drzachary

Josh and Dwight would make such a great team -- Josh would pull all the defenders out of the paint, keeping 'em honest from the perimeter, PLUS they could work on their free throws together! (Yeah, no.)

But if you play basketball in Texas, you have to spend a lot of time in Texas. That should be a selling point for the Hawks.

BWAHAHAHAH

Championship!

Just noticed it! Incredible. We're lucky to have such a wonderful, humorous, educated Hawks community. Love it. -Z

Why are the Mavs a preferential destination for Howard? Come play with Dirk in his final productive years as the team continues to decline? They didn't even make the playoffs.

See, I think our situations for your 'home angle' and 'fanbase angle' are closer to what Dwight is actually comfortable with. Obviously, I'm mind-reading here.

This draft is an utter failure. No Machado, No Yi Jianlian. What are we going to do without these guaranteed superstars?

Can you photoshop Robert Horry in there? He has more rings than Jordan. And, less facetiously, Bill Russell has to use one of his toes.

Efficiency doesn't matter. He's not a star because he doesn't have a ton of highlight reel dunks. That's what we need if we want the Hawks to be successful.

It's no fun if you reveal the mystery. Back in my day, we had to figure out who alter egos were through analyzing the text. (JohnnyBravo & TheArtist). *shaking my rake*

1) This is Atlanta. Good things don't happen for us, since Sherman. 2) Broussard. On a "truthiness" scale of 1 to 10, I give this article a "meh."

Pretending to be a woman would be a nice way of deflecting the JohnnyBravo investigation though....

Check his IP against JohnnyBravo's, please! ;)

Offensive rebounding is pretty rare: getting back on D is probably a good move for them. In fact, I think there's a case to be made like this: Take these two scenarios: A) Josh fires up a long jumper, Hawks scramble back to defend in transition. B) Josh advances across the halfcourt line, holds the ball in his hands until the 24 second clock expires. During this time, the rest of the team gets set, defensively. I think B might even be better than A, given how poorly Josh shoots. I'd need to look at the offensive increases in transition vs not, though.

Josh is usually an asset, but can be a liability when he tries to do things he's not capable of doing. (Unfortunately, these things happen frequently, and I don't really know who's to blame.)

Josh doesn't need to replace his jumpers with interior shots -- he just needs to stop shooting jumpers. The other team scores more off those jumpers than the Hawks do.

"Outlet passes neglected" is my guess for stat the Hawks lead the league in.

Got season tix.. Probably fairly easy to move around to wherever the group ends up sitting. And there's always White Cup Special for pregame.

Also worth noting that his offensive prowess has been better in years' past -- this is a legendarily bad season for him (or any player) on the offensive side of the ball. He's a top 100 guy this year, been top 50 in prior seasons, so the 'cusp of an All-Star' judgement is pretty accurate. Definitely not a guy you want to max out, but them's the breaks.

They're not quotes, they're summaries of arguments I hear. Sorry for the confusion. And as for WS being off 2 games, my reaction is: only 2 games! That's awesome. It's not perfect, generating expected wins out of something like PER/Efficiency, you're usually off 30% or so. And there's nothing arbitrary about it, really. Arbitrary was how PER/Efficiency were created and the various factors weighted. With WS/WP, the weights were derived from actually measuring -- regressing -- what statistical factors were present in the box scores of teams that actually won games! Where it gets tricky is when you break it down to individual players, of course -- but the summing of wins helps bear it out a bit.

Yes to all of the above, with the caveat that it's not perfect, so maybe Zaza was only 33% or 40% better. The reason it doesn't "sit well" is that our eyes lie to us. :)

AHF has summed it up pretty nicely. Here are my additions: "We're not saying Josh is an efficient offensive player, we're just saying that he's an efficient player!" I am not sure how this is possible. What definition of 'efficient' can include 'offensively inefficient?' "Josh Smith is one of the very best defenders in the league" gets no argument from me. "Josh's offense doesn't invalidate all his defensive contributions!" This is true, but only inasmuch as his offensive problems don't invalidate *all* of them. His offensive problems are what make him a top 100 player, not a top 25 one. Good, not great. Also-ran, not All-Star. He could literally fix all of these issues by taking less shots, which is sad, and is definitely largely due to coaching. "Why is WS better than PER or NBA Efficiency?" Easy: one reflects winning and one does not. PER/"Efficiency" can be generated for all players back to the late 70s pretty easily, and then compared to the actual win totals of the teams they were on. WS/WP gives us a highly correlated result; PER/Efficiency do not.

Does defense win championships? Prove it! I always see that canard bandied about, but I don't believe it to be true. I'd guess that scoring efficiency wins championships (in the sense that we're looking for the single biggest factor in wins.)

Oh, you're using the NBA Efficiency metric, largely comparable to PER, both of which are useless and reward inefficiency. So yeah, nowhere near the top 25 in efficiency, but 25th in Player Efficiency. Quick explanation: Player Efficiency and PER both *increase* if a player simply takes more shots at a 33% clip, or 25% from 3. In short: it doesn't mean anything.