NBA 2012-13 Season Thread - Crown The Heat!

I'm biased but I put Adelman up with the elite. As far as someone that takes what's in front of him and does the most with it. I mean just look at this track record. He took over for Portland, coached less than half a season and won 14 games and was sub 500 overall. The next year? 59 wins and 5 straight winning seasons. 27 wins Kings team to 8 straight .500+ seasons. The Van Gundy Rockets weren't bad, but he improved their record and had 4 winning seasons.

The Wolves and a brief stop in GS are literally the only two teams in his 24 year career that he's inherited and not had above 500 within 1 year of taking over. That's beyond impressive. And if we hadn't had injury hell these last two seasons it would apply to us too.

So for me: Adelman, Thibs, Carlisle (definitely think he belongs) and Pop. Spoelstra I guess based on success but I don't think he's that great (which I guess is Ambiturner's point). I expect Budenholzer to be highly regarded before too long as well and also think Dwane Casey is a good coach but still too new. Karl in this second tier as well.

Man that's a tiny list even with me adding a couple.

Leadaas_sl said:

If the Cavs select Alex Len tonight, I will shoot someone in the goddamn face.

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Seriously. The hype that still exists around non productive big men is crazy. Noel is theobviousnumber one pick this year. The only other prospect the Cavs should even be contemplating is Porter and that's only under some misguided idea that he'll help more in the short term (which might be true but is piss poor draft strategy).

Biggest surprise to me this year is Zeller slipping. He would have gone top 5 after his freshman season, regressed a tad playing out of position his sophomore year and then this whole deal about him being undersized circulated all over the place. He does kind of have t rex arms but his athletic testing was off the charts and he was very productive in college. He doesn't have quite the same wingspan but if I was to compare him to another player coming out college it would be Aldridge. Now with draft picks who knows if they pan out but Zeller looks like he's slipping down past 9 (unless the Bobcats take him) and you could do a lot worse that late in the lottery.

If he's there at 9 i think he's without question the BPA by a large margin. However, with team need and also the fact that we have to coddle Love, I'm not upset if we end up with KCP or Mccollum. Mccollum seems like a really awesome, intelligent kid that would be fun to root for, but I'm scared of combo guards after Foye. I really like KCP a lot. This is all predicated on Flip not figuring out a way into the top 4 to get Oladipo which is his preference.

NBA draft night is one of my favorite nights of the year.

I'm a bit of a homer being a Maryland alum, but Len was mostly unproductive because the guard play on the Terps last year was not ACC caliber in the least. The point in particular, I believe I read a stat that Howard had the lowest true shot % in ACC history or something crazy. Every team essentially doubled Len the instant he touched the ball and the few games where he was not doubled were the games that he was productive. If you put him on a team with even respectable outside threats I think he'll be a solid player. Whether he should be #1 overall is debatable but with this weak draft its not so bad and I think he'll be a better player than Noel. Noel has absolutely no offensive game besides put backs.

So the advanced stats guys have keyed in on steal rate being one of the few stats you can look at as a real determination for how well a college player will translate to the NBA. When looking at big man, this isn't really that intuitive so most people that either aren't fans of sabermetrics or only have fleeting interest (know what PER is don't dive into it any more) dismiss the idea from the get go.

But if you analyze it a little further I don't think it's that crazy. You aren't comparing things across position so the fact that centers get less steals than guards doesn't matter. You're comparing center steal rates to other centers. And just in general I think it makes sense that steals and intangible things like court vision and anticipation probably go together.

So take that for what it's worth. Disagree that steals matter for big men or agree that there might be something to it. But it is factual that there is a correlation between steal rate and NBA success. It's over 25 years of analyzed data, but maybe it's just a correlation.

Now in regards to Len. His steal rate is historically bad. It's actually the second worst of any player across that entire data set. He grabbed one steal every 120 minutes of college play. For comparison purposes, here's the entire list of players to play at least 1,000 minutes in college and record less than half a steal per 40:



(Credit vjl110 over at CanisHoopus for this data)

The Len fans simply disregard this. "Steals aren't his game" being what is said the most but if you buy the correlation at all he's so historically bad that I wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole. To me it says he's not a very intelligent player. The rest of his stats are middle of the road (these are the ones you can try and explain by his guard play around him but steals isn't one of those) but who knows...maybe he is. Stats don't mean everything.

I'm not making the argument that Len is going to be some amazing player, keep that in mind. I think his ceiling (which he will almost undoubtedly not reach) is probably like 25/12 and realistically I think he'll pan out to be a 15/10 type player. Solid, unspectacular, definitely not a franchise changing talent. I'm not disputing Foggy's point about FG% either, stats are stats, but from an eyeball test Noel just doesn't bring it offensively. Neither does Len for that matter, but I think he has far more potential than Noel. Noel is also far too thin to really be a pivot right now, I guess he could move to the 4 but he might be too skinny there as well.

jeydax_sl said:

Correct me if I'm wrong but Zeller played like a scared little girl in the NCAA tourny. That is against mediocre to good talent. Imagine him playing the most elite players in the world on a nightly basis?

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Who gives a shit? It's comments like these that made people think Harden wasn't worth a max deal or that LeBron would never win a championship. Zeller played 72 college basketball games. You're welcome to base your opinion off 3 of those if you want.