Friday Bolts – 9.6.13
Ethan Sherwood Strauss of TrueHoop on layups: “Made 58 percent of layups, attempted 478 — Westbrook might be the player whose facility at making layups simply means he gets to the rim a bunch. That’s not entirely fair, though, because Westbrook can and does finish with either hand. You just wouldn’t expect the dynamic point guard to be a whole 12 percent worse on layups than LeBron, given Westbrook’s elite speed and hops. It appears, from the video clips, that Westbrook flies into the lane with more desire than strategy, willing the ball towards what might be the hoop. That’s nitpicking, because, even if Westbrook’s only OK at converting layup attempts, it matters more that he’s creating so many of them.”
The 66ers released their schedule yesterday and included in that is a game in Oklahoma City on Feb. 4. So if you want to see Steven Adams and Perry Jones in person, there’s your chance.
Kevin Arnovitz of TrueHoop writing on the Bucks: “Since Milwaukee struggles to recruit the kind of players who can single-handedly deliver homecourt advantage in the playoffs, that leaves the Bucks with two general directions to follow. They can tread water as a league average team with the hope that, with a break or two, they can add 10-12 wins to their .500 record, join the adult table and continue to build from there. The Indiana Pacers, former team of Bucks’ assistant general manager David Morway, have deployed this strategy in recent years. The Bucks’ alternative is to deliberately place themselves in a position to acquire a collection of high draft picks that could morph into an elite core — the Oklahoma City Model, now a proper noun in the NBA.”
Hakeem Olajuwon thinks KD could benefit from a few lessons from him.
Idea from Brad Humphreys for TrueHoop in stopping tanking: “The entry draft also gives teams market power (monoposony power, in the jargon of economics) because of rookie-scale contracts, which reduce the earnings of players in the first two or three years of their careers. Free agency would benefit these players, in that some of them would clearly earn higher salaries. Also, a significant body of economic research suggests that entry drafts, salary caps and revenue sharing do not have any appreciable impact on competitive balance. This further strengthens the argument that eliminating the draft would not hurt competitive balance in the NBA.”
