The Bratwurst – Milwaukee Bucks Blog

I’ve posted the new IPM data through December 8. A few things that I’ve noticed:

1: I think it’s official — the winner in the TJ Ford/Charlie V trade is Toronto. TJ is playing his second straight spectatcular season with the Raptors, and now he’s shooting 48% from the field to boot. He’s finally curbed his most annoying trait, shooting too early in a posession, as he’s down to 38% of his shot attempts coming in the first 10 seconds of the 24 second clock. When he takes early shots they are good ones, too; hitting them with a 63% eFG% (which includes an adjustment for 3-point shots). On the other hand, Mo Williams has taken 41% of his shots early in the clock and shot 44.5% eFG. Meanwhile, Charlie V’s comeback season has been maddeningly inconsistent and there is always the problem with how he fits into a team concept — how do you use a player of his size who is too slow to guard small forwards and too thin to play power forward? The matchup problems he creates offensively are offset by the problems he has defensively.

2: Time to face facts: this whole “committment to defense” thing isn’t working for the Bucks. It’s a nice idea, but they aren’t defending that well. Their defensive IPM ranks them third to last, only a two spot improvement from last year (they were the #29 defense at the end of January 07, which is when they pretty much stopped trying last season). However, this team should be able to run pretty effectively as they have played at slightly faster than the league’s average pace for the past few years. However, this season they are playing at the 21st fastest pace in the league. A team with a pretty efficient offense but poor defense needs to get as many shot attempts as possible to make up for the weaker defense; they shouldn’t slow the game down. I am not saying that the Bucks should abandon defense altogether, but they have to run more and try to generate turnovers through pressure rather than slowing the game down with ineffective zones. One of the traits a good coach has is the ability to tailor schemes to your talent. Coach Krystkowiak has to know that the Bucks have plenty of offense-first players and needs to take advantage of it.

3: Boston’s team defense has been so good that their IPM differential is throwing off my formulas. For a while it said that the Celtics were good enough to win 83 games this year, now it believes that they look like a 76 win team. Well, I have my doubts about that. The Celtics haven’t really played anyone, and they needed last second shots to win two of their games. They also beat Miami by one at home. The Celtics are good, but they aren’t going to be threatening the Bulls’ 72 win season.

4: The Knicks are a lot worse than they look. They are so inefficient that they have the league’s worst offense and so lazy that they have the second worst defense. With only 6 wins so far, my formulas say they have overachieved by 3. It’s incredible how bad they are. What is amazing is that they don’t have a single player with a 0.8 IPM — the only team to do that. David Lee comes close — 0.7992 — but he only plays 25 minutes a game, so the Knicks aren’t even using their best player for much more than half a game! Coming as no surprise to me, Zach Randolph has seen his numbers drop significantly, and Eddy Curry’s “bust out” season a year ago was a mirage. What a joke.

5: My numbers say that Orlando is overachieving, my intuition says that Orlando is a overachieving … but the results look pretty serious to me. Their 5 losses came to Detroit, Phoenix (twice), San Antonio and Indiana; and they just finished a 5-1 west coast road trip. They are 11-2 on the road. Clearly Dwight Howard has become a complete beast, and still has upside. So why don’t I trust them? Because I don’t see how they can go very far with Howard as their only effective big man and without a decent shooting guard. Look at the positions that their top 8 players (by IPM) play: C, PG, SF, SF, PG, SF, PG, C. At some point they will get a matchup at power forward that Turkoglu and Lewis can’t handle and will need some well-rounded play from the “2″. They are off to a great start, but there’s a long way to go for that roster to keep this pace up.