The Tweener: T-shirts, Biting, Losers, and Superstars

On February 26 I wrote my inaugural Tweener column. It's that time of the week again - here are this week's quick hitters:

Free stuff is always better than something you pay for

You know what I really love about the NBA playoffs? How the owners make the fans feel welcome by spending a tiny fraction of their surplus for t-shirts for the home crowd so their arena looks good on TV every arena makes sure there is pure color domination in favor of their home team! OKC's blue t-shirts and the Heat's white ones made the solidarity of the fan-base simply awesome. I also love that you can tell Denver makes less money by the fact that they only gave out towels and not t-shirts the towel waving in Denver! It's so energetic, and it is probably the reason Andre Miller turned into a 21-year-old and dropped 18 points and his first career game winning shot in the 4th quarter on Saturday.

I know this is a year old. But it is just so good. And I hope it happens again.

Steph as a superstar? 

The Tweener: Pi, GIs, and the fat lady singing

On February 26 I wrote an inaugural Tweener column. It's that time of the week again! My apologies for opting out of this column last week. This week, well, I've watched more than a couple movies recently. Just so everyone knows, THERE ARE AT LEAST MINOR SPOILERS ABOUT LIFE OF PI, GI JOE 2, and LES MISERABLES in the following post. Just FYI. Ok...anyway, I warned you, so if you read something you didn't want to know, don't blame me if you end up like this:

I don't even know what that is from. Ok here we go:

What's in a name?

When It Rains, It Pours: Kobe Bryant and the Eye Test

Where to start? Kobe Bryant is a lot of things. Future Hall of Famer, pathological competitor, possible sex offender, arguably the greatest player since Jordan retired. But most importantly, one of the most prolific volume shooters the NBA has ever seen.

If there was a Mount Rushmore for volume shooters, the faces on it would most likely be: Kobe, Jordan (yes, it's true), Allen Iverson, and my boy Antoine Walker. Carmelo is making a strong push for that #4 spot though. Any way you slice it, Kobe is either #1 or #2 on that list.

While I was watching Steph Curry's Golden State Warriors run train on the Lakers the other night, I noticed just how much Kobe started to shoot when the game got out of hand. Like, every time he wasn't being bearhugged by Mike D'Antoni. His stats for the game look great on paper: 36 points!...on 11/27 shooting. Yeah, Kobe is a chucker sometimes. And almost all of those shots/points came when the Lakers were down by about 20 points.

This got me wondering, who is the greatest "garbage time" volume shooter? I'm going to define garbage time as being down by 10+ points in the 4th quarter. I know teams can come back from 10 point deficits in the 4th, but often they don't. Biggest chucker: it's got to be Kobe, right?

Aw, hell yeah. Kobe is outpacing the field by a comfortable 14 shot attempts in such situations. To his credit, he does hit 48.5% of them, so it gives his team a better chance to get back into the game. Let's pause to look at the other players behind him: Jimmer Fredette? JJ Barea? E'Twaun Moore!? HUH?!?!?

Interestingly, if I look at shots when down 15+ in the 4th quarter instead of 10+, Kobe drops to 31st on the list. So how do I decide this eye test? Screw it - Kobe, I deem thee a chucker.

EYE TEST: CONFIRMED

And ok, I had to...

A Closer Look at the "Kobe Assist"

Ten or fifteen years ago, basketball began to undergo a statistical revolution in much the same way baseball had ten or fifteen years prior with Bill James. Over the years, different schools of thought about player value have developed, but there are a few central tenets that most quote-on-quote "advanced statisticians" seem to agree on. One of the biggest such tenets states that points per game are a truly terrible metric for value; good teams do tend to have players that score a lot of points, but so do bad teams, and efficiency is far more important. A related tenet is that generating the most possible points in every possession is more important than generating the most points overall, meaning that if Carmelo scores 35 points but goes 10 for 30 in doing so, his team is highly likely to lose despite his high point totals. In short, the vast majority of players can take lots of shots, and making them is certainly important, but not missing shots is what truly adds value to a team. Missed shots, in all except certain rare end-of-game free throw situations, are bad.

Recently, a Kirk Goldsberry article entitled "The Kobe Assist" generated a lot of discussion amongst the statistical world for attempting to disprove the theory that all such missed shots have equal, negative, value for a team. I encourage reading the entire thing, but for those of you who don't want to/can't access Grantland at work/want to get through this article before your shit is over, Goldsberry's basic thesis is that each player's missed shots are not created equal. In other words, some players are far more likely to get their missed shots rebounded by their own team, leading to (typically) an easy putback. The stats will record this as a miss (a negative event) by the shooter, and an ORB and made shot (positive events) by the rebounder, but since the first shot led to the second, easy shot, some of this positive value should transfer back to the shooter. Unsurprisingly, Kobe Bryant (famous for many reasons, notably large point totals and correspondingly large numbers of missed shots) is the king of this stat, with over 200 such instances over the last two seasons, so Goldsberry names the stat after him.

So, the obvious next question is, does this throw a major wrench into the entire notion of advanced statistics in basketball?

There is no buzz-beater for greatness

Kobe Bryant’s story is an interesting one.  Filled with talent, promise, money, fame, set-backs, slumps, awe-inspiring finishes, dunks, friendships, friends he says would not have been successful without him, and friends that call him super old.  He’s produced some of the NBA’s greatest plays and moments of my brief lifetime.  He’s also produced some of the more character-less acts done by professionals - which is saying something.

And yet, despite all that, “Kobe!” is what any kid calls out when he practices his buzzer-beating fade-away.  (Ok, let’s be honest – it’s also what all high schoolers, college students, and young adults call out as well.)  Take a poll – who is the “clutchest” player in the NBA, who is the best closer, who would you most like to have taking the final shot for your team? Kobe.  (Challenged in the last year by Kevin Durant.)  Who sells the most jerseys around the world – most notably in China? Kobe.