OFFICIAL 2010-2011 NBA PLAYOFFS THREAD : VOL. MOST. ANTICIPATED. PLAYOFFS. EVER?

[SneakerProSr.]

The Dallas Mavericks are the NBA champions.

It still hasn't sunk in yet.

 

[japanair21]

Originally Posted by SneakerPro

The Dallas Mavericks are the NBA champions.

It still hasn't sunk in yet.

It's funny, it really hasn't.

Maybe it's because I'm not over there in Dallas, but it hasn't.

A lot of Mavericks have been quoted on saying they can't really believe it, including Tyson and Dirk.

It's quite surreal. I don't know how to feel.

But still..

 

[seymore cake]

The Bulls fans on RealGm bother the ++%@ outta me... They're obsessed with Monta & OJ as the 2 guard for us.

Just what we need a back court under 6'4"

 

[proshares]

I've been saying Deron --> Dallas

 

[seymore cake]

I fully expected him to end up there once he hit FA, never saw him resigning with Utah or going anywhere else

The Jazz were smart

 

[N41D]

I'll be honest, I'm mildly concerned about what Mark Cuban is going to do this offseason... Even with Chandler, they've gotta be careful...

Everything finally fell into place this year and the chips fell our way, but they need to be smart and not fall in love/overvalue with what got us there.

 

[seymore cake]

Robery Horry's daughter passed... She was 17.

 

[JD617]

LeBron James watched his production fall off the table in the NBA Finals as the Miami Heat lost a shot at the NBA Championship. But which stars saw their playoff production fall even harder than that of LeBron? Which stars elevated their games in the postseason?
Jun 15, 2011 - LeBron James had a really awful 2011 NBA Finals; a popular stat going around the sports radio airwaves claims that no player has seen a points-per-game drop from the regular season to Finals as large as the Miami Heat All-Star did. But for the playoffs on the whole, wasn't LeBron pretty great? He was especially dominant against the Boston Celtics and Chicago Bulls; co-star Dwyane Wade struggled against Chicago, notably, and LeBron carried the Heat to a 4-1 that was a lot tighter than "4-1" would make it seem.

Were LeBron's Finals so bad it tanked his playoff performance altogether? In the narrative, yes. In the data? I'm curious. It'd also be interesting to find out which players elevated their production in the playoffs, and which sunk. If LeBron's overall playoff production did suffer, did he have company? What other stars suffered indignities at the hands of the Second Season?

I used John Hollinger's PER -- not a perfect metric, but one that cleanly adjusts your standard box-score statistics for possessions played and (most importantly) efficiency -- to compare regular season performance to playoff production for all players who received at least 100 minutes in the postseason. (That'd be 123 players.)

Here are the results, with the Top 5 Sinkers and Top 5 Risers plus the top 20-or-so playoff performers called out.



You can tell by the linearity of the data that most players performed roughly as well during the playoffs as they did during the regular season. The few major outliers -- nearly all of which are on the Risers and Sinkers lists -- are the exceptions; the standard deviation for change in PER was 3.58, which means about two-thirds of the players had a playoff PER with 3.58 points of their regular season PER. The average change in PER was -1.75.

Some players, of course, saw their PER drop much more precipitously than that. At the head of the list is, unfortunately, the New York Knicks' Amar'e Stoudemire, who was injured for much of his first-round series against the Celtics. Amar'e was a star-level performer during the regular season, with a PER of 22.7. In the playoffs, that dropped to 10.7, which is right around replacement level. Amar'e gutted out 134 playoff minutes, but he didn't help the Knicks too much as they were swept out of the postseason. Only three other stars (regular season PER over 20) saw their playoff PER drop at least five points: Al Horford (-7.4), Tim Duncan (-6.4) and Pau Gasol (-6). Stoudemire's PER dropped 12 points.

The Orlando Magic's Ryan Anderson had a really terrible series against the Atlanta Hawks, and Glen Davis was simply awful for the Celtics. (The only players with worse PERs in the playoffs: defensive roleplayers Jason Collins and Omer Asik, couldn't-buy-a-bucket Wilson Chandler and The Mike Bibby.) Nazr Mohammed and Tony Allen are interesting cases; both are primarily defensive contributors, but had solid PERs in the regular season. Whatever production their teams were used to disappeared in the playoffs, though. Allen certainly struggled on offense despite an otherwise magical run for Memphis.

Those are the major sinkers. But who elevated their game in the postseason? The biggest riser was none other than Greivis Vasquez, a rookie who played a little more than 10 minutes a game for the Grizzlies in both the regular season and playoffs. In the regular season, Vasquez shot poorly and was a turnover machine. In the playoffs, he was an efficient stud, one of the better point guards in the league. Watch out Mike Conley!

Nick Collison, like teammate Mohammed, is primarily a defender, but he shot inordinately well during the playoffs and was a killer on the offensive glass. Kirk Hinrich shot well against Orlando, too, and limited turnovers to a bare minimum. But his placement on the Risers list is more a function of how awful he'd been with the Hawks during the regular season.

Chris Paul is the story of this study. A veritable superstar during the regular season (23.7 PER, sixth in the NBA), he rose his game to another level in the Hornets' first-round series against the Lakers, putting up a PER of 28.9 (No. 1 with a bullet in the postseason; Wade was No. 2 ... with 26.3). He only got in six games, but CP3 was the MVP of the first round, and with any semblance of a supporting cast, it could have been New Orleans in the Finals. Look at it this way: you know how otherworldly Dirk Nowitzki was all playoffs long? He had a PER of 25.2. The difference between Playoffs CP3 and Playoffs Dirk is about the difference between Regular Season Dirk and Regular Season LaMarcus Aldridge. It's huge, considering how wonderful Dirk was.

Jason Terry is another player who played out of his mind in the playoffs, only he did it for 21 games, raising her PER from a solid 15.9 in the regular season to a star-level 20.3 in the playoffs. The Mavericks don't win the championship without J.E.T. raising his game. You want to know why so many of us picked against Dallas again and again? Because Regular Season Dallas doesn't win the title. The team played much better in the Second Season than they did during the regular season.

Ah, but what of LeBron? Where does he fall on the continuum? Well, you probably spotted him the graphic. He's up there with the league's best regular season PER (27.3), and with the No. 6 playoff PER (23.7). Plenty of players fell harder in the playoffs, stars included (the aforementioned Stoudemire, Horford, Duncan and Gasol, plus Russell Westbrook, Lamar Odom, Josh Smith and Carlos Boozer). But LeBron's fade sticks out, especially when you consider the sinking came almost completely in the Finals. James wasn't alone in seeing his playoff production dip, not by a long shot. But the sinking was dramatic and noteworthy, and it's something only different results in the future will erase.

Link

 

[pmatic]

Kings got put on blast. 

Perhaps Antoine Wright is just disgruntled though.

"I had an issue with one of the coaches and my mother," said Wright, who was with the then-Mavericks assistant Elie and Kings coach Paul Westphal in Dallas from 2008-09 as a key reserve. "Mario Elie. I'll say his name because I had a history with him. We had just lost a game. It was over the holiday, Thanksgiving holiday, and my mother was in town and in the [team] family room [at Power Balance Pavilion in Sacramento]. She came up to Mario Elie, and said, 'I'm Antoine Wright's mom. Can I have a picture with you?' My mom is a fan of the game, a big fan of Mario Elie, and he said, 'No, I'm with my family.'

"We're a team now, so I came into practice [the next day] and told everybody, I said, 'When we go into film, I'm just going to put Mario on blast.' So I walk in last, and I come in through the front and Mario is in the back, and I said, 'Man, you know what? That's foul what you did to my mom. All she wanted was a picture. Everybody in this room would have took a picture with your mom if she asked, or anybody else's mom in this room. That's probably why we don't have any team chemistry.'

"My rift, really, with the organization was that I don't think they prepared the guys enough to win basketball games," Wright said. "We were probably the only team in the NBA that didn't have a scouting report. How do you expect a young team to go out and carry a game plan? Every team I've been on, they give you a scouting report on every guy on the team, a couple paragraphs about each guy before you go out there and play against him.

"Coming on the court before the game was chaos -- no structure whatsoever, and we kind of had a laid-back coach. Westphal was pretty laid back, and with a group of young guys, you've got to have somebody who comes in and disciplines them."

Wright wasn't even close to done yet.

"I'm not going to throw any of their players under the bus, but one of the main players who was a big part of our team, his attitude was really, really bad -- I'm pretty sure you can figure out who that guy is," he said before confirming that he was speaking of then-rookie forward-center DeMarcus Cousins. "Tyreke [Evans] had a pretty good attitude. His work ethic wasn't great, but he's a good young player. I believed in him completely. I just don't think the coaches did enough to prepare us to win games."

Link

 

[kevin cleveland]

Yeah, Chris Paul is really good.

 

[jd214]

Originally Posted by Proshares

I've been saying Deron --> Dallas

I've been saying the same thing for about two years

, When J.Kidd retires they might bring him in

Chris Paul should go to the Knicks, Dude really doesn't have a future in New Orleans.

 

[seymore cake]

The Heat extended an offer to Rio.

 

[proshares]

Originally Posted by Nowitness41Dirk

I'll be honest, I'm mildly concerned about what Mark Cuban is going to do this offseason... Even with Chandler, they've gotta be careful...

Everything finally fell into place this year and the chips fell our way, but they need to be smart and not fall in love/overvalue with what got us there.

You gotta think they don't want to give out too many long term deals, they're looking at 2012 as well.  Do you give Tyson or JJ a multi-year deal?

 

[nicedudewithnicedreams]

Originally Posted by PMatic

Kings got put on blast. 

Perhaps Antoine Wright is just disgruntled though.

He just salty that he got waived. And now plays in China.

But I mos def agree that a new coach would do wonders for the team. A coach that doesn't coddle Tyreke so much. I mean, Cousins, can definitely come out the better player and he gets chewed up over every mistake.

 

[hood17]

Originally Posted by Seymore CAKE

The Heat extended an offer to Rio.

I'm wondering who will pay for him.

Hopefully JJ and Tyson can get contracts where it won't hurt the Mavs and both of them can be there for what 2-3 years? And what do they offer Caron.

 

[mronegative]

It's crazy seeing Red Auerbach .... why am I watchin the '87 draft on NBAtv?

 

[japanair21]

Deron Williams is a pipedream IMO, I'd rather get our guys that won us a championship locked up, instead of banking on someone who might not even come.

When was the last time we signed a huge FA?

The biggest FAs we've signed in the past 10 years?

Terry and Marion.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

^Nah I'm pretty sure ya'll traded Antoine Walker for Terry

 

[N41D]

Originally Posted by Proshares

You gotta think they don't want to give out too many long term deals, they're looking at 2012 as well.  Do you give Tyson or JJ a multi-year deal?

I think a lot depends on the money and how long the market dictates...

If I'm them, I'm very cautious about giving out anything that extends much past what Dirk has now... When he's done, they need to be ready to do a quick rebuild. The CBA could help a load if they are able to dump Haywood...

I honestly don't think I'd give Chandler what they gave Haywood, but that's what the market is going to dictate he gets... And on Barea, I honestly have no idea what to expect him to get... But I'm almost positive it'll be more than I personally value him at. He's never going to be a starting point guard on a contender... I think a lot there depends on how much you still like Roddy or if you feel like you can go get a guy like Josh Selby in the draft...

 

[japanair21]

Originally Posted by rck2sactown

^Nah I'm pretty sure ya'll traded Antoine Walker for Terry

You're right. My bad.

So Shawn Marion.

Can't think of anyone else huge we outright SIGNED.

And pretty much everyone (from Chandler, to Barea, to Cardinal, to Caron) has said they'd like to come back if the CBA dictates it, so we'll probably dish out a lot of cash this summer on these cats, as long as the CBA allows it.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

Even with Dirk ya'll traded for him on draft day

 

[japanair21]

Yep, either that, or drafted.

No big FA has ever signed here.

Not at least during the Dirk era.

Also, I fully believe everything Antoine Wright says. When he was on the Mavericks for his short stint, I always respected the guy, and he always seemed to have a good attitude, never heard a bad thing about the cat (other than his play sometimes), but never a negative energy on the team.

So it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that from him.

 

[N41D]

Long-term deal for a 30 year old center with a history of injuries and up-and-down performance... Scary.

Not something I'm particularly excited about doing with a team that's on the verge of a rebuilding job.

 

[Deleted member 38182]

Meh I kinda believe him, but I heard he was just as disgruntled in Toronto. Whatev that guy is playing in China for a reason

 

[japanair21]

Originally Posted by Nowitness41Dirk

Long-term deal for a 30 year old center with a history of injuries and up-and-down performance... Scary.

Not something I'm particularly excited about doing with a team that's on the verge of a rebuilding job.

Well, definitely is something that might worry you, but he had a relatively healthy season while busting his +** since LAST summer with Team USA, and he was good all throughout the Playoffs.

The best Center in this teams history and we're already about to let him go? I don't think so.

Tyson will be locked up, he's the main priority, over Barea, over Butler, over anyone. May the other pieces fall into place however they will. It's a pretty common consensus that Chandler was the difference that put us over the top this year.

DUST Chip.