I don't know it's even half that. Kardashian is a low upside frontcourt reserve. Those guys grow on trees.BigSoxFan said:
2014 Celtics Offseason: Rebuilding Plans
- Thread starter Curtis Pride
- Start date
I don't know who's what anymore. I've heard some say Kardashian was our best player last year which if accurate would certainly put him in line for that type of deal.bosox79 said:
HomeRunBaker said:
There's guys who score well on efficiency-based metrics because their games involve easy-to-count things like rebounds, assists, etc. and they take only high-percentage shots. This is especially true when the player has more minutes and a larger role (as Kardashian did) because the team stinks. But as you and I know, there's a ton more to basketball (spacing, defense, flexibility about role, matchups, dribbing, mobility) that aren't easy to measure but count a ton. Humphries is a serviceable rotation big guy, but as you note there's a lot of those out there.
I don't know one metric that measures spacing (if there is one I'd be VERY interested in reviewing it) which is arguable the most important trait a non-prime scorer can provide to his offense. Kardashian scores average to poorly in this area by my eyes.PedroKsBambino said:
Defensively.....when Ainge was asked what the teams primary needs was this offseason he didn't hesitate in responding "rim protector" which was a direct hit at what they need out of Kardashian's position. Yet metrics say he was the teams best player? I'm not that sucker who's going to buy that ever.
Humphries does indeed grade out quite poorly by plus/minus metrics, in spite of grading well on box score stats. Even ASPM, which is a box score stat designed to mimic plus/minus, can't help but like Humphries however, which goes towards what PedroKsBambino was saying (that some guys do the things box score stats measure pretty well).
In fairness, the team was awful, being the best player on a 25 win team is a pretty low bar.
In fairness, the team was awful, being the best player on a 25 win team is a pretty low bar.
Humphries ceiling is really the Perk role in the 08 Celts minus the rim protecting defense (because he is a little undersized and too bound by gravity) for the 4 but slightly better offense. Basically your 5th best starter or 6th man where his best skill (rebounding) can really help your team and he is decent enough offensively that if he is left alone he will make the opponent pay. The problem is he has never been in one of those situations and has always been asked to play a more important role on a less talented team.
The other thing to note about +/- stats is that there is an embedded impact from the replacement player in there.
So, if Humpries leaves the court and Faverani comes on that is a big difference and will make Humphries look 'valuable' But what it really says relative to the NBA is the Celtics had a mediocre and an awful player rotating...not that Humphries was especially valuable relative to league average.
All that is to say that there's a lot of noise in +/-....and while I don't think Humphries is garbage he also is not, in an actual basketball sense, close to the best player on the team last year either
So, if Humpries leaves the court and Faverani comes on that is a big difference and will make Humphries look 'valuable' But what it really says relative to the NBA is the Celtics had a mediocre and an awful player rotating...not that Humphries was especially valuable relative to league average.
All that is to say that there's a lot of noise in +/-....and while I don't think Humphries is garbage he also is not, in an actual basketball sense, close to the best player on the team last year either
That is incorrect with respect to RPM and xRAPM. It is only true with respect to raw plus/minus metrics.
bowiac said:
Please explain....I do not believe you are correct. To keep it simple, I believe they attempt to adjust for actual replacement level, but are limited for two reasons. First, because NBA plays are not independent events. Second, as they compare Humphries on-court to Humphries off court the results are pretty materially impacted by the actual quality of replacement, since we have no basis for assuming what would have happened with a different replacement. They regress to try and manage this, I'd assume, but that's simply not a complete solution to the problem noted.
You said your concern was that when Humphries leaves and Faverani comes in, "that is a big difference and will make Humphries look 'valuable'." However, xRAPM knows who is coming in.PedroKsBambino said:
Vitor Faverani is graded out as an awful player by xRAPM. When Kris Humphries leaves the floor, and Faverani comes in, xRAPM knows a terrible player is coming in. xRAPM compares the Celtics performance with Humphries out there to their performance with Faverani. To the extent the Celtics are much better with Humphries than Faverani, that's still based off a very low baseline, so a big improvement off Faverani still makes Humphries look like a pretty mediocre player.
And to wit, that's exactly what xRAPM shows: It hates Humphries (actually grades him out identical to Faverani). Precisely because of this base-lining adjustment.
Yes he was when in Brooklyn and his play resulted in him being benched for Reggie Evans who the Nets couldn't wait to dump less than 12 months later.wutang112878 said:
bowiac said:
I probably oversimplified my first post, and your comments don't respond at all to the challenges I raised in my second post. Obviously, if you are going to do plus/minus you need to track who replaces whom; no question that it does do that. However, doing so across a large set of substitutions is more complicated than you suggest and that's where I note this is still pretty inexact.
First, we need to assess how the change of one spot impacts what people are doing at other spots. If you bring in someone who is horrible (or someone who is slow, etc.) that impacts what happens elsewhere on the floor. That is why these are not truly independent events. Looking at the plus/minus tells you what happened when that substitution happened (since that is a simple math problem) but not the contribution of the player to that outcome. I grant that's a very 'second level' thing.
Second, and really more importantly, to do plus/minus you need to make some assessment of the quality of player coming in. You describe above (correctly, I believe) that the metric compares performance with player 1 in vs performance with player 2 in. But that's only part of the measurement challenge, because even if all other players and sets were the same (which, as noted above, we know they are not) we still need to assess how much of the scoring difference between 'lineup with player 1' and 'lineup with player 2' is player 1 being good and how much is player 2 being bad. So, if there's a 10 point difference it might be that Humphries is 10 better than average and Faverani is average, or it might be Humphries is +5 and Faverani is -5, etc. This is essentially a true talent level problem. To simplify, you say that they do this (and I agree) but my belief is that they way they do it leaves real gaps.
The metric tries to do that, I believe effectively by taking the +10 and -10 and comparing it to a large set of substitutions and regressing the changes for different lineups to determine a baseline for each player. That is a reasonable approach; however, it is far from a perfectly accurate one, too. So, it's guess at Faverani's impact is just that---a guess, likely a regressed one. Once we're regressing both parts of the equation, we need to recognize that outliers (such as Faverani's bad-ness) will tend to get washed out to a larger degree than they probably should.
I can't pretend that I've dug into the underlying math of these as I have at times on other stats; however, I have yet to hear (here or elsewhere) answers to either of the above that really address the concerns. And to be clear, the guys doing this are very smart, doing great things that advance our understanding, and some of them fully understand the complexity of the NBA, too. Many of these guys recognize the limitations and the error bars. Sometimes, (just like in baseball sabermetrics) those who don't create the numbers recognizing the gaps is really the bigger challenge
To Wutang's point about 'if we can't see an impact, why should we care?' I think part of the answer is that it's a multivariate problem, and part of the answer is we should remain conscious of the difference betweeen 'we can't yet measure' and 'it has no impact' If you go back and read this very board on the impact of catcher defense in the mid-2000s you'll find hundreds of posts mocking the idea that it matters much; Bill James counseled the sabermetrics community that there's a difference between measurement and impact, and as technology evolved and research continued eventually we learned that just one aspect of catcher defense (pitch framing) has a material impact on runs allowed and were able to clearly document and value that skill. The actual value of that skill was the same in the early 2000s and today---only our ability to measure it (and the number of people who recognized it) changed. I don't know that we are in a similar place in NBA stats, but I think the lesson is one to remember.
PedroKsBambino said:
This post is in line with my thinking. Im skeptical of these stats because they are often presented without std. errors so I have no idea if they are meaningful nor do I know how to interpret the marginal effects even if they are meaningful.
HomeRunBaker said:
All the 'non-impact' type of players are going to struggle when playing along side the corpse that was Gerald Wallace that year. Having said that, I have no idea how Evans wasnt as impacted in the exact same situation. Its also probably a lot more plausible that Humphries is just an average Joe NBA player who really wont shine consistently in any particular situation.
I'm going to try and respond to this as much as I can, since some of your "points" are vague and hard to parse.
The broader issue you're describing is comparatively simple mathematically and has been solved for something like 300 years. This is how chess (ELO) ratings work, as well as how Las Vegas generates spreads, and to my knowledge basically every successful method of analyzing team performance.
When two chess players play each other, at first, we don't know if the result reflects the winner being good, the loser being bad, both players being bad (but one better than the other), both players being great (but one better than the other), etc... Then each player plays someone else. We get another W-L-D datapoint. All the players keep playing each other, and we generate a well connected network. With enough of a sample, we get a pretty effective sense of how good each chess player is, and everyone's future wins and losses adjust the entire connected network.
With Las Vegas, they do the same thing, except the result isn't binary, but also builds in a strength of victory adjustment. The Spurs beat the Heat by 10, we don't know if the Spurs are +5 and the Heat -5, if the teams are +20/+10, or whatever. Then the Spurs play the Mavericks, and win by 5, and the Heat play the Blazers and win by 12 and we get new datapoints. As these teams continue to play each other, you get the same well connected network. Then through the method of minimizing the sum of the squares of the errors, you can generate an estimate of team strength that minimizes the sum of the errors.
These are both fairly "robust" mathematical adjustments, and basically what xRAPM is doing. These are issues with xRAPM, but as near as I can understand your question, this isn't one of the major ones. It's not "perfectly accurate", but I honestly have no idea what is in life. That's a useless high standard. We should use NBA scouts either - they're not perfectly accurate, etc...
I don't understand what you're saying here. If you bring in someone who is horrible, that impacts what happens elsewhere on the floor - yes. Everyone needs to adjust for that, and presumably that unit will be less effective. That will be reflected the xRAPM. I honestly do not understand what you're saying. What is the "second level" thing?PedroKsBambino said:
I do not understand this. Why is Faverani's bad-ness being washed out to too large a degree? I think there's a conflation of terms going on here, between regression analysis, and regression to the mean. The issue you're describing (I think?) is regression to the mean, which isn't what's going on Faverani's rating. Regression to the mean is something that you should probably apply on top of the ridge regression that xRAPM is doing. The ridge regression of xRAPM generates that Earl Clark is the worst player in the NBA at -5.63 points/100 possessions. Regression to the mean on the other hand says we've probably just observed an unusually bad sample of play from Clark, and he's likely to improve. These are distinct issues.
The broader issue you're describing is comparatively simple mathematically and has been solved for something like 300 years. This is how chess (ELO) ratings work, as well as how Las Vegas generates spreads, and to my knowledge basically every successful method of analyzing team performance.
When two chess players play each other, at first, we don't know if the result reflects the winner being good, the loser being bad, both players being bad (but one better than the other), both players being great (but one better than the other), etc... Then each player plays someone else. We get another W-L-D datapoint. All the players keep playing each other, and we generate a well connected network. With enough of a sample, we get a pretty effective sense of how good each chess player is, and everyone's future wins and losses adjust the entire connected network.
With Las Vegas, they do the same thing, except the result isn't binary, but also builds in a strength of victory adjustment. The Spurs beat the Heat by 10, we don't know if the Spurs are +5 and the Heat -5, if the teams are +20/+10, or whatever. Then the Spurs play the Mavericks, and win by 5, and the Heat play the Blazers and win by 12 and we get new datapoints. As these teams continue to play each other, you get the same well connected network. Then through the method of minimizing the sum of the squares of the errors, you can generate an estimate of team strength that minimizes the sum of the errors.
These are both fairly "robust" mathematical adjustments, and basically what xRAPM is doing. These are issues with xRAPM, but as near as I can understand your question, this isn't one of the major ones. It's not "perfectly accurate", but I honestly have no idea what is in life. That's a useless high standard. We should use NBA scouts either - they're not perfectly accurate, etc...
What do you mean standard errors? Standard errors are a sampling issue as far as I know, i.e. polling 10,000 Americans and using that sample to represent the entire American population. Basketball statistics are (generally) not doing that. They're not sampling part of the data, and extrapolating to the entire league. They're polling all 300,000,000 people. (Which isn't to say the stats are perfect - problems occur even without sampling errors).luckiestman said:
bowiac said:
I don't agree with what you are saying exactly, but it is a contested issue (my line of thinking is consistent with the following since we are trying to figure out the relevance of the metrics going forward)
http://www.tinbergen.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/220114_Imbens.pdf
Can you explain more about what this means? This paper is above my "pay grade" so to speak (my mathematical training is mostly in number theory, not pure statistics). What is this paper saying, and what is a standard error outside of a sampling context?luckiestman said:
bowiac said:
I think you're not really thinking about how team defense works, and that leads you to miss the challenge I'm raising about what the data says about how much we can attribute point difference to a single player. It simply is not the case that all permutations of different matchups are the same. So, if you have a set of players on the court and you change one of them, all of the interactions change in some ways (not just the one player who changed). The method you're describing counts all of that difference as attributable to the matchup which changed. However, that does not mean the true talent level of the guy who changed is equal to the point differential of that second matchup, because if he was in a different configuration he might generate different results (because the matchups may be different, and this will generate different results). To illustrate this, the entire concept of a rim protector is built on the exact same principle I'm noting.
This is all true, and has nothing to do with my point; others understood the problem I was noting, fortunately.. To make it simpler for you, your chess example uses a single matchup only (player a vs player b). Your team example in Las Vegas is the same (team 1 vs team 2). This is not what we're dealing with when analyzing NBA players---the matchups are all interrelationships between 5 players.
To solve that multivariate problem, you need to do a much more robust analysis, and that analysis is going to require assumptions that themselves have error rates. These multiply when doing the analysis, and that is the challenge to be considered. That is the regression issue I was noting.
Sorry, so what's your point here? That xRAPM and its ilk aren't perfect? I think everyone has been very clear about that. I don't see how this generalized concern has anything to do with Humphries or Faverani?PedroKsBambino said:
What is the regression issue that is causing Faverani's bad-ness to be washed out? I still don't get it. Be specific please.
I don't think the question is whether or not a stat is perfect, I think it is a question of it being meaningful at all.
When you sub a player in, think about all the variables that can change: let's just do a trivial example to get at some basics
Celtics scrimmage Lakers
Lets say they play twice and in a really strange situation with exactly 6 minutes left in the first quarter the stat line from game 2 is exactly the same as the stat line from game 1, the coaches make the same substitutions as the prior game...what is going to happen. More likely than not, a result similar to game 1 but that will not happen with certainty. Why not? So what are we going to use to predict the future? After game 1 we had a population mean and it was wrong when used to predict outcomes in game 2. After game 2 we had the new population mean, you think that would predict a hypothetical game 3 with certainty? NO! As we increase the size of the population we might start feeling better about how we can predict a subsequent event but we don't have certainty
So, we are going to get coefficients on whatever we regress. and the std errors matter if we are trying to make predictions
Even for +/-, is the opponent different, is the game situation different? The only time you get a result where you are like HEY! every time that we put mike in the game the defense goes to shit no matter who is out there with him or who he is playing against, well sure, the stat will be meaningful but NOBODY is going to need that stat to know that Mike sucks.
Here is another tricky thing. We have all seen games where a team is playing great defense but the offense is just drilling low percentage shots. How are we accounting for that. You need something similar to BABIP.
I'm sort of rambling so maybe I can say it like this: If you were going to create an athletic game where you could use metrics to analyze it, you would basically create baseball. Baseball has to be the perfect game to use simple statistical tools on. Just a plethora of independent events. AND batters will almost never give an at bat away. Basketball has none of this...well, free throws. You could get a ton of split stat free throw data that is meaningful if you wanted it. What I see happening in basketball is the same thing that happens in quant macroeconomics, people already know their position and then they go find some crazy ass metric to back up what they are saying.
When you sub a player in, think about all the variables that can change: let's just do a trivial example to get at some basics
Celtics scrimmage Lakers
Lets say they play twice and in a really strange situation with exactly 6 minutes left in the first quarter the stat line from game 2 is exactly the same as the stat line from game 1, the coaches make the same substitutions as the prior game...what is going to happen. More likely than not, a result similar to game 1 but that will not happen with certainty. Why not? So what are we going to use to predict the future? After game 1 we had a population mean and it was wrong when used to predict outcomes in game 2. After game 2 we had the new population mean, you think that would predict a hypothetical game 3 with certainty? NO! As we increase the size of the population we might start feeling better about how we can predict a subsequent event but we don't have certainty
So, we are going to get coefficients on whatever we regress. and the std errors matter if we are trying to make predictions
Even for +/-, is the opponent different, is the game situation different? The only time you get a result where you are like HEY! every time that we put mike in the game the defense goes to shit no matter who is out there with him or who he is playing against, well sure, the stat will be meaningful but NOBODY is going to need that stat to know that Mike sucks.
Here is another tricky thing. We have all seen games where a team is playing great defense but the offense is just drilling low percentage shots. How are we accounting for that. You need something similar to BABIP.
I'm sort of rambling so maybe I can say it like this: If you were going to create an athletic game where you could use metrics to analyze it, you would basically create baseball. Baseball has to be the perfect game to use simple statistical tools on. Just a plethora of independent events. AND batters will almost never give an at bat away. Basketball has none of this...well, free throws. You could get a ton of split stat free throw data that is meaningful if you wanted it. What I see happening in basketball is the same thing that happens in quant macroeconomics, people already know their position and then they go find some crazy ass metric to back up what they are saying.
I don't really know what to respond to, as you said, your post was a bit rambling. With respect to this question however, is it meaningful, I can say with pretty strong confidence that the answer is yes. The reasons:luckiestman said:
1. xRAPM and its ilk is currently used to strongly influence/make personnel decisions at a number of NBA front offices, reasonably successful ones at that.
2. It works. xRAPM and its ilk are designed and built on the basis of predictive accuracy. That's why there are a number of "fudges" in RPM for box score statistics, player height, and prior season data. xRAPM has similar, but less extensive fudges. The reason - to increase predictive accuracy of the stat. The result is that by using xRAPM you get strong forward-looking results for how various lineups and teams will do.
According to the Sporting News, The Pacers are "quietly shopping" Roy Hibbert. I realize he makes alot of money and that he sucked for long stretches last year.
Even so, if they could get Hibbert (e.g. for Rondo) I'd be very happy to add Kevin Love. If you put those two together-- one providing defense- the other offense, and both rebounding the ball, you'd really have something. The whole could be greater than the sum of its parts, etc. etc.
Even so, if they could get Hibbert (e.g. for Rondo) I'd be very happy to add Kevin Love. If you put those two together-- one providing defense- the other offense, and both rebounding the ball, you'd really have something. The whole could be greater than the sum of its parts, etc. etc.
Would love to see Hibbert in green - if they're going to move Rondo, that would be an incredible haul to come away with.
I'm not so sure. Hibbert did not have a good year at all and makes a ton of money.swingin val said:
What kind of year did Rondo have? And Rajon Rondo makes 13 million, and has een rumored to want a max, or near max deal.Brickowski said:
Indiana could find some contender to gamble on Hibbert for a year or two and get back a much better asset than soon to be free agent Rondo
I doubt it.swingin val said:
There have been rumors for months that Indy would really like to get out of that contract.
Now I actually don't think they want Rondo (hence the 3 team trade rumors from last week), but the value is probably pretty close.
swingin val said:
To pile on, I think Rondo has more value than Hibbert, and I wouldn't make that trade straight up.
Hibbert is making 15M per season, and was abysmal at the end of the year. I suppose maybe he had an injury or some other issue complicating matters, but is he even a net positive in a trade right now? At that contract for the next two years, thats questionable (even with the general assumption that bigs always get overpaid). I'm not surprised Indy is shopping him.
We can argue about Rondo's value too, and I agree its not that much with just one more year on his contract, but I think it's still safe to say he has positive trade value. I'm not sure the same can be said for Hibbert.
Its difficult to judge the value of each of them. Rondo because of his contract demands and injury and Hibbert because no one has much of a clue about his inconsistent play. But because there is a chance, regardless if how small, that Hibbert can be a difference making center he does have positive value
wutang112878 said:
Rondo's future contract certainly could alter things, but no one is forced to pay him if they trade for him.
Just looking at the 2014-2015 season, I think Rondo's reputation around the league is such that plenty of teams would be happy to have him at his current salary. If you don't want to pay him the max, and he walks after the year, thats the risk you are taking. But it doesn't change his value for the 2014-2015 season, which I think is worth something decent in a trade.
30M for 2 more years of Roy Hibbert's lumbering body, after the last few months he just had…. I'm not so sure I can say the same. I admit perhaps I'm falling for a bit of recency bias there, but he was just so awful down the stretch this season.
whether or not we're rebuilding or contending I think this trade makes sense for the C's b/c hibbert is younger than rondo and fills an important need on this roster. I just have a really hard time believing the pacers make this trade b/c they already have Hill who's pretty good and it would be so obviously selling low on a true center.
is hibbert's problem simply that he thinks he's more of a scorer than he is and/or that his offensive usage is too high? His stats look fine apart from the low shooting percentage. Maybe a coach can hammer into his head that his job is only defense (rim protection), rebounding & garbage points. There's a ton of value in that type of player. I don't know if he's easily fixable and maybe part of the fix is also physical (injury / conditioning), but maybe that modified approach could see him improve across the board.
is hibbert's problem simply that he thinks he's more of a scorer than he is and/or that his offensive usage is too high? His stats look fine apart from the low shooting percentage. Maybe a coach can hammer into his head that his job is only defense (rim protection), rebounding & garbage points. There's a ton of value in that type of player. I don't know if he's easily fixable and maybe part of the fix is also physical (injury / conditioning), but maybe that modified approach could see him improve across the board.
I think of Hibbert-Rondo as being pretty similar. Both were mid-late first round picks, who as their teammates became better started getting talked about as premier NBA talents. Both have had pretty massive falls from grace: Rondo due to injury and an exposure of his warts without 3 HOF teammates around him; Hibbert due to putting up some worst 2 months of basketball anyone can remember from a playoff starter.
I'd rather have Hibbert, as his mysterious vanishing act is easier to overlook than Rondo's problems. Further, given the state of PG and C in the NBA today however, it would be weird if positional demands lent themselves to such a trade.
I'd rather have Hibbert, as his mysterious vanishing act is easier to overlook than Rondo's problems. Further, given the state of PG and C in the NBA today however, it would be weird if positional demands lent themselves to such a trade.
Not just down the stretch. Hibbert disappeared for a couple months mid season as well. And didn't have the excuse of injury.radsoxfan said:
I get that this board is down on Rondo, but he's one of the few exceptional pass-first players in all of basketball who facilitates an offense and can play good help defense. As I've said elsewhere, reliably near double double. I don't think he deserves a max contract, but I don't think 15-20 is any kind of stretch, given his unique skills and the salary environment. Hibbert's more of a question mark.
Hibbert's previous performance indicates that rather than emerging as a star and regressing, he may have just been a mediocre player who put together a strong stretch. That said, the Celtics just drafted a likely starter at point guard and Rondo is surely gone next year. If the Celtics can get Hibbert for Rondo, I'd take the gamble without hesitation.
Hibbert is an interesting case of paying for one skill. He's an excellent rim protector, but does nothing else well.
15-20 per what? That's a max deal basically.zenter said:
I want no part of Rondo at almost any plausible contract if he's going to be the starter, so I'd obviously love a Hibbert/Rondo deal, but I can't imagine that what Indy wants to do is blow up their team identity to add another guy who can't really create his own shot.
radsoxfan said:
I think 2 things drive Rondo's value down. The first is that about half the league is perfectly content with their PG situation. The 2nd is that as you said teams dont mind his current salary, but if they are looking at this as just a rental then they arent going to give up much. Typically the teams that would be fine with a rental are the teams with title hopes so now your market is down to teams with title hopes that dont have settled PG situations. It only takes 1 to make a market but these are just the market forces I see at work for Rondo.
Hibbert is the opposite situation from a position standpoint because there are so few teams that wouldnt want a C of his potential on his team. His question marks/warts are far worse though, no question about that. Its also not necessarily 2/30 because the 2nd year is an option and its pretty rare that guys at 28 exercise their options unless they are horrific and then if thats the case with Hibbert then you have a $15M expiring which isnt that awful either. He is the more risky investment but its more palatable because of the upside that Rondo just doesnt have.
zenter said:
There is really a few aspects of the Rondo discussion. There is Rondo the player who I think most of us believe will return to that great PG player that he was, but the question is when you project his game to begin to decline because he is so reliant on his speed. There is the contract which is somewhere between $10M to max dollars. There is the PG market. And finally there is Rondo the asset based on the value of the player, the contract and the PG market. I think we are primarily talking about Rondo the asset and I think the biggest reason we are 'down' on him is because of the PG market aspect.
To be clear, no one has suggested perfection is the goal, or the expectation. The concern expressed by two of us was specific, and likely material (though we can't be sure of course) if it hasn't been addressed. It may have been; you don't seem to know which is fine---I surely don't either.bowiac said:
As described before, it relates to the assumption made about his performance. I think you will need to understand the concern raised above to see this one, though...because it's in trying to unpack how all of the players on the court relate that I believe one gets to the problem of determining whether to regress their performance and how.
We'll it has to do with Kris Humphries value and how to think about Avery Bradley's contribution. But I hear your point....it's a baby version of the WAR discussion from main board a while back
zenter said:
If Hibbert didn't disappear down the stretch, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. IND was a mess this year. Hibbert's disappearance coincided with Lance Stephenson reacting to not being picked for the All-Star team by dominating the ball. Also, there are rumors of some interpersonal issues as well.
One way of getting a rim protector is to get one that has fallen out of favor with his current team. Hibbert's issues may not be skill related. I'd much rather take my chances on Hibbert than Rondo.
I agree with some of the above posts that there are more factors favoring Hibbert to Rondo. The lack of rim protecting bigs in the league generally, and on the Celtics specifically, certainly is very relevant. Then add the fact that the Celtics just drafted Smart, and Rondo might be gone after this season, it all seems to add up to Hibbert being the better fit for the Celtics going forward.
However, this all has to be balanced with a more simple analysis. There is a real possibility Hibbert is now terrible. The way he played down the stretch and in the playoffs isn't useful on any team, at any price.
If there is some reason to think that guy we just watched isn't the Roy Hibbert of the next 2 years, then I can see wanting to make that swap. Maybe this is a great buy low opportunity on Hibbert. But watching him play the last few months of the season was ugly. Give me 1 more year of Rondo over 1 or 2 years of that guy any day.
However, this all has to be balanced with a more simple analysis. There is a real possibility Hibbert is now terrible. The way he played down the stretch and in the playoffs isn't useful on any team, at any price.
If there is some reason to think that guy we just watched isn't the Roy Hibbert of the next 2 years, then I can see wanting to make that swap. Maybe this is a great buy low opportunity on Hibbert. But watching him play the last few months of the season was ugly. Give me 1 more year of Rondo over 1 or 2 years of that guy any day.
The only way a Love deal ever made sense was with an Asik or a Hibbert joining him on the frontline to completely change the dynamics of the team. Love without either of them (or their likeness) is like trading for Ray Allen without adding KG.Brickowski said:
I'm convinced that this was Ainge's plan to do exactly this which is why I've been in favor of a Love deal.
RT @judefox10: Would you trade Goran Dragic for Rajon Rondo?
Verified Phoenix reporter that caught my attention with the mention of Rondo.
Verified Phoenix reporter that caught my attention with the mention of Rondo.
knucklecup said:
Not sure I get the appeal of that for Phoenix, unless they feel like Dragic's asking price is too high and think they could re-sign Rondo for less.