The Bratwurst - Milwaukee Bucks Blog

First of all, some congragulations are due to the Bobcats for even making a game of it on Saturday. After playing Friday night, the suffered through a myriad of travel delays and wound up having to take a bus from Midway Airport to the Bradley Center, arriving one hour before tip. If I was a betting man I’d have called my bookie upon hearing that and said; “Yo, Moose! Gimme FIVE DIMES on the Bucks!” It’s a good thing I’m not a betting man, though, because the Bucks were seven point favorites and I would have lost.

I must say, I was mighty worried when I sat in my seat during warmups and saw that number 42 was listed along with the starters. I was really hoping that Bobby Simmons would get the start in Desmond Mason’s place, and not only because Charlie Bell has been simply awful this season (while it is true that Simmons has been about as bad).

I’ve said before that I can’t stand seeing Michael Redd play small forward. The best athletes in the game play the “3″, and Redd is nowhere near among them. Moving him up takes away the size advantage he usually has against opposing shooting guards, and makes him both guard and be defended by someone who is bigger, stronger and faster than him.

In the case of a game against Charlotte, this problem is even worse, because moving Redd to small forward means he will spend the entire game being guarded by Gerald Wallace and Jason Richardson, two players who he is at a significant athletic disadvantage to. At least if Redd stayed at shooting guard he would see very little of Wallace (who plays a lot of power forward in Charlotte’s system) and get to feast on Matt Carroll for a while. As it turned out, this matchup would contribute to Redd suffering through a pretty horrific game by his standards.

So it was with dismay that I saw that Krystkowiak started Charlie “The Defender” Bell, giving up 3 inches and 25 pounds to Richardson and guaranteeing a miserable night for Redd.

But then Bell really helped the Bucks’ offense.

Apparently Bell was under strict orders not to shoot at all, which was a very good move considering he is shooting 29% for the season and the Bucks’ 4 other starters all shoot between 44.1% and 51.7%. It was quite comical to see Bell (3 or 4 times) passing an open jumper (one could almost see the thought process: “Open shot … No! Coach said he’d kill me if I did! Mo, here, take the ball!”) but one certainly couldn’t argue with the results. Despite taking no shots in 32 minutes, Bell had 7 assists, one turnover, and the Bucks would lead by as much as 22 on a night where they shot 49%. The final score (4 point margin) wasn’t indicitave of the game — the result was never in doubt for the entire 4th quarter.

I saw an interesting post at MKE Bucks Diary where Ty writes that Bell had the second best game of any of the Bucks. I find this to be a major stretch, but Ty is a big believer in Wages of Wins and Win Shares, so it makes sense to him. Personally, I have a major problem with the Wages of Wins school of thought, but that’s not the point of this post. If anyone wants to know why then drop me a comment and I can email my thoughts on the issue to you, but for now I’ll just leave it at that. By IPM and from my view in the seats, I’d say that Bell’s box score was pretty good for him and in the same neighborhood of a typical Desmond Mason line (but to do it without taking any shots is pretty nice).

But did Bell’s defense help the Bucks win? Quite the contrary. Considering that the team needed to win without much help from Redd (thanks to the unfavorable matchup) it was a good thing that Yi posted by far his best game because Bell got torched all night long. It appears to me that the way that any player helps his team win is by defending well enough to keep his opponent’s production below average while maintaining at least average production himself. So to be a positive player Bell needed to defend well to hold up his end of the bargain.

By looking at the box score it is easy to tell what Bell’s IPM was (0.563 — a little above his average but still not great). So what I wanted to do was try to judge Bell’s defensive effort by calculating the IPM’s of the players Bell was guarding. Fortunately the Bobcats use a pretty short bench, so seeing the matchups was pretty easy, and the Bucks didn’t screw around with many switches or much zone — Bell checked Jason Richardson in the first 3 quarters and Matt Carroll in the 4th.

It would be easy — and too simplistic — to look at the box score and see that Richardson went for 30 on 11-19 shooting and think that Bell’s defense wasn’t up to snuff. Richardson normally averages 17 points a night and has averaged a 0.750 IPM, which is quite average. In this game he had a 0.947 IPM, which is near all-star level. So I dug a little deeper.

I looked at Popcorn Machine’s game flow and ESPN’s play-by-play to assemble a “Bell’s man” box score, tabluating statistics that ocurred only when both players were in the game, and assigning Carroll’s stats to the 4th quarter (when Charlotte went with an Okafor/Wallace/Richardson frontcourt).

My data and caluclations are available here.

It’s pretty clear that the Richardson/Carroll duo destroyed Bell. The pair posted a 1.013 IPM while guarded by Bell, to Bell’s 0.563 (difference of 179%). Because I felt that Ty’s writings were worth some extra thought, so for comparisons sake I also ran the same data using Wages of Wins metrics (PAWS — Position Weighted Win Score) and found Bell to have a 2.90 PAWS (which is very good) while Richardson/Carroll posted an amazing 11.15 — a 384% increase over Bell’s production (PAWS methodology available here).

The biggest indictment of Bell’s defense, though, is the fact that the Richardson/Carroll combination against Bell was more effective than either players’ individual full-game numbers (0.947 for Richardson and 0.368 for Carroll). This means that both players were less effective when not being guarded by Bell.

So the money question is: with Mason out for two months, can the team be effective with Charlie Bell as a starter? The answer is an emphatic no.

While the defensive data is only for one game and thus a very small sample size, Bell’s body of work from this and last year suggest that he will always have trouble guarding bigger players. It’s a fact of life — his size kept him out of the NBA for 5 seasons at the beginning of his career, his shooting ability is what got him here, and the fact that he had to play so many minutes last season was a big part of the reason the Bucks lost 54 games in 2006-07. While Redd may be a lousy defensive player — maybe even worse than Bell — chances are that if his man scores 19 Redd will almost always top that with 25. Bell will not do the same.

Of course, it’s all good if Bell continues to have 7 assist/one turnover games, but that is simply not realistic. Should that drop to a more realistic 3:1 ratio, the drop in his metric rankings (expecially PAWS) would be significant. While one turnover in a blowout is no problem, 2 or 3 in a close game becomes a major issue when that player is a complete nonfactor offensively.

The “don’t shoot it, Charlie” strategy worked well for one night — but that was against a tired, jetlagged team and Bell played a perfect game offensively for his role. Long term it’s not a good idea, both because Bell’s defense isn’t good enough to make up for his offense and Redd can’t handle playing small forward and guarding the Carmelo Anthony’s of the world.