The positional revolution has gained a full head of steam over the past month.  Although talk of tearing down the walls of traditional positions has been going on for years, Drew Cannon’s brilliant article at Basketball Prospectus blew the discussion wide open and sparked a slew of articles from the game’s brightest writers and analysts.

Definition is the root of the issue.  What is a point guard? Besides height, what differentiates a power forward from a center?  Why do we call a player who can’t shoot a lick a shooting guard?

Here’s an attempt at quantifying those definitions from the shot selection standpoint. Using Hoopdata.com’s player shot location data, I’ve calculated the average shot location shares of each position (the positional designations on Hoopdata come from dougstats.com).

We want to outgrow the conventions of traditional positions but let’s see if we can observe divisions in the first place.  Hoopdata breaks down shot types into 5 buckets: at the rim (layups and dunks), <10 feet, 10-15 feet, 16-23 feet, and 3-point shots.  Here’s how the five positions look, in terms of percentage of shots in each location.  So what does a point guard’s shot makeup look like compared to a shooting guard? Where do we see the biggest disparities between positions?

Here we see that the typical point guard attacks the basket more than the typical shooting guard and then the basket attack trends upward with the following positions.  Most point guards work out of the pick-and-roll which lends itself to penetration to the rack or dishes to the rolling big.  They’re getting almost all of their at rim baskets on penetration as opposed to bigs who can get layups/dunks from offensive rebounds.

Looking further, we see that the mid-range jumper is the least populated area for shots but there isn’t much distinction between positions in the mid-range.  What’s also interesting is that point guards, shooting guards, small forwards, and power forwards all shoot the long two in similar doses, with centers only taking about 18 percent of their overall game from here.

From the 3-point line, it makes sense that shooting guards launch the most from deep and the centers the least.  Nothing too ground-breaking there.

Perhaps what’s most interesting is how similar point guards and small forwards are in their shot palette.  The blue and green bars are nearly identical with each other from zone to zone.  Below is the graph in table form along with the assisted percentages and field goal percentages from each shot location, courtesy of Hoopdata.

There’s plenty of good stuff in the table above but for now, let’s dig deeper and see which players get classified in a particular position but shoot nothing like their traditional brethren.  To get there, I calculated each player’s z-score (which, in simple terms, calculates the magnitude of deviation from the norm) compared to the positional mean from each shot location.  Then, I took the absolute value of those z-scores and summed each location together for the Zsum to get the final aggregated score.  Note: I only looked at players who averaged 20 MPG and played 20 games last season.

In the first table below, we find that Miami Heat point guard Carlos Arroyo deviates the most from the shot selection of a traditional point guard.  In particular, 65.3 percent of his shots come from long twos and he barely attacks the basket or launches from downtown.  His z-scores total to 8.19 which is the highest sum of the point guard bunch.  Perhaps is good that he doesn’t attack the basket, as he only converts on 47.8 percent of his tries which is far below new Charlotte Bobcat Shaun Livingston’s 71.4 percent success rate.

The first table displays the “Least Alike” players in the group and the next table shows the “Most Alike” which tells us who are the most protypical point guards in their shot selection.  Orlando point guard Jameer Nelson tops that list.  I’ll save the commentary for a later date but I found this to be a pretty interesting exercise.  Which players are positional contrarians? Find out below. (My apologies for the blurriness).

SHOOTING GUARDS

SMALL FORWARDS

POWER FORWARDS

CENTERS

Lost in the whole Free Agentpalooza of 2010 was the fact that the party could have been bigger. Outrageously bigger.

With the cap-slashing climate over the past few years, the writing was on the wall well before the calendar reached July 1, 2010: this class of free agents were due for an enormous payday.  Seeing the formation of the storm on the horizon, organizations wisely arranged meetings with their imminent 2010 free agents and their representation in effort to prevent their prized players from hitting the market at all.  The plan? Sign them to a contract extension.

Contract extensions can be mutually beneficial; the player receives job security  from the team and the team gets the player at a discount.  The latter part of the deal isn’t guaranteed by any means but the team doesn’t have to compete with other bidders to sign their player long-term.  And that exclusivity is a huge advantage for teams.  But how can we quantify that advantage?

Let’s compare some contracts.  Of course, every free agent’s situation is different but to responsibly compare apples to apples, let’s examine the 2006 draft class whose rookie scale contracts were generally due to expire after the 2009-10 season, allowing them to become free agents this past summer.

First, the guys who cashed in early.  Can you imagine if Brandon Roy, Rajon Rondo, and LaMarcus Aldridge joined the free agent sweepstakes? Believe it or not, each of these players could have waited to test the free agent waters but elected to sign long-term with their respective clubs in the fall of 2009.  But they weren’t alone; Andrea Bargnani and Thabo Sefolosha also agreed to contract extensions before hitting free agency.  How much did they sign for? Let’s take a look.

For each player, the first two columns after their name tell us the contract length and dollar amount, with the third column calculating the average salary over that contract. For example Rajon Rondo inked a contract extension with the Boston Celtics in early September 2009 for 5-years, $55 million for an AAV (average annual value) of $11 million.

Then, for each player, I included their 2008-09 Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP09) with the “09″ signifying the year.  I chose 2008-09 to reflect their output before they signed their contract extension.  The WARP numbers are courtesy of BasketballProspectus.com and the brilliant work of BBP author and Indiana Pacers consultant Kevin Pelton.  To be clear, this version of WARP is not his newest version, WARP2, which incorporates an added bonus for players who space the floor with 3-point shooting.  Why? The Basketball Prospectus site has not updated their databases with WARP2 yet so for continuity purposes I opted for the older version.

So, this chart tells us that Rajon Rondo received a $11M AAV contract extension after a 13.2-win season in Boston, meaning he was being paid $0.8 million for each win that he accrued that season.  To be sure, teams pay for future projected performance not past performance, but this provides a quick dollar-value conversion that I’ve outlined in previous articles.

Through some research, I found that teams roughly paid $2.25 million for each win in this past free agency period.  Using that standard, the contracts handed to Rondo, Roy, and Aldridge were incredible bargains for their respective organizations.  Sefolosha received a contract fairly in-line with the going rate and Bargnani’s salary hasn’t quite reflected his production in the eyes of the WARP model (although WARP’s opinion is not unique in the statistical nor the scouting world).

All in all, the players who received contract extensions were paid about $1.4 million per win which is far below the free agent price observed this season.  Rondo undoubtedly would have received a max contract had he tested free agency and a case can be made that Aldridge would have pulled one down as well, given his age and productivity.  They left money on the table for job security, ensuring that they’d be set long-term should a career-altering injury occur in 2009-10 (which happened to Roy to some extent).

But how much money did they leave on the table? To find out, I looked at the going rate for their fellow 2006 draftees who received at least three-year deals in free agency: Rudy Gay, Tyrus Thomas, J.J. Redick, Jordan Farmar, Ronnie Brewer and Kyle Lowry. (The three-year qualifier captures players in the same stratosphere as those worthy of an extension and excludes players like Shannon Brown.)

While these free agent deals aren’t all completely egregious, the free agent premium bears out in this small group with the average price for a win costing $3 million compared to the previous group’s $1.4.  In fact, according to this method, inking an extension gave the parent organization about a 50% discount on the commodity of wins.

The biggest difference? In free agency, it’s nearly impossible to sign a talent like Rondo at a clearance markdown price.  Rondo has nearly four times as much impact on the standings as Rudy Gay but the latter will earn about $25 million more over the next half-decade.

So how are teams able to convince players to sign extensions that are probably below their market value?  Well, it’s not easy.  It’s paramount for an organization to produce a winning attitude from the top on down.  That means not just winning in practice but also in style (right, Dan Gilbert?).  It’s the responsibility of the owner, front office staff, and the coaching staff to make the players feel like there’s no sense to risk losing the professionalism, commitment, and comforts they can enjoy at home.  In other words, make your lawn as green as green gets.

In my previous post here at Hardwood, I shed some light on the biggest bargains in the game last season. Superstars LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Dwight Howard found themselves in the top tier but also some young studs who were still paid on the rookie scale such as Kevin Durant, Rajon Rondo, and Brook Lopez.

To reiterate from that post, I found that teams spent approximately $2.25 million per WARP2 produced in 2010.  So, I converted each player’s WARP2 into a dollar amount by multiplying their production (WARP2) by the price for that production ($2.25M) to calculate a dollar value for their production.  Then, I simply subtracted their salary (source: Patricia Bender’s database) from their dollar value of production to find their net value.  Some players, like Kobe Bryant and Andrew Bynum, were paid a salary that matched their production value. But other players, well, didn’t live up to their pricetag, for various reasons.

Which contracts lead to the biggest loss last season? Last take a look.

Injuries. Injuries. Injuries.

It’s incredibly difficult to project how players will perform six years into the future.  But it’s even harder to foresee how injuries will plague their career down the line.

The cases of Tracy McGrady, Yao Ming, and Michael Redd illustrate the devastating effects that a serious injury can have on a team’s books.  The Rockets were set to receive nearly nothing for their $40 million investments in Yao and McGrady but a midseason deal with the Knicks handed McGrady’s albatross over to Jim Dolan in exchange for long-term cap relief. In general, $40 million equates to about 18 wins above replacement so the Rockets 42-win season becomes even more remarkable considering what they lost due to injury.

Boston’s signings of the O’Neals haven’t received a standing ovation from some fans and analysts largely due to the stigma of the $43.2 million they were owed last season.  At those prices, the O’Neal’s were undoubtedly poor investments by their respective teams but they still contributed about $14 million in on-court value.  Despite the 6-win production from Shaq and Jermaine, the contracts sank $30 million worth of deficit on the books, according to this method.  The Celtics will pay just $6.5 million for their services next year, which amounts to about one seventh their pricetag last season.

McGrady and the O’Neals aren’t the only ones who may go from albatross to asset overnight.  Brad Miller and Zydrunas Ilgauskas will see huge paycuts next season and their salary will more closely mirror their on-court production.

Again, I owe a huge thanks to Kevin Pelton for the WARP2 numbers.  Be sure to get your hands on the invaluable 2010-11 Pro Basketball Prospectus when it comes out in the early fall.