First of all Heisley dodges the questions and makes no promises to lock himself into a Zach Randolph extension, despite the fact that Z-Bo is quickly becoming the most popular player in the Memphis Grizzlies short history. This move is clever because Heisley does have options — three 1st round picks in a PF/C heavy draft — that he can use to keep Randolph’s value below the maximum.

So why not run the same bluff with Rudy Gay? Because promising to match the money might actually drive down Rudy’s value — the exact opposite — because of the young scorer’s particular situation. A team, say the Knicks, won’t want to offer Rudy maximum money if it will be matched, because until Memphis responds a week later all that cap space is tied up. By threatening to match, as a bluff or not, Heisley has essentially bought himself time to negotiate with Rudy and the fanbase.

via Zach Randolph Wants an Extension; Michael Heisley Continues to Promise to Re-Sign Rudy Gay – Straight Outta Vancouver.

What do you do with Zach Randolph? I mean, honestly, what do you do with him? Has his play earned this season earned him an extension? It’s incredibly difficult to argue otherwise. A double-double machine, the emotional leader of the squad, the franchise’s first All-Star of this new core, and arguably the best player on the team (I’ll still maintain that’s Marc Gasol), how can you not think he deserves an extension?

But does his past lead to question marks? Absolutely.  He turns 29 this year, which means he’s good for another three seasons at least, but is his worth high enough to swallow the inevitable increase that his extension would take as he gets older?

Then you’ve got the dreaded question of space. And I don’t mean his ass.  The Grizzlies are on the books for only 14.9 million (HT: ShamSports) in 2011-2012, with Marc Gasol a post-CBA RFA. Same for Mike Conley. So they’ll be trying to lock up at least Gasol and potentially Conley if they decide that point guard doesn’t really matter in this league. Randolph’s making $17 million next year. As a 30 year old, what kind of money is he going to want, with a new CBA coming, with the Grizzlies needing to lock up Gasol (and Mayo the year after), and with the team working to re-sign Gay? They’re not going over the luxury tax. And they won’t know what the threshold is until after the CBA. It would be very dangerous to lock Randolph into a large extension without knowing the future of the CBA, and when doing so would threaten your ability to re-sign the players under 27.

SOV makes a brilliant point regarding Gay. Any team that makes a huge swing for Gay will automatically put a lock on their cap space, which limits their competitive flexibility with the unrestricted free agents. Minnesota might not care, since they won’t be targeting any of the major free agents, but the delay Heisley can put on other team’s offers means more time to get a reasonable deal for Gay in place. I’m also encouraged to hear him say Gay is not a franchise player. That’s a vital distinction that has to be considered for both sides before committing money.

The Grizzlies have made such strides in the last 12 months. They have to be very careful not to get dragged back to the edge of oblivion.

Today’s post explores  a fairly new basketball statistic that hasn’t been analyzed in the public forum: percent blocked (%Blkd).

Well, maybe that isn’t totally accurate.  Matt Moore flirted with the shot blocked stat earlier this year in this very space but his love affair phased out as the season went on.  It’s a shame really because %Blkd awareness has plummeted ever since.  What is %Blkd? It’s the percentage of a player’s shots that get blocked.  Simple enough.  Although, it’s not to be confused by Basketball-Reference’s handy BLK% which calculates the flipside for the defender.

%Blkd is so simple that it feels like we should have had this information all along.   We make a big deal out of blocks for defenders but we ignore the other side of the ball.  Luckily, Hoopdata began publishing this data this season for the swat hungry masses.

Looking at the leaderboard of those who get denied a lot and those who leave the court unscathed, you find some interesting results.  No one’s safe from the swat.  Some of the tallest players to grace the court get blocked and the some of the shortest ones never do.  Seven-footer Brendan Haywood gets blocked more often than his 5-11 Carolina counterpart Ty Lawson.  Sure, Brendan Haywood lives in block territory and Ty Lawson only takes about half as of his shots at the basket (which is astoundingly high for a point guard) but evidently it takes more than height to be the last one to touch the ball as it approaches the rim.  In the former Knickerbocker department, Nate Robinson, who stands 5-9,  gets blocked less often than Darko Milicic who stands 84 inches tall.  Guess who takes more shots at the basket? That’s right: Nate. #wordaapp.

So anyway, who finds himself on the Most Blocked List? Let’s take a look at the ranking if we trim those who don’t play 20 minutes per game.

No surprise there with Chuck Hayes at the top. He’s undersized for a shooting guard but he’s employed at the 5.  But what about athletes like Tyson Chandler, J.J. Hickson and Gerald Wallace? Did you think their other-wordly hops would protect them? Not so actually.

And what about the Least Blocked List?

Notice some trends here? Bigs who lack an outside shot lead the blocked shot list and the guards who are allergic to the paint have gotten blocked fewer times than a highway patrol squad car.  Most blocks occur around the basket so if a player made it a priority to not get blocked, he could just live on the perimeter.

With that in mind, if the object is to learn something about the skill set of the players, these rankings probably aren’t all that informative.   We might as well look at their shot locations since there’s a very strong correlation between  the percentage of a player’s shots taken at the basket and how often they get blocked (r = .708, in fact).

What we want to find are the players who attack the rim cleanly without getting their shot swatted into the first row.  To do this, it’s worth looking at the relationship between percent blocked and how often they take shots at the basket. We measure the latter through at rim percentage.

In the chart below, we can glean more information about the player’s block evading skills if they display a separation from the pack.

At Rim Pct

There’s a lot to take in here, I know. Names, colors, lines. Oh my! Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through it.  (Click here for the standalone graph).  First, I elected to display the data points as player names instead of regular dots.  I mean, there are real people behind those dots so I just went ahead and identified them.   Secondly, the colors of those names correspond with their position. Consult the legend at the top left.  You’ll notice the orange centers cluster to the right. Lastly, the lines you see are trendlines for the positional distribution.  I wouldn’t put too much weight in the G and F trendlines since they only represent a few observations in the dataset but they’re there anyway.

Looking at the graph, we see that the Portland (and also injured) version of Marcus Camby has a much lower blocked percentage than we would expect given how much he works the basket.  Maybe he’s learned a thing or two from all the shot-blocking he does himself.  Or maybe it’s just a small sample of games (it is).  On the other end of the spectrum, Carl Landry strays from the pack, getting blocked on about 14% of his shots in Houston which is much higher than what we’d expect for someone with his taste for layups.  And the full season Landry (Carl Landry TOT), isn’t much better. You can see Steve Blake tucked in the bottom left hand corner.  He’s right on top of the trendline which tells us his tiny %Blkd isn’t really special.  Move along.

Speaking of which, why do we have the trendlines? For one, they provide a nice baseline so if the player finds himself above it, that tells us he gets blocked more than we would expect.  And vice versa below the line.  Secondly and most importantly, the regression equation associated with the trendline for each position enables us to derive an expected %Blkd with what we know about their propensity to take layups, dunks, and tip-ins.  For example, a 10 percent increase in At Rim Pct for centers increases %Blkd by 1.2 percent.  Furthermore, point guards suffer more compared to centers the more layups they take which seems logical given their stature.

So we want to find those who deviate from the expected line the most.  In other words, who gets blocked way more than they should given their appetite for layups?

Chuck Hayes no longer tops the list, all though he’s still a card-carrying member of this shameful group.  The new leader, 6 foot 7 Chris Douglas-Roberts gets blocked three times more than he should for a small forward taking 44 percent of his shots at the rim.  Gerald Wallace, for all his explosiveness, dunking chops, and athleticism, features an alarmingly high blocked percentage, moreso when he consider his position.  If all of Crash’s 101 blocked shots came at the basket, that would mean that one out of every five shots he takes at the rim get blocked.  If there’s a dent in his game, this is it.  And he’s not the only stuffed athlete on this list; Corey Maggette, Rudy Gay, and Caron Butler find themselves here as well.

Butler’s stint in Dallas has not been a slam dunk and maybe it’s because he hasn’t had enough of them.  He’s had his shot blocked a whopping 23 times in his time in Dallas, a high total considering he only takes a few shots at the basket per game.  He’s traditionally been blocked more than average but this is definitely something Mavericks fans should note as they march into the playoffs.

With the weak finishers taken care of, what about the undeniable attackers?

As remarkable as it is that Marcus Camby has only been blocked twice in Portland, the real leader on this list is Ben Wallace who should have given up about twice as many swatted shots as he has.  This is particularly interesting because Ben Wallace at 6-9 is woefully undersized for a center.  He’s not Kevin McHale underneath the basket but he certainly picks the right spots to get a clean look at the basket.

Notice that many of these players double as shot blockers on the defensive end.  Iguodala and especially Wade rank among the top shot-blocking guards.  On a per minute basis, Chris Andersen blocks more shots than any regular.  Dalembert and Camby are right up there.   Perhaps these players possess a shot blocking intuition and instantaneous jumping ability that helps not just on defense but on both ends of the floor.  Of course, not all shot-blockers avoid getting their own shots swatted (ahem, Brendan Haywood) but this is certainly an intriguing finding that I’m not sure I’ve seen before.

In the future, I’ll call up player height and And-1 percentages in effort to get closer to the heart of finishing ability. The findings here certainly warrant a deeper look to investigate further if shot-blocking ability translates to offense as well.

After the Jazz “beat” the Thunder with a 140-139 overtime victory on Tuesday night, I looked at the reaction from the Thunder fans in the Daily Dime Live chat, I looked at the fallout on Twitter and I had some playful banter back and forth with various people in the blogging and blog-reading world. But still, I debated on whether or not to write this piece.

Despite what the proprietor of this website would lead you to believe, I really like this Thunder team. I’ve been big on Russell Westbrook since he was at UCLA. I’ve enjoyed watching him prove to the doubters that he’s a legit NBA point guard and one that will star in the association. I love the deadly repertoire that Kevin Durant destroys his opponents with. I’ve definitely seen more complete scorers throughout the history of this game than Kevin Durant but it isn’t a big number and it certainly isn’t a list of players that are more fun to watch than KD. I marvel at the amount of weapons he has at his disposal. He’s the NBA equivalent of Iron Man out there. And they have so many fun role players on this team (including my favorite college fan crush in Eric Maynor) that it is literally impossible for me to not enjoy this team play on a nightly basis.

Then you’ve got the community of Thunderites (a horrible nickname I came up with tonight). Royce Young is one of my favorite people to read because he has such passion for this young franchise and he’s just damn good at what he does. He has good people writing for him at Daily Thunder and whenever I peruse the comment sections of the site, I’m amazed at the thoughtful and intelligent nature of the ideas the readers type out to help add to the discussion.

I knew that if I wrote this piece, I’d end up most likely offending a fan base that I really do enjoy and that’s not my intention. I’m probably going to come off as smarmy, snarky or some other “S” word that ends in a “Y” that nobody wants to be labeled. Hopefully, they’ll see the merit in this post instead of reading it as hatred because that does not exist in my words here.

So here goes:

You’re blowing this no-call against Kevin Durant and the Thunder WAY out of proportion.

I’m reading things all over the internet about how Kevin Durant not getting a foul call at the end of a regular season game in which the Thunder will still get to go to the playoffs regardless of the outcome is a tragedy. Apparently, it’s a travesty and a sham and a mockery.

I’m sorry but you’ve got to get over this and put things in perspective.

CJ Miles did block Kevin Durant’s shot at the end of the game. You can clearly see that he gets a little ball. The problem with the block though is that he hit a crap-load of hand on the follow-through. It’s not even close. It should be a no-brainer call. Put Kevin Durant at the line for three shots. Considering he’s having a historic free throw shooting season, I’m guessing he makes two of the three at worst and the Thunder have to wait out a desperation heave with 0.6 seconds left. If the heave falls by the wayside, the Thunder are sitting pretty with 49 wins, five games to play and their sites on a possible division title.

Unfortunately, the whistle didn’t get blown. Welcome to the NBA.

This happens a lot. There is a definite problem with the officiating in the NBA. This isn’t any big newsbreak. There are missed calls all the time. There are missed calls that influence the final moments of a game. But they don’t decide the outcomes of the games. There were 45 missed OKC shots, 17 missed threes, five missed free throws, 18 turnovers, 28 points off of those turnovers, and 16 offensive rebounds given up in this game by the Thunder. One missed call did not lose the game at all.

Does it suck that you essentially got screwed on the final play of the game? Absolutely. Is it going to be the last time this happens to your franchise? Wait until you play the Lakers in the playoffs someday. This swift kick to the gonads is going to feel like a Swedish massage.

The Thunder fan base is extremely new to the NBA. You haven’t gone through this stuff before; I realize that. But you’re going to have to get used to it and get used to it quickly. You have a young, talented team that is going to be in the playoffs for the next 10 years, minimum. This is going to be a regular occurrence since you’re in a small market, according to most NBA fans. You’ve experienced the frustration of the Salt Lake Bias that sweeps through the NBA year after year. Just wait until you feel the East Coast Big Market Bias or the Lakers Need To Be In The Finals For Ratings Bias.

This is not a travesty. This is not tragic. This was losing a regular season game. You may think this took you out of division title contention or it might cause you to fall into the dreaded eighth seed by season’s end. It had no more affect on the standings than the Thunder dropping an early season road game in Sacramento. What about the other three overtime games the Thunder lost this season? They mean the exact same in the wins and losses columns that this “crushing defeat” does.

A tragedy is watching Danny Manning’s knees fail him time after time when he should have been one of the best players of the past 25 years.

A tragedy is watching a player get called for a foul because Kobe Bryant elbowed him in the nose during a crucial inbound moment of Game 6 of the Western Conference Finals.

A tragedy is watching Greg Oden’s knee explode when he was starting to show that he could have a huge positive impact on the game and the future of the Western Conference.

A tragedy is watching Dwyane Wade get to the line in the 2006 NBA Finals because the Mavericks shot him a questionable glance as the fate of the 2006 NBA Finals was seemingly being scripted right in front of everyone’s eyes.

A tragedy is seeing Shaun Livingston’s knee ligaments play a game of Twister on the court.

Those are basketball tragedies. What you experienced Tuesday night was a great game have a deflating ending because Tony Brothers decided to swallow the whistle. You just experienced the equivalent of basketball indigestion.

Should you be mad? Sure. Should you be outraged? That’s taking it a bit far. This is not that big of a deal. You need to put it in a little bit of perspective and respect the history of bad NBA calls before you. This was no different than the phantom call on Paul Millsap in favor of your team a couple months earlier.

Do two wrongs make a right? Often never. But this is the officiating world we all have to live in until the machines take over the Earth and we get perfect robot referees.

Don’t let losses like this consume you. Take it for what it is, mull it over for a few minutes and move on. You don’t want to become that bitter fan base. That’s not fun for anybody.

And remember, you still have Kevin Durant and I owe Matt Moore a cake because of it.

This just sucks. We’ve been robbed of our manifest playoff destiny once again.

Andrew Bogut is out for the year. Now, normally this wouldn’t be huge news and it wouldn’t really matter with just a week and a half remaining in the regular season. Normally, the Bucks would have been eliminated from playoff contention for a couple of weeks now and the city of Milwaukee would be turning their attention to Prince Fielder and the rest of the Milwaukee Brewers. But not this year.

This year, the Bucks aren’t just making the playoffs; they’re putting teams on notice that if you face them in the first round you’re going to be in for a rude awakening. The Bucks are scrappy but it’s a different kind of scrappy. In the past, we’ve had scrappy teams that “nobody wanted to face.” They were teams who most likely put up a lot of points or had huge glaring weaknesses that far superior teams would be able to exploit in a seven-game series. The Wolves teams from the late 90s and early 00s were scrappy but you didn’t truly fear them. Tracy McGrady’s Orlando teams were scrappy but you knew they weren’t pulling off the massive upset against better teams. But this Bucks teams is completely different.

Or at least it was until last night when Andrew Bogut seemingly slipped off the rim and fell on his right arm. The diagnosis is a dislocated elbow, a broken hand and a sprained wrist. If it was just one of those injuries, the tough Australian anchor to the Bucks defense would wrap it up and go be the destructive defensive force he’s been all season. He’d be the guy that makes you wonder if Dwight Howard is hands down the best defensive player of the year.

Dislocated elbow? He’d probably pop it back into place in a pseudo-tribute to Lieutenant Riggs and go out there and be the guy Milwaukee needs him to be. If it was a broken hand, he’d most likely tape it up, take a few painkillers and go out there to carry out the plan of his defensive-minded coach. Sprained wrist? I don’t even know that we would hear about him having a sprained wrist. Andrew Bogut is one of the toughest guys in the NBA. He has that Aussie blood running through his veins that allows him to feel very little pain. However, throw all of those injuries together into one horrible fall and you’re left with the situation the Bucks are in.

It’s eerily reminiscent to the Houston Rockets situation from last season. With Tracy McGrady on the shelf already, the Rockets lost Yao Ming deep into their playoff push against the Lakers. The Rockets were already in the playoffs and in the middle of a Round 2 showdown with the eventual champs. After Game 3, we found out Yao Ming had a hairline fracture in the same left foot that had sustained three significant injuries throughout his career. It was completely deflating for all basketball fans that didn’t root for the forum blue and gold. When you have a scrappy team with the odds stacked against them, you don’t want them to lose their best player in the middle of what could be a special run.

Would the Rockets have beaten the Lakers in the second round of last year’s playoffs? Would the Bucks have advanced to the second round or the Eastern Conference Finals on the shoulders of the biggest, toughest man in Milwaukee? Unfortunately, we will never get those answers. We’re left to guess and hypothesize instead of get a definitive yes or no to the situation.

Much like the Rockets, the Bucks were already without their best wing scorer – a fate they have grown accustomed to and are used to dealing with. They know life without Michael Redd just the same as Houston knew life without Tracy McGrady. It was something you could sort of prepare for and make due with. Any NBA wing player (outside of Sasha Pavlovic or Sasha Vujacic or anybody named Sasha) can get hot and carry his team for an extended period of time. But like that Rockets team, this Bucks team has always been praying the bad luck wouldn’t once again trickle down into the post and befall their franchise big man.

What’s left of the Bucks is an aircraft carrier with no anchor. The Bucks are left with Ersan Illyasova playing the role of a much younger Luis Scola, Luc Richard Mbah a Moute playing the role of Shane Battier, John Salmons as a heavily medicated Ron Artest and Brandon Jennings as the flashier and more swaggerish version of Aaron Brooks. And I sort of hope it works.

What we need now is this Bucks team to rally around this adversity. We need them to accept this horribly dealt hand and bluff their way into winning a pot.

I often get labeled as a Brandon Jennings “hater” because I believe Tyreke Evans is not only the better player but is far more deserving of the Rookie of the Year award. The truth is I’m crazy about Brandon Jennings. Just because I believe Tyreke is better and more likely to receive the hardware doesn’t mean I’m not a Jennings fan. I’ve always been a fan of point guards first in this league. I’m drawn to them for some reason. Honestly, I would love nothing more than Brandon Jennings to go NOVA for the entire playoffs and give the opposing defenses more than they could ever hope to handle.

I want Brandon Jennings to turn back into the Pterodactyl With Wings of Fire. I want him to find the jumper that eluded him for too long this season. I want the three-point shot to snap through the bottom of the net. I want the runner to fall, the pull-up jumper to splash and the dribble to be so succinct and elusive that defenders are left confused and trying to recreate the scene of the crime to figure out how their dignity was taken from them on Jennings’ way to the court. I want chalk outlines of defenders’ ankles on the court and William Petersen brilliantly piecing the whole thing together with his creepy beard.

The Bucks may be deflated with the loss of Andrew Bogut for the rest of this campaign but this is a new Milwaukee team. Hopefully they can show the innate toughness that their coach and defensive centerpiece have infused into Bucks basketball.

Fear the Deer.

International competition will always pale in comparison to the NBA, because ultimately it’s still seen as an extension of the Dream Team vs. Team X, even if America has a few more in the loss column than they used to. No reasonable person in the basketball universe would honestly claim that the USA is anything but the greatest basketball nation on the planet, and with that notion comes the understanding that the players from here are the very best. It doesn’t make much of a difference that USA didn’t take gold in ’04, as evidenced by the prevailing post-Olympic question being not “When did this happen?” but “How did this happen?” It was an important moment for international play, but not an important moment for Americans. The only signal sent by that failure was that Team USA needed to treat the Olympics more seriously, not that our country’s dominance in the sport had suddenly come to a close.

Until that happens — until Spain, Argentina, and the like are seen as something more than “challengers” — international competition will be nothing more than a passing fancy in America. The fact that the NBA title is often referred to as the “world championship,” wrong though it may be, is perfectly indicative of the attitudes and opinions regarding the league as we know it: this is the best collection of professional basketball talent in the world, and attaching nationalistic importance to another tournament isn’t going to change that.

Honestly though, that’s not all that concerning. The general consensus regarding the FIBA World Championships or the Olympics doesn’t really concern me, because I enjoy the games all the same. I still get to see a cross-conference All-Star team trot out against some of the top of players in the world. You get to see Chris Paul throw oops to LeBron, Kobe and Wade working on opposite wings, and a frontcourt of Carmelo and Dwight. Barring a serious free agent shake-up, these aren’t pairings you’re likely to see anywhere else on the planet, and unlike an exhibition like the All-Star Game, these competitions do have real winners and real losers. It’s not the same as an NBA title, and I don’t expect it to be. I just want real effort, real defense, and an execution level worthy of the tremendous talent Team USA is putting on the floor.

Maybe there’s a little part of me that enjoys having international basketball as my little secret. Something as big as the Olympics hardly seems like an underground treasure, but staying up until 4 AM to watch Team USA take on Andrei Kirilenko and the Russian national team? Even if I’m connected through my television set to fans around the world, there’s something personal there. Maybe by the time it replays the next day or the die-hards dive in on the DVRs it will belong to everyone else, but for those precious few hours, that game, filled with only the best in the world, is mine. Then, when you try to talk to me about it the next day, I’ll chide you for being behind the times and tell you all about how I discovered that game before it was famous. I thought all I wanted was to have a ‘meaningful’ experience with global bros [via social media], but all I wanted was 2 have some ‘basketball’ 4 myself.

Or really, some brilliantly talented players filling my summer with slightly different but still exciting basketball. That only happens if international competition matters; it doesn’t have to be paramount, but it needs to be an endeavor worthy of these athletes’ time. Prior to the last Olympic games, the thought was that establishing USA Basketball as a commitment-based system, along with the involvement of the most respected names in the NBA, would instill the program with prestige. For a summer, it did. 2010 will be the real test for Jerry Colangelo and USA Basketball, though, as players will still be asked to commit their time and represent their country, but without the glitz and glam of the Olympics. Those events are heavily televised and gigantic marketing opportunities. By Colangelo’s rhetoric, they’re deemed the big prize for commitment to the program. Without that commitment, not only does USA basketball as an institution lose some respectability in being blown off, but it opens the door for more and more off-year drop-outs.

Right now, it’s LeBron and Wade that don’t seem to want to play this summer, and they have their reasons: free agency, other interests, family turmoil. Cool. Jerry says he’s flexibile, and he’s willing to roll with it. That doesn’t mean either Wade or Bron will be in Vegas or Turkey this summer, and the message James sends by telling the world that he’s “busy” is not a positive one. Not because of some contrived nonsense about national pride or somesuch, but because it prevents the best possible basketball from being played this summer and in future summers. Not everyone has the singular focus of Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant, two players whom Adrian Wojnarowski claims are committed to playing this year. What happens when Melo decides he needs the summer off? When Dwight Howard and Chris Bosh are too busy? Who will we actually be seeing in July and August?

It’s not that having Durant, Deron Williams, Chris Paul, O.J. Mayo, Brook Lopez, and more would be any kind of tragedy. That’s a team of stars in its own right. But if I’m allowed to be greedy, I want the best. Not the biggest names, but the best players in the world absolutely killing it. Even the televised scrimmages are terrific. While I can hardly blame either LeBron or Wade for wanting to skip out to do whatever it is they intend to do this summer, the butterfly effect it may have on USA Basketball 10 years from now scares me a bit. It’s nothing even close to terrifying; I’d watch USA field a team Antoine Wrights, Sebastian Telfairs, and Craig Smiths and still find joy in it. Just not as much joy as I would watching the cream of the crop.

That’s what we have a chance to see for every other summer from now until USA Basketball disintegrates (the cream of the crop, not Telfair et al), but it depends on the players committing and taking it seriously. If the cool kids are doing it, everyone else will fall in line. That’s why even though Jerry Colangelo is the man in charge, the elite players hold the real power. They put the power behind the product, and they’re the ones that control the future of Team USA.

The bad boy NBA player is to develop and produce the “They Call Me Crazy” show with E1 Entertainment and Tijuana Entertainment.

The series will document the ups and downs of Artest’s life, allowing him to “make amends for past transgressions,” according to E1 Entertainment, and help develop aspiring musicians through his hip-hop label, Tru Warier, to be supported by E1 Music.

-Hollywood Reporter

What are the criteria for getting your own reality series again? Be rich and at times foolish with money? Check. Off-center personaltiy? Check. Controversial? Check. Not be self conscious about details of your life being made public? Check.

Once you look at he list, you wonder why it took so long for Ron Artest to get his own reality television series.

-PBT

Could there be a better name for a Ron Artest show than “They Call Me Crazy?” I submit that there cannot.

There’s no indication of when the show will start, or what channel it will air on, but as soon as it goes on-air it will instantly be the best show on television. I mean, between his random Internet videos, his escapades with his recording artists, that time

-Trey @ BDL

I loathe reality television. LOATHE. It is one of the larger sacrifices I make to Paroxi-Wife in exchange for being able to watch so much NBA that there’s an indentation in my couch from my ass. Thankfully she doesn’t subject me to American Idol or You’ve Got Talent or Let’s Have Fun With Stereotypes, but suffice it to say, I know way more about Tori and Dean than I ever wanted to. That said? I will watch this. I will watch it like I am trying to choke the life out of it. I will watch it like I am watching mushrooms to make sure mushrooms are not snake eggs.

CRAZY PILLS HAS HIS OWN SHOW!

The only way this could be better is if they called it “They Call Me Crazy Pills.” That would be far more accurate.

Do you realize there will now be a television show about a man that ran into the stands during a game and hit the wrong dude? Who made his own Michael Jackson tribute? Who shaves things into his head and dies his hair blonde and then shaves it the next day when they lose?

He’s just like you and me.

I’m so happy.

By now, you’ve probably watched the Kevin Garnett swearing video about 100 times and giggled about it with your friends.

What’s that? There are a lot of KG swearing videos? You need me to clarify?

I mean the latest one. The Kevin (oooo-weeeee that’s a bad word) Durant video. Hell, here it is one more time (via Daily Thunder). Remember, there’s a bad word in this video so you don’t want to play it in a place that gives you a paycheck for reading this site when your boss isn’t looking.

I know, I know. It’s hilarious isn’t it? Kevin Garnett, who used to be beloved and respected before he went to a big market and kicked the tar out of your favorite team, is pissed at the refs. He’s complaining. I get the irony that a big market team is complaining about the refs. The beauty of it is that the refs weren’t even that bad. Did Durant get some questionable calls? Possibly. I’m sure most of them were legit just like all of the other calls in the NBA.

What you see here is a frustrated, fading Boston Celtics team figuring out their actual place in the NBA. They’re not title contenders. They know they’re not title contenders. I mean, they don’t really know it but I think deep down they suspect it’s just not going to happen. They’ve been there before and accomplished it against a really good Lakers team. They know how good you have to be to win a title. And it isn’t there this year.

Garnett isn’t healthy enough and even if he’s around 90%, he’s become too old or too rusty or just plain not good enough. He hasn’t had to carry a team in three years. He used to be able to put up insane numbers like it was just something you did. Even if he had been completely healthy over the past two seasons, I don’t know that he’d be able to still carry a team like that now. He’s been out of practice with it for so long that the ability just isn’t strong enough to carry out a feat like that.

Throw in the fact that Paul Pierce moves like Bill Murray taking baby steps to the elevator, Ray Allen is busy listening to random music with green fog surrounding him and the Celtics bench is about as deep as any of the people on The Real World: Washington DC and you’re left with a big problem. Rasheed Wallace is a punch line, people are still trying to figure out exactly what Marquis Daniels does for a living and Michael Finley basically needs a Hoveround to get from the locker room to the court.

This team used to be mean. This team used to be deep enough to throw an impregnable defense at you with timely offense sprinkled around it. This team used to break you down physically and mentally until the point of frustration and then squeak out victories on their way to hoisting up a trophy. Now, they’re the frustrated ones. They’re complaining about a 21-year old getting calls on their home floor instead of just shutting him down. Hell, they could play him 100 times and not shut him down once. It has more to do with their inability and lack of pieces to accomplish this rather than Durant’s ability to trick the newest fan base in the NBA into foolishly throwing the Jordan name around as some sort of synonym.

But as bad as this team supposedly is, it’s sort of absurd that people think they’ll lose in the first round of the playoffs. Look, I know that you all HATE Boston because the media blah blah blah and Kevin Garnett blah blah blah and Curt Schilling yatti yatti yatta. That’s fine. I understand people taking great enjoyment in the demise of the Boston Celtics. I mean I don’t because to me, I’d like a team to be at full strength and near their peak if my team is going to beat them. It means more and gives the opposing fans nothing for excuses. However, I sort of see why you’d like to feast on an irrevocably vulnerable Celtics team.

The problem is people are foolish enough to actually believe the Celtics aren’t going to make it past the first round. It’s fine if you want to believe in fairy tales and believe that Cinderella is ALWAYS going to wear the glass slipper at the end of March Madness. It’s fine if you want to believe the Easter Bunny will be here in a few days. But don’t trick yourself into thinking this Celtics team can’t win a seven-game series against a team that isn’t Top 12 in the NBA or possessing home court advantage in the first round.

Would we all love for Dwyane Wade to start his campaign to entice another big name free agent to South Beach this summer with an upset victory that vaults his team into the second round of the playoffs? Sure. We’d also love to see a young team of role players and virtual nobodies go out and embody the spirit of their coach as they win with defense and playing within themselves. We’d also love to see Larry Brown not only take the Bobcats to their first playoff series in franchise history but turn the world on its head as they march into the second round. And we’d all love for Toronto to do whatever the hell it has to do to salvage a working relationship with Chris Bosh.

But none of that is going to happen. Maybe if we still had five-game opening series, I’d believe it to be possible. Unfortunately, we don’t.

The Celtics still have arguably the best defense in the league right now. Their defensive efficiency is first (102.4), they force teams into a lot of turnovers (17.4 turnover rate is second) and they don’t allow teams to make shots (7^th best defensive eFG% at 48.3%). They win at home (seventh best home record) and on the road (second best home record). They turn their games into free throw shooting contests and with the big market bias that everybody loves to complain about, that strategy seems to favor them.

I know the Bobcats, Heat or Bucks could beat the Celtics in theory. But application is so much harder in the NBA. The Celtics can’t win series against the Cavaliers and Magic. It looks like the Hawks finally have their number too. But a lower seed without homecourt advantage just doesn’t seem likely to occur in this NBA climate. Can the Bobcats and Bucks score enough to actually knock off the Celtics? Can Jermaine O’Neal’s knee be duct-taped enough together to provide a defensive safety valve for seven grueling games? We don’t even need to ask the question about the Raptors defense because even the people most against Celtic green wouldn’t consider Toronto winning that series.

The Celtics are vulnerable but it’s a different tier of vulnerable than everybody wants. They’re vulnerable to the top dogs in the NBA. They’re not vulnerable enough to the playoff hopefuls. Aside from Toronto, I’d almost guarantee any first round series the Celtics have will end in seven games. And those seven games are going to be exhausting for this fading power.

For now, enjoy the decline of the brief Celtics Empire. Watch the KG video above time and time again. Laugh at how the Celtics’ forced pride is diluting their sense of reality. But don’t trick yourself into thinking they won’t move onto the second round of the playoffs this season.

They won’t exactly be facing Kevin (aggressive expletive) Durant.

After last week’s column about the sustainability of shooting, I want to build on that foundation and steer my thought into new directions.

In that piece, I mentioned Derrick Rose’s league-leading field goal percentage on short shots (58.2 percent) and wondered whether that was something he could repeat in years to come.  While we’re not quite ready to make projections from the raw data, I was curious about a related question:

Do rookies tend to improve their shooting percentage in their sophomore year?

I touched on this topic before in this space but not across all the shot locations.  So, Rose has experienced an enormous jump on shots within ten feet and I wondered if that was an outlier compared to the rest of the rookies/sophomores in the sample.  So I gathered all the rookie/sophomore seasons of the past four years (the span of the Hoopdata set) and set some qualifiers.  To reduce variability in the analysis, I set the sample frame to 50 shot attempts in the shot location in both their rookie and sophomore season.  That way, Steve Novak can’t bring the noise.

I have some reservations about setting the bar at that level because quite honestly, 50 shot attempts isn’t a whole lot but I also recognize that, by and large, rookies rarely get the opportunity to get that many shots in the first place.  Set the bar too high and the chart looks at the development of Kevin Durant and Joakim Noah.  As a result, two biases exist here.  A selection bias arises because we’re only looking at the players who got enough run to get their shots and secondly, a survivor bias exists because players who shot poorly in their rookie year might not shoot enough to qualify in the second.  But nonetheless, this situation is more desirable than analyzing a couple of data points.

Just as I did in the last article, I charted each player’s year 1 and year 2 field goal percentages from the following Hoopdata shot locations: at rim (layups, dunks, and tip-ins), short (<10 feet), mid (10-15 feet), long (16-23 feet), and three-pointers.  In this study however, the year 1 will always be the rookie season and year 2 will be the sophomore season.

Let’s take a look at how rookies performed on at rim shots in their first two years in the league.  Did rookies get better with a year of NBA play under their belt?

Of the 65 rookies in the sample, 32 improved their at rim field goal percentages the following year as you can see by the data points below the gray diagonal.  Surprised?  Well, before you conclude that all rookies will get worse at finishing layups in the following year, remember that 33 vs. 32 is not a convincing defeat by any means.  The average change in field goal percentage was actually a positive 0.006 or 0.6% but insignificantly so.

Still, for those expecting an general increase in ability to finish at the rim, this is a bit of a surprise.  When we break this down into positions, we find that 9 of the 13 point guards improved from rookie to sophomore year which is the best improvement of the five positions of the floor.  Interestingly enough, only 12 of the 27 big men in the sample (power forwards and centers) experienced an uptick in their success rate at the basket.

How about short shots? Where does Derrick Rose’s mark fit in?

In this sample, Derrick Rose and Rajon Rondo improved the most. Where can you find them? Rondo’s the southernmost point on the chart whereas Rose finds himself furthest east.  There were only 21 rookies in this sample so the conclusions are quite limited.  For what it’s worth, two-thirds of this sample improved into sophomore year but with such a small sample size, that’s easily due to random chance. In my study last week, I found that year-to-year correlations were the most random in this zone.  Brandon Roy and O.J. Mayo, both shooting guards (or hybrids in many situations) both declined in sophomore year from this range.  This area generally has the least focus among basketball players so a decline usually is nothing more than a tiny dent in production.

Moving on to the 10-15 feet shot which we can the mid-range.

With only 16 players who fit the criteria in this shot zone, the relationship looks to be completely random.  Some improved and some regressed.  LaMarcus Aldridge went from a 29.0 FG% shooter from the 10-15 foot range in his rookie year to one of the most successful mid-range shooters in the game in his second year.   His struggles in his rookie year didn’t discourage him as only six players took more shots from this area per game the following year and his field goal percentage soared to 45.3 percent.  Teammate Brandon Roy didn’t enjoy the same success, however. He shot a blistering 45.4 percent his rookie season and fell to 31.3 percent in his sophomore campaign.  Unfortunately, the tiny sample size doesn’t allow us to extrapolate much from this area.

What about long twos? Have sophomores shoot better just inside the three point line?

Like the mid-range shot, sophomores in this sample don’t seem to exhibit improvement on long twos.  Of course, this area of the floor probably is most sensitive to the biases since not every player possesses enough of this shooting skill to qualify.  Especially with bigs, the mid-range jumper is work in progress for the first couple years in the league.

Among the 11 shooting guards in the sample, only Randy Foye and Ronnie Brewer experienced more success on their long two jumper in their sophomore year. Aaron Afflalo, O.J. Mayo, Brandon Rush, Daequan Cook, and Eric Gordon all regressed following their rookie campaign.  In the case of Mayo, it was a regression to the mean after a sparkling rookie campaign where he shot 45.2 percent from 16-23 feet.  He’s about league average this season.  He’s not an exact comparable for Ty Lawson who’s shooting 48 percent this year but he should take note as most of the rookies who shot better than league average (40%) on long twos in their rookie year, ended up below the norm in year two.

How about the three-point line?  This is just the past four years but I’m sure longer studies have been done before.

Again, lots of randomness here but that’s to be expected with only 30 observations.  Half of the group declined and half improved their downtown shot.  The most stark correction came from Michael Beasley who shot 61.1 eFG% in his rookie year but just 40.2 eFG% this season.  This must be evidence of the curse of the No. 2 pick, right?  Actually, no.  2007 No. 2 pick Kevin Durant improved his three-point shot from 43.1 eFG% to 63.3 eFG% from year-1 to year-2.  That was a quick disposal.

So what did we learn? As much as we want to believe that “one year under the belt” theory, it hasn’t shone through in this crop of rookies.  If anything, we observe a regression to the mean as opposed to uniform improvement. There’s plenty more work to be done in this area and this certainly doesn’t wrap up the rookie to sophomore growth analysis.   As it is with a lot of basketball studies, we need more data to draw stronger conclusions.  The limited scope of shot location data keeps our extrapolation to a minimum.   But nonetheless, if you wonder if Ty Lawson’s 48 percent shooting from long two or Brandon Jenning’s putrid finishing ability are here to stay, you can refer back to these charts to see if past extraordinary rates continued the following year.