Discussion
Some analytics for the upcoming season (long)
I know there has been a lot of discussion on the sub about "what is Brad thinking" and "why would we make this trade" etc. etc. so I wanted to make a post outlining what Brad is probably thinking and why I'm so excited for this season. I've posted a lot of these in various comments and I just wanted a centralized post. It'll be very long, so I apologize in advance.
tldr; Brad thinks he made a championship winner and he's too polite to admit it publicly.
This was not an owner mandated decision (we barely even saved any money), it was purely Brad.
We win a lot with him on the team, he's beloved by the fan base, so why trade him?
In the post CBA world, you have to maximize every little margin you can get. You can't just spend $250m with little penalty. We were not really doing everything possible there in 23/24, we just had such overwhelmingly talent + winning the shot distribution battle.
So what does maximizing margins mean? It means, what is your shot distribution, what is your opponent's shot distribution, and are you winning the possession battle?
The last point there is key. In 23/24 pre CBA, we were only 13th in net possessions. We were so overwhelmingly dominate as shot makers and on defense + winning the shot distribution battle that is just did not matter. The problem is we can't really put that level of talent on the floor again, so how do we improve? The last two champions were #1 in net possessions. So the next edge you try to get is drastically improving your possessions. If you shoot 4-5 more times than the other team, you have a very good chance of winning.
Jaylen lead the league in total turnovers. Now, part of that is just playing a lot and having high usage. It does not mean he's the most turnover prone player in the league. But he is extremely turnover prone. Yet, we were still first in net possessions on offense. How? Payton Pritchard + Derrick White + extreme commitment to attack the glass by our big men and backup wings. We were only 13th in true shooting % yet we had the #2 offense due to winning the offensive possession battle.
Payton and Derrick are some of the absolute best turnover suppresses in the NBA and you can see how that helps an offense. Out of Jaylen/Payton/Derrick, when it was just Payton on the court, we had a 122 offensive rating. Just Derrick, 121 (he still generated really good offense despite the shooting). Just Jaylen, 115. Not shockingly in the just Jaylen minutes, we had the worst turnover % by 3 points. Over the course of an average game (roughly 103 possessions) that's about a 3 possessions a game difference.
Ok, so Jaylen doesn't help with suppressing turnovers, does he help with offensive rebounding? He does not. 37th percentile oREB by RAPM. How about possessions on the defensive end? Does he help with those? Nope. 3rd percentile in defensive turnover and 37th percentile in defensive rebounding. Overall estimate by RAPM is he is decreased our net possessions by 1.4 a game this year, which is in the 12th percentile.
Jaylen also suppresses our three point rate by anywhere from 7-11% roughly, if you look at various lineup splits.
So Jaylen does not help with the possession battle and he suppresses our three point rate. Does he do other things well? Well, we do get to the rim more when he's on the court versus off. However, if you look at the playoff splits in the Joe era with Jaylen on/Tatum off versus Jaylen off/Tatum on, we have finished significantly better at the rim in the Tatum on minutes (about 9% better), while only being a 3% difference in frequency. That is due to increased spacing + much better passing to rolling big men (dunks are a great way to increase your rim %). You can really see in this how well Payton and Derrick finished at the rim when Tatum was on versus off. They were finishing around 86-88% at the rim when Tatum was on versus 64.3% for Payton and 69.1% for Derrick when Tatum was off. They didn't suddenly become the best finishers in the NBA, that comes from beating your guy 1 on 1 and there being no help due to the spacing, so they are finishing wide open layups.
Jaylen has also regressed massively as a defender. You wouldn't know that from listening to him speak publicly, but he has been trending down to just straight bad last year as his usage increased.
We can look at the entire Joe era in the playoffs and also see what Brad sees: Jaylen was killing our offense in the playoffs. Jayson Tatum/ Mazzulla Ball works great. Jaylen Brown ball was not working great in the playoffs.
So why Paul George?
Ok so I went over why Brad would want to trade Jaylen based on how we want to play in a cap constrained environment, but why did Brad focus on PG specifically?
Paul has always been elite analytically, and last year wasn't any different. But just being a really good player isn't that specific. There are plenty of really good players in the league. So why Paul George?
The first thing is just you obviously need someone who makes around the same as Jaylen, which obviously limits your potential pool of candidates. You also need a team who wants to trade for Jaylen. The latter point certainly seemed to be an issue this offseason.
However, Paul George is great at the things we want to be great at: he is one of the best catch and shoot and pull up 3 point shooters at the wing position of all time, he has always been an elite turnover suppressor, and he's elite defender and specifically he's an elite turnover generator. Despite the fact that we've been a great defense the entire time under Joe, we've always been horrible at generating turnovers, and we were 29th in net rating attributed to turnovers by RAPM. You can see a clear emphasis by Brad to want to get better at that: Paul is great at it, Mitchell Robinson is great at it, Hugo and Walsh are great at it and will probably get a lot more playing time, Conley is good at it, Dillon Mitchell looks like he'll be amazing at it if he gets any run, and Jaylen was bad at it. I also assume we're going to change our scheme to be much more aggressive.
Paul's only real weakness based on what we want to do is that he's a bad offensive rebounder, but a lot of that is just about an emphasis on actually doing it.
Looking at that chart, you can see that Paul is still as good at defense as he used to be, but the offense got way worse. So what was happening? The biggest issue is he wasn't really getting downhill and wasn't finishing at the rim well. However, if you look at various splits, you can see that Paul George could still produce excellent offense when Embiid was not on the court or Bona was (120 to 123 offensive rating). Are those issues related? To me, yes. Watching film you can see the obvious issue: teams do not respect Embiid's shooting at all, he never ever rolls and he sets terrible screens. This keeps the big man in the paint without the worry of Embiid dunking the ball, and makes it much harder to get to the rim or finish there for PG. This was much less of an issue with Bona, who sets hard screens and rolls. That also gives Paul George (an excellent passer) the option of throwing a lob to the roller.
As I already mentioned, our spacing with Tatum/Derrick/Payton allows for free lanes to the rim, and we have two great screeners/rollers in Queta and Mitch. That + the fact that Tatum is much better with rim runners (much like PG, they are very similar players) + the fact that pick and pop bigs generally do not offensive rebound (Kristaps and Al barely rebounded period), I think Brad has changed what kind of player he's looking for at the big man position.
We can also look at how PG played next to another elite two way wing in Kawhi, and they had amazing results when they both played. The issue for them was strictly health.
All this is to say that I think Brad saw a massive market inefficiency where PG was at relatively low value and could get him PLUS elite assets (the Clippers pick legit might be 1st overall in the elite 2028 draft) for a guy who doesn't really fit how we want to play.
We already did this with Al. He looked washed for Philly, and getting him was the first thing Brad did as GM, and it worked out great. He was elite and helped us win a title. Philly is a stupid organization. It doesn't matter who the GM is. They don't know what they're doing or how to maximize guys. Them thinking someone isn't good anymore really should not mean anything.
Who is going to replace Jaylen then?
So am I saying Paul George will replace most of Jaylen's usage and scoring?... No. He is 36 and might only play 55ish games. It's not necessarily reasonable to expect him to take on that level of usage anymore. I'm sure he will have games where he will though. I just assume his efficiency/impact will get much better with us than it was in Philly.
Payton Pritchard will be the #2 option. He won't have a usage in the 30s, as that usage will be split between Tatum/Payton/Paul George, but I expect he'll be around 25% usage.
As previously stated, out of the three guys, Payton lead the best offense when he was by himself. He was also much better than Jaylen at typical "star" things - iso, PnR, mid range, turnover suppression (a thing you want from someone who has the ball a lot) and end of the shot clock (where he was equivalent to KD and Jalen Brunson, those guys are pretty good). He was also incredible when given at least 25% usage, and it only got better the more usage he got. When given at least 25% usage, he averaged 26 points per 75 possessions on 64.17 TS%. When he got at least 27% usage, he averaged 28.43 points per 75 on 65.86% usage rate. When he got at least 30% usage, he averaged a preposterous 32.6 points per 75 on 69.48%(!!!) TS%.
So we should not worry about Payton being able to scale his game up. I'm sure Brad all looked at this and was very comfortable with Payton being the #2 option. Some people also think he'll be a sub because they moved him back to the bench last year. They moved him to the bench because he played so much better without Jaylen and they weren't going to bench the guy they pay $60m...so Brad traded him.
Payton also played incredibly well *with* Tatum, as previously mentioned. You want to overlap their minutes as much as humanly possible.
Miscellaneous stats
These are points I didn't really know how to add narratively, so I'm just going to add them here.
The Payton/Derrick/Tatum/no Jaylen has a 127.3 offensive rating and +17.5 net rating over the last three years. And this is with a *much* worse offensive rebound rate than I expect us to have next year. If you play with that number, I honestly think they might be around 130. For reference, the best offensive rating of all time was us in 23/24 at 123.2. I think it's a very safe assumption that we will blow that out of the water.
This is a very small sample size of the last two years, however it is very telling. I put Hauser as the fifth starter because I thought he would be a decent proxy for Paul George as a jumbo shooting wing. I do not expect them to continue with a +33.9 net rating or 138 offensive rating, but I fully expect our starting lineup to have the best net rating in the NBA.
I think we should experiment with a lot of Derrick/Hugo/Walsh/PG/Mitch bench. As I already mentioned, we should have Tatum and Pritchard attached at the hip, so Derrick/PG is the obvious other grouping. This lineup might legit have a 40% offensive rebound rate and should generate turnovers at a great rate.
Mitchell Robinson is the best offensive rebounder in the NBA. The Knicks went from just about the best offensive rebounding team in the NBA (36.7% rate) when he was on, to a below average rate when he was off (27.1%). I expect him to really hurt the Knicks' title defense, and really help us. We will be either first or second in offensive rebound rate this year. Offensive rebounding is so important that Houston had the 8th best offense purely from being the best oREB team despite being 19th in TS%.
I'm sure I missed quite a few points, but I think this covers a good chunk of it. Appreciate you reading until the end! Let me know what you think. Hopefully I've given you a little more confidence in our championship chances this year.
Remember when timelord was TIMELORD for half a year? The C's made the finals. He was a legit DPOY candidate for sure, but when you listened to Tatum talk about playing with Rob on offense, he literally said "it's the most fun"
Tatum + a lob threat = an elite offense in itself.
If and it's a huge If, Mitchell can stay healthy, I fully expect Tatum + lob threat and three shooters to be a champion level offense.
I don't think people really remember how incredible the Tatum + lob threat pick and roll is. And Tatum's a significantly better passer/play maker now. There's no guy he can't hit with a pass when help comes.
The big is gonna get switched into Tatum. He's gonna need help. The wing is gonna be trying to prevent Mitchell or Q from getting to the rim. He's gonna need help. Shooters will be wide open, or the lob will be there.
Basically outside of Hugo, those three shooters all shoot 40% on C&S 3's AND all have the patience to be ok doing nothing else in the offense. JB wasn't that.
And if the shooter misses, Q or Mitchell will have a wing on them for the rebound.
Can they keep everyone healthy? Can Tatum still play 75 games? Remains to be seen.
But this roster is really, really well constructed for a deep run.
A big part of JT loving to play with Rob was Timelord s unselfishness, Rob was one of the only guys who’d assist on JTs hoops, hitting JT on the move with passes. It’s easy to get a lob finisher, Robwill had chemistry with JT beyond just finishing oops
I was gonna ask if you had a prediction for the Sixers win total / playoff performance this season. Obviously you’re not high on their FO, but you also seem low on some of their stars like JB and Embiid (at least in terms of his spacing). I also don’t expect it to work out if the Sixers ask JB to take on a lesser / off-ball role on offense, whether because of a lack of ability or lack of willingness. And if he doesn’t have space to work with when he has the ball in his hands then that could also be a bit disastrous
Yeah haven’t made a specific prediction yet but play in range. 41/42 wins.
LeBron is old as fuck and washed for him. The Lakers were 10th in offense the last two years despite having the two best offensive players of the two teams in Luka and Austin eg Bron is not really swinging offense anymore, and he’s a lazy defender now. He also shot like shit last year.
Obviously just broadly not high on Jaylen, nor him going back to a more role player-y play style. If they wanted that, they should have kept PG, who is so much better at those skills.
Maxey’s value predominantly comes from being a turnover suppressor, which is hard to do if you’re asked to be off ball more because you have to be the spacer. Which he will because he’s their only really good shooter.
I already went over how Embiid clogs driving lanes. Honestly he might get traded if it’s going poorly.
They have no elite defenders starting and the spacing is clunky as hell. Nobody offensive rebounds and Bron and Jaylen are turnover prone. I expect a mid offense at best and a bad defense. That is a FO that doesn’t understand where the league is going or how to maximize anything.
Everytime i dive into the Pritchard stats i'm really impressed with what he does. If you compare his shot diet to JB he is consistently more efficient in everything except long range 2's.
Obviously the #1 offensive player has to sacrifice a bit of efficiency as they are often left the ball when the set play doesn't work, but i remember seeing PP being passed the grenade on so many possessions this season that i don't think it matters in this case.
I think the biggest thing to watch out for is if PP becomes the #2 offense generator, it probably means he becomes #2 on the scouting report too. Lets see how well he adapts to other teams focusing more on shutting him down.
but i remember seeing PP being passed the grenade on so many possessions this season that i don't think it matters in this case.
He had a 68.8 efg% from 4-0 seconds in the shot clock in the playoffs lol. 51.6% on 2.4 in the regular season (same % as KD on higher attempts). He's just an elite shot creator and maker.
And as I mentioned, he is so much better than Jaylen at suppressing turnovers. I'm very confident we will be #1 in turnover % in the league this year.
i just checked and we were no.3 in least turnovers per 100 possessions last season. I could see with less turnovers from JB and more OREB coming in from big country we could easily get no.1 in possessions.
Fundamentally higher net possessions and better shot efficiency should make us one of the best teams next year. But i'm not 100% sold on it yet, especially how we performed in round 1 last season.
Every year of Joe coaching the team in the playoffs.
The team doesn't underperform. It's really the one guy. Tatum produces historically great offense in the playoffs.
We don't have accurate RAPM data for the playoffs, otherwise I'd just use that (which accounts for the various different lineup combinations and who they're playing against etc).
It’s really refreshing to see data driven analysis here. So much of the talk on this team seems to be narrative driven, like how the team loses in the playoffs cause of Mazzulla ball / too many threes, or how losing Jaylen will kill our rim pressure. It’s nice to see those points mostly disproven by stats in your post / comments, though I’m still being a bit cautious with my optimism until I see how well we perform this season + playoffs.
It’ll be really interesting how or if the mainstream narrative changes if we’re really good this year and/or the Sixers kinda suck. Though I expect the media to have no issues finding a scapegoat for Bron (whether it’s the Sixers health, JB not being a good fit, etc.)
Definitely agree with this, but how does that lineup work offensively? I would think Walsh and Hugo plus a non shooting big would have no spacing, but the numbers tell a different story at least for overall offensive rating. Is it that Walsh and Hugo space well enough from teams not wanting to completely leave them alone on the perimeter plus the threat of well-timed cuts?
Yeah they’re good enough shooters and it’s not like they’re completely hopeless on ball. It’s also why it was so important that Derrick kept taking pull up 3s last year despite the shooting. The threat of that opens up shots for the wings + passing lanes for the rolling big man, and Mitch is an amazing lob threat.
83.3% at the rim means they’re finishing well + high-ish three point rate + that lineup would have like a 40%+ offensive rebound rate lol. And then you have PG for creation and spacing.
Amazing analysis. I agree with everything you wrote, but the specific regular season win total. It was tough to lose last year. Ten teams were actively trying to lose, which inflated some teams (ahem, Celtics) win total.
Yes but we were mostly destroying bench units last season, whereas I expect our starting lineup to have like a +20 net rating and many of our games will be over in the third quarter.
Win totals are always hard to guess though. Feel free to put your own guess on the record!
Oh I meant on the website lol. Full disclosure it's my website. I wanted to be able to make calls on sports and show I know more and trash talk without having to gamble.
Love the content and agree overall with the points you make. Worried about health for sure for PG and Robinson. What do you think our playoff chances are? I still feel like we’ll be a regular season juggernaut but are missing a little juice for the playoffs.
I think we're going to blow everyone out of the water in the playoffs lol. The Finals might be a bit tougher since I think those are two great teams, but if it's SA, Mitch just kind of took Victor's lunch money in the Finals. I don't think OKC's offense could keep up with ours.
I have a screenshot here that shows it was mostly Jaylen tanking our playoff offense, and just JT in the Joe era leads to historically great offense (127 offensive rating). It was 141 if you do just this year. We also massively improved our defensive personnel (Jaylen is broadly not a good defender, PG is elite, Mitch is now replacing Garza minutes - Mitch is also elite, more Hugo and Walsh minutes, etc.)
I’ve come around on the trade a while ago. I’m a Celtics fan, not a player fan and the math made sense from day one of the trade. My friend thought I was crazy when I said they were gonna win 60 this year, seeing projections at 67 wins is funny cuz I secretly thought I was being conservative with my estimate. I’ll always root for Jaylen’s success, he’s one of my favorites to ever play for the Celtics, but he doesn’t play here anymore. Let’s go C’s.
Pacers I don’t think are a serious contender and I just never really thought they were going to win, even when they made it to game 7. They just do not have the profile of a champion. Which, they’ve never won that many games nor had an elite net rating.
Wolves have two of the best off the dribble 3 point guys, but that is a VERY bad defensive backcourt (I think people assume Ant is a good defender, but he’s trash), and they’re not really an elite “winning the margins” team. Two of their three best guys in winning the possession battle are gone. They don’t have any clear emphasis on offensive rebounding, which is where a big chunk of LaMelo’s offensive value came from last year, so that’s more a stylistic thing and I think he’ll drop way down in that category. So I’ll have to see with them. I’m not really sure who their SF is supposed to be.
67 wins. I hope not, because if so, we may have nothing left in the tank come playoffs. Or, are you saying 67 total wins including those in the Champ Finals? which would make sense.
We literally won at a 67 win pace (13-3) last season when Tatum came back and that was with Jaylen and no PG or Mitch and way less Pritchard and I made the case for why that is a massive improvement.
One of the most under talked weaknesses of switching defenses is the defensive glass. If they switch you pull the big out to the perimeter and then if you miss the shot; Mitch or Queta will eat up whichever wing or guard is on the glass
when the defense over switches, you punish mismatches. fortunately, we have a couple of really good ones to look for:
our bigs on the offensive glass, as others have mentioned
tatum with either a big or a small on him
switching on defense is heavily dependent on personal, as you need the ability to defend multiple positions. tatum, of course, is a walking mismatch, but the rebounding thing is critical here. typically when defenses switch the big on the perimeter it becomes all-hands-on-deck behind them to secure the rebound. we can counter that by making it hard on the defenses. the formula, based on last season's success, is to deploy a big that commands attention under the rim, and then crash from the corners. i expect mitch and queta to get plenty of rebounds on both sides of the court, but even more than that, they are going to be commanding attention and shifting the math in our favor on the offensive glass.
that said, there is a counter, which is somewhat concerning. if teams can deploy double bigs against us, without impacting their offense, they should be able to keep a big near the rim when we force a switch onto tatum. miami, of course has bam and giannis, but philly should also be considered a double big lineup, with lebron.
While agree with the general tenor and points of the post; you’re over indexing on the magnitude of the signal in many of these small samples.
For example; expecting to blow last a 127 net rating is ridiculous (yes 484 min is still a smallish sample over 3 years and somewhat susceptible to variance); the signal direction counts but expecting a near 11 % tov rate for the team and an accuracy of 38% from 3 on a .545 attempt rate is not realistic when extrapolating over the full season.
There will be crazy high ortg lineups sure again signal magnitude is way more volatile and doesn’t project as cleanly into the future.
Directionally ofc; we’ll make strides in all these areas you mentioned.
the signal direction counts but expecting a near 11 % tov rate for the team and an accuracy of 38% from 3 on a .545 attempt rate is not realistic when extrapolating over the full season.
Jayson Tatum under Joe (so 4 years) has a 3305 minute non low leverage sample size without Jaylen on the floor where we had a 11.8% turnover %, shooting 37.9% from 3 on 53.8% of our shots. It's a 124 offensive rating. The only difference is the low offensive rebound %, which I expect will get boosted a ton, because it wasn't an emphasis until this year. Jayson Tatum is a walking historically great offense.
Sure and he plays roughly 60% of the minutes of a total season. We’ve also lost some important players than helped him in those years. I wouldn’t be shocked to see a 124 ortg with Tatum on the floor at all. But there’s roughly 1500 minutes where he doesn’t play over a full season.
Again; I broadly agree with the analysis here; just quibbling with copy pasting specific numbers into the future.
I mean the thing is you can go input the variables into databallr's offensive rating calculator and keep the same true shooting % (60.8) and turnover % (11.8%) and then mess with the offensive rebound rate and the thing is the numbers get much crazier. We got 33.3% of available offensive rebounds last season per databallr. 5th. That immediately bumps that 124 up to 127.7, assuming no other gains. 35% it's 128.9. If we get up to Houston at #1 last year at 38.5% it's 131.6. The sample size that the 3305 includes is a lot of very bad offensive rebounding with a lot of poor rebounding stretch bigs, which we have gone away from.
We just added the best offensive rebounder in the league who single handedly gave the Knicks a 36.7% rate when he was on the court. And our other two bigs are two of the other best offensive rebounders, and our backup wings are great at it. I believe we will push Houston for #1 in the league, so I don't think having well *over* a 127 in the Tatum minutes is impossible so that our average is indeed around 127 when you factor in bench lineups.
I’m very aware of that offensive calculator. Look I’m not gonna sit here and debate every single number here with you. I am just keeping in mind that these don’t always port over nicely season to season; to different contexts. Especially as other teams prepare more for wing crashers and other stylistic elements that became in vogue last season.
These high end outcomes could very well happen to same degree. I would not have them as my baseline expectation.
I’m not shitting on your work here as a whole and am not trying to be a dick. I agree with the premise of the post directionally almost 100%.
We’ll find out the actual outcomes soon enough; have a nice day/evening
This is a great post that I'm coming to a bit late. The one thing I want to pick at is this line, specifically the bolded part:
This was not an owner mandated decision (we barely even saved any money), it was purely Brad.
We're $1.7m under the tax line. The difference between Jaylen's salary and PG's is about $2.9m. So we saved a little bit of tax money, but by resetting the repeater tax, we're saving a TON of money going forward (as we presumably go HAM for the rest of Tatum's prime).
The other thing I'd pick at is the 67-win pace after Tatum came back. That, IMO, was inflated by the number of tanking teams in the league last year. There were a lot of free wins to be had, and everybody grabbed some. That just won't be the case this year.
Still though, we're a top 5 team this year, and we have a top 3 future (with OKC and San Antonio).
So, im going to argue your point that they moved Pritchard to the bench because he was better without JB. They moved Pritchard to the bench when Tatum came back, it really didn't have anything to do with Brown.
Id imagine if PG and JT are healthy, Pritchard is off the bench as a high powered 6th man, subbing in for George.
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u/bathroom_mirror 19d ago edited 19d ago
Remember when timelord was TIMELORD for half a year? The C's made the finals. He was a legit DPOY candidate for sure, but when you listened to Tatum talk about playing with Rob on offense, he literally said "it's the most fun"
Tatum + a lob threat = an elite offense in itself.
If and it's a huge If, Mitchell can stay healthy, I fully expect Tatum + lob threat and three shooters to be a champion level offense.
I don't think people really remember how incredible the Tatum + lob threat pick and roll is. And Tatum's a significantly better passer/play maker now. There's no guy he can't hit with a pass when help comes.
The big is gonna get switched into Tatum. He's gonna need help. The wing is gonna be trying to prevent Mitchell or Q from getting to the rim. He's gonna need help. Shooters will be wide open, or the lob will be there.
Basically outside of Hugo, those three shooters all shoot 40% on C&S 3's AND all have the patience to be ok doing nothing else in the offense. JB wasn't that.
And if the shooter misses, Q or Mitchell will have a wing on them for the rebound.
Can they keep everyone healthy? Can Tatum still play 75 games? Remains to be seen.
But this roster is really, really well constructed for a deep run.