak well to their long-term strategy during the period. The best way to get to the second round is by far to be there already and stay at that level. If the conventional GM wisdom is right, getting bad before you get good may be a better strategy on average long term than trying to rise up from the middle ground as Philly is still trying and Houston is trying, now that they 3 years removed from a 2nd round appearance & loss and almost 15 years removed from a 2nd round victory. Stick with the reload efforts and try to rise out of the middle after all that? Not a strong track record to endorse that path.

Kevin Martin without the ability to get to the line is not much of an improvement over a guy like Monta Ellis.

EvanZ wrote:Kevin Martin without the ability to get to the line is not much of an improvement over a guy like Monta Ellis.

what's the story behind scola underperforming this year? is it age?

In updating the Predictions thread, I noticed that people expected Houston to win 29 to 34 games, and they're on pace to win 36.
Guessing 34 were J.E. and Crow.
Martin's got most of his game back, and Scola just had his best game of the year.

Through the first 22 games last season, Martin had 8 games with 10+ FTA. This season he has 3 such games. Mike, I think the rip-through effect on his game is real, and Martin is not going to get back up to the levels of efficiency he used to have. There's just no way of doing that without getting those free throws. He's not going to become a vastly better shooter at this point in his career.

His FTA are way down, and he may never again lead the league in FT. He's certainly had to adjust, and adjust he has.
In the Improved thread, he bottomed out at -.90, as of a Jan. 20 report; and he's now -.59 .
To reduce his deficit, he's actually got to be better than he was last year.

So here are his raw per-36 minutes rates last season, the first 11 games this year, and his latest 11 games:Other rates (DReb, Ast, PF, Blk) aren't significantly different.
The FTA are perhaps never coming back, but his 2FG% is way up. His 3FG% is back, and he's shooting more of them. TSA and TS% are most of the way back. Stl are up and TO are down.

If he can get back to 58% or 59% TS without the free throws, that will be truly impressive. (One of the more interesting stories of the year from a stats perspective.) It could be that he's just on a hot shooting streak, though.

Kevin Martin has been compared to Reggie Miller. And when Reggie was 28, they had some similar career numbers (per 36 rates) :Martin has taken more shots, of every kind, in his minutes. In perhaps a tighter defensive era, he hasn't made them quite as well.
But really, the disparity in their 2pt FG% is glaring. Why has Martin shot just .477 from inside the arc?

Perhaps part of it is that he's been trying to draw the foul more than to hit the shot, on a lot of his attempts before this season.
Maybe now he's actually trying to make the shot; and along with recently making them, he's been getting fouled more often. Who wants to foul a 45% shooter?

It may actually make him a better player to be forced into this adjustment. Ironically, it may not show up in his on/off numbers: Drawing fouls on the opponent helps your team, even when you're off the court.

Man, Crow, you must have gotten in their heads. Two big road wins since this thread started. Went to high school in Houston so I'm always rooting for the team to do well...

Those 2 victories weren't because of the new starting lineup which went pretty negative in these games.

With time to do it, it would be interesting to sort performance data for specific lineups when facing 5, 4,3 or less starters. Some lineups probably can handle facing 3 or 4 starters but not 5.

Make it three tonight. Do you think some of the mini-surge might be connected to team depth? Kind of a lesser version of Philly that's just shown up recently. Houston's keeping its players fresher than other teams...and it's starting to show up now? I haven't been watching very closely, just throwing that out as a possibility. Heard some announcers somewhere talking about "energy" for Houston.

With EVERYONE in the West fresh and healthy, Houston isn't a playoff team. Fresh vs. tired has helped them surge into contention, creating a temporary illusion of playoff caliber quality against shorthanded or tired teams (consecutive road wins at Portland, Denver, Phoenix is something non-playoff teams probably wouldn't do).

Will try to dig through some recent boxscores when I get a chance to see how minutes are being distrubuted. Is Chase Budinger doing a Jeremy Lin off the radar? Bet per minute stuff is similar the last three games for both...particularly if you adjust for the quality of opposing defenses...