Revenge of the Nerds

I didn’t need this calc to know this to be true

People keep saying Detroit should keep him because he’s young and can still grow, but it’s hard to exaggerate just how bad the drop was in the playoffs

Yeah I saw that too.  Assuming the two columns were comparing regular season and playoff +/-, Duren went from 1.6 to -10.7, for a -12.3 point difference.

Unadjusted on/off in a 20 game sample is pretty worthless.

Duren’s playoff on/off is bad because Detroit’s DRTG is 115 with him on he court and 101 with him on the bench. Their ORTG is actually better with him on.

Why is their DRTG historically great with him on the bench? Because opponents are shooting just 27% on threes in those minutes, which is something teams have virtually zero control over.

If Detroit allowed their usual 37% on threes in those minutes, their DRTG would be 110 without Duren on the court – moving Duren’s on/off from -11 to -2.

small sample size means nothing

That gives more validity to this system

I honestly can’t remember a guy as good as Brown being dragged this hard and I fucking hate the Celtics

Slander mean saying thing that aren’t true.

Slander implies it isn’t true but it is lol.

Yeah, like where did all of this come from? Do people really hate this guy because this sub has been shitting on him for like a week straight now.

This like piling on to a landfill that has been piled onto for a generation. These people can’t help themselves at this point lol. The irony to me is, if anything, the entire discussion actually shows that these analytics may not in fact be all that accurate for certain types of players. They are blind to that somehow.

I don’t think it’s slander, this is a statement of fact.

Jaylen Brown is better than the advanced metrics say he is, but he’s not as good as thinks he is. He’s like the 15th-20th best player in the league but wants to be treated like a top 5 player.

+You sure about this? I never disliked him tbh.

-They called us fat white boys.

+Release the hit pieces.

MVP? More like most volatile and pathetic

SGA proves the stat is pretty good, he was awful in the playoffs for his standards and he was being called a playoff dropper

Especially against the Spurs and having a great game 7 kinda saved his count stats because he had two good games out of 7

Game 1-6 he shot 37% from the field, 26% from three while averaging almost 10 fewer points than he did in regular season

I mean, he definitely was not as good in the playoffs as he was in the regular season

Hell, trade him. OKC could use some picks.

i mean yeah he’s consistently been subpar in the playoffs, the eye test and counting stats show that too

Why is Jayson Tatum 7th then

even in 2021, which is undoubtedly the worst celtics team of the last 10 years, the team was basically as good with him off or on

That’s kinda the point. Brown is getting WAY too much credit for the team’s success.

Then why doesn’t this pan out with Tatum at all?

Partly? Sure. Entirely? That seems unlikely. Tatum has performed well in it, and this has persisted through a coaching change, an entire stylistic change, a Tatum injury, and an entirely turned over roster. Yes, the Celtics have generally been good, but they’re not the only good team, and it’s remained true across what are essentially entirely different situations. 

For 10 straight years seems unlikely, especially when Tatum doesn’t have something similar to browns +-

it could

but it could also be why the celts won despite brown being a negative

I’m not sure where I land, normally the truth is somewhere in the middle with these things

I think Brown is a very talented scorer and the analytics can only be taken so far, but he isn’t a particularly efficient scorer, he turns the ball over, the ball sticks in his hands and the defensive impact might be overstated.

Comparing him to role players is ridiculous, but i think it’s fair to wonder how impactful he is compared to other all nba caliber players and if the raw numbers and accolades match the impact.

Queta and Derrick White had an on-off per 100 possessions of over 9 each. Brown’s was -4.6. Hauser played 25 mins a night for a +2.2.

The argument then becomes pretty simple - the Celtics players outside of Brown are simply significantly better than the eye test/historically terrible all-star/MVP voting tell us.

Even Tatum rehabbing from injury managed +3.8 in his 16 games.

I don’t think the argument is “well hur dur if you removed him would we still win 60? checkmate reddit”. Obviously players who were good last year (e.g. Gonzalez) might be worse in larger roles (someone has to shoot the ball right). I think the fair, still critical, lens, is perhaps “if you replaced him with another similarly paid wing, would the team have performed better or worse?”

They have, many times. A lot of these people are very public without their model works, what it does, where it succeeds and where it has blind spots. You just have to actually go read the writeups, understand the math, etc.

In this specific case, it’s not even a model, it’s literally a counting stat, a box score stat added up over 10 years. This is like asking to prove it if I told you Jaylen averaged 20 ppg over the last 10 years….

As for why, a lot of these people have also talked extensively about this. Believe it or not, analytics guys watch more games than you do, and brown had long been a debate topic in those circles.

Brown is a floor raiser only, a very good one, but that role is historically underrated by on-off models

He isn’t an efficient scorer and has high turnovers relative to role. That’s a perfect recipe for these metrics to not reflect positively on a player.

That’s not what the impact stats say tho.

EPM had Jaylen as worth 8.7 wins more than a replacement level player last season for Boston, which was 30th in the league.

That suggests the Celtics would have been a 47 win team without him last year, which seems fair, that’s about where the Raptors were.

I’d like them to make the argument we’d have been a 60+ win team without him this year

Seriously. Celtics were 41-20 when Tatum returned. If anyone REALLY believes the Celtics were a 40-20 caliber team without Tatum or Brown, they are crazy. Were White and PP suddenly going to average 25 points apiece? Queta gonna turn into a 20 point guy without JB around?

It’s just pure fantasy that people desperately want to be true.

This all mfing day. Thank you

Fellow Knicks fan

It actually made me sad that I couldn’t enjoy the pacers run last year. Everyone was gushing about how fun it was and I’m like fuck these guys to hell. 

This is as coordinated as vultures circling a carcass. Talking heads smell the engagement miles away, nothing more to it imo

I’m convinced PR teams do this to players to tank their trade value and/or contract negotiations.

It reminds me of Luka being called fat for 2 months after being traded from Dallas.

You can’t slander a player by posting a statistic lol

Not co-ordinated lol. The data just shows the same thing regardless of how you dice it up. 2/3/5 year RAPM. Adjusted for luck, shooting, teammate quality. Doesnt matter

Teams basically have to sell out just to contain him inside the paint. This is one reason three-point shooting is such a priority going forward. As soon as doubling Wemby has drawbacks, the Spurs become truly unguardable as a unit

As the guy says, “We all know he is an immensely talented player, but Boston has played better with him on the bench across 10 yrs” 

Like: there’s more to the picture, and also consider this.

It’s not the be-all-end-all, but it’s something. Over the last five years (regular season, no garbage time), the Celtics are +7.9 net rating with Brown on – that’s a really good team. Without him, they’re +12. That’s a great team. That’s a -4.1 swing. Look at the other players. Tatum is +3.1. Derrick White is +4.3. Payton Pritchard is +1. Tatum-on-Brown-off lineups are better than Tatum plus Brown, Brown only or no-Tatum-no-Brown. Looking at Derrick White and Jaylen Brown, Brown-only is the worst by net rating, White-only is the best. I mean, we’re talking about a sample size here of more than 15,000 minutes. At some point, this has to mean something. It’s not just the nerds being mean to JB.

I think this actually shows how underrated KAT is, because usually Brunson starts the 2nd quarter on the bench and KAT is leading the offense.

Sounds right to me. The guy is very boom/bust on the offensive end, and is a traffic cone on the defensive end. This was especially true in last years post season, which is included in this stat.

Also, particularly in the Spurs series, the games went through a predictable pattern of the Spurs starters building a big early lead against the Knicks starters, and then the benches would come out and the Knicks would begin clawing back. Thats obviously going to drag down the on-off for a starter like Brunson.

it matches my eye test

This is so crazy because Jaylen was SO important to the title run 

I don’t trust “scientists” from Kansas, sorry

I think it’s a very predictable backlash to some people (including JB!) putting him in MVP talks that a lot of numbers and common sense indicate he didn’t deserve to be in.

A guy like Stephen A says Jaylen Brown is the most valuable player in the league and people reasonably push back with numbers showing he’s not an efficient scorer, not a great playmaker, and probably an overrated defender at this point.

Unadjusted on/off is such a simple stat and it still confuses people somehow

(The stat he’s showing isn’t RPM or RAPM btw)

These are people that literally don’t play ball or even know about it. Or they are literally stirring up drama for funises

RPM isn’t even a publicly available statistic anymore and hasn’t been for years (all of Wemby’s career at least).