Bench

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

I got a tape of the first Chicago game which we lost in the final
minutes.  I have to say that Hoiberg, besides having a nice night
shooting the ball, also must be good friends with the refs. Besides
the final call where he got a foul call for falling down, he also had
a play in the third quarter where he got the ball at the three-point
line, took one dribble, and dunked the ball. Jordanesque? No, he
actually took four huge steps!!  I went back and checked it out in
slow-motion because I didn't believe what I saw. Though I remember
that Robert Parish used to get away with quite a bit of shuffling at
times.

Onto the main topic. I think the current ineffectiveness of the bench
has a lot to do with the change in philosophy from the mass
substitution approach. Under the mass substitutions, you needed five
athletes who could press and fast break. Basically you're not going to
be a good halfcourt offensive team so you build your team differently.

With the current approach, you're giving up some athleticism so you
want to have a better halfcourt offense and run the offense like the
starting unit - based around a star, either Walker or Pierce, at all
times. Say Walker is in. A lot of the offense is based on getting the
ball to Walker and letting him create. The other team is usually
forced to double team, and hopefully he uses his passing ability to
find shooters. You want to complement him with at least one marksman
who can shoot three pointers accurately and get it off given a bit of
room. The first unit actually does pretty well because Anderson and
Pierce can do this as well as create, and Griffin also creates well
off ball rotation. But when you replace Griffin or Pierce with
McCarty, Cheaney, Williams, these guys basically don't give you much
on offense other than spotting up when playing with other
starters. They're just not the best guys for doing this. They can't
always get open shots off quick enough when the defensive rotation is
close. Even though they shoot a decent percentage, I think a
specialist would make a big difference - an outside assassin that
shoots 42% or so that has size to play the 2 or 3. I feel like teams
get away with double teaming our stars in the post. I want a guy who
can punish teams for rotating even a bit too slow. Of course, if you
add a guy like this and play him decent minutes, you are going to
probably only have enough minutes for only one of McCarty, Cheaney,
Williams. The others would then have little value because bench
players that don't play only have value if they are young and have
lots of untapped potential, which you can't say for any of these guys.

So on to trades. I think there's going to be a trade but I don't think
that Walker, Pierce, or Anderson will be involved. Out of the three
big men, Potapenko is affected to a degree by base-year compensation,
I believe. I could see either Battie or Fortson going depending on
which way Pitino wants to go, or even both if we get a center in
return.  In the same package perhaps would go one of McCarty, Cheaney,
or Williams. I guess Williams has the worst contract so we try to move
him but the other team may want one of the others instead. Ellison is
added so that the other team can dump extra unwanted salary on us. We
might include a first-round pick to add value. In return we get a
piece or two to help the team - maybe a center with some combination
of size and athleticism (probably an underperformer with the right
body), or a sharpshooter, or a backup point guard, or some young
developing talent that can sit on the bench for now. The other team
probably gives us a bad contract too, or maybe the guy we get in
return has the bad contract. 

Alex