Re: Sporting news article on Pierce

[Alexander Wang <awang@MIT.EDU>]

I agree with the part where you say that Antoine is not going to become 
Kevin Garnett or Chris Webber. But there's a lot of room between those 
all-NBA superstars and the shoddy basketball player you describe in your post.

At 10:32 AM 8/3/01, Berry, Mark  S wrote:
>What about the 41
>percent shooting for a power forward? The complete and utter inability
>(unwillingness) to play physically and get to the free throw line? The
>continued reliance on the 3-point shot when he only this season shot even a
>semi-respectable percentage and when he knows those shots take the team's
>best rebounder out of rebounding position? The assists? Antoine dominates
>the ball, by demand. He hasn't gotten along with any of the Celtics'
>admittedly below-average point guards during his career, probably because
>Antoine's idea of offense seems to be to give him the ball at half-court and
>let him either shoot a 3 or drive to the basket. In short, the numbers are
>deceiving, and worse yet, you get the feeling that Antoine is satisfied with
>the numbers.

I agree that the numbers are deceiving, but I have a different 
interpretation on most of them. A key principle of stats are that they're 
not scalable. If someone shoots 50% FG and scores 5 ppg, that doesn't mean 
you can give him six times the shots and he'll be a 50% FG shooter with 30 
ppg. More likely he won't even be able to get that many shots off, and his 
FG% will drop close to zero if he really has to take the shots. I've read 
arguments about how Iverson doesn't help his team because of his poor FG% 
and they're missing this key point.

It's also important to separate 2 pt FG% from 3 pt FG%. Antoine shot 44% 
from 2 pt range, which isn't stellar but is a lot better than 41%. Let's 
use this number from now on when we complain about his offensive inefficiency.

Finally you have to take into account the context of the team around the 
player. A little known fact is that Antoine shot 47% from 2 pt range in the 
1999-2000 season, because he butchered his overall percentage with poor 3 
pt shooting that year. How come he shot that well? I actually think that 
the explanation is Kenny Anderson. Two reasons: First, as annoying as 
Kenny's point guard play is, he's the only PG on our team that actually has 
any court vision. Some of those 5 apg that he had were nice passes to 
Antoine that gave him very high percentage shots. Second, Kenny can 
actually score a bit, which meant that Antoine didn't have the burden of 
trying to score 23 ppg.

1. Reliance on the 3 pt shot: Antoine shoots a good percentage, period. 
Shooting 33% from 3 pt range gives you one point a shot, shooting 50% from 
2 pt range gives you one point a shot. There are side effects that you 
mention and I agree with: he doesn't get to the line shooting 3's. He's not 
in position to rebound offensively. On the other hand, he needs to shoot 
the 3 to protect Pierce down low.

And 37% is a high enough percentage to justify a lot of side effects. The 
fact that he can get off as many 3 pointers as he can at that percentage is 
a positive, not a negative. Reggie Miller actually shot the same percentage 
as Antoine. Is it because Miller's accuracy is the same? No, the reason is 
because Miller has to scratch and claw to get every attempt. He'd love to 
get more attempts at the same percentage. The reason teams don't shoot more 
3 pointers given their higher percentage is due to scaling effects: they 
won't be getting high percentage opportunities.

One negative side effect in general about shooting tons of 3's is that they 
are higher variance shots (in the technical sense of the probability 
distribution of points). Bad teams want higher variance, good teams don't. 
We're going to want to reduce our volume of 3's once we're better than a 
.500 team but until then, bombs away.

2. His low 2 pt percentage: As I noted above, he shot a decent percentage 
when he actually had a healthy Kenny for a whole season. I'm not saying 
"give Kenny an extension" here. But his low percentage is at least 
partially explained by having to initiative the offense. He's rarely on the 
receiving end of a good assist. And there's the fact that he's surrounded 
by a bunch of offensive incompetents (everyone but Pierce) so that if he 
and Pierce don't combined for 45 points, the team probably loses. Of 
course, this team-induced ballhogging probably fits his somewhat selfish 
personality well.

Now, hopefully with the addition of some credible offensive talent in Joe 
Johnson and maybe Kedrick Brown, and the return of Kenny Anderson (maybe), 
Antoine can cut down his bad shots, receive some assists, and shoot a 
higher percentage - maybe even higher than the 47% from 99-00.

3. His assists: you can't just disregard them because he was the primary 
initiator of the offense. Just because someone fills a role where certain 
production is expected doesn't mean it's not valuable. If he takes over 
this role, he allows us to play someone at PG that doesn't fit this 
traditional role. For instance, you can play $1.4M point guard Milt Palacio 
who gives you decent defense because he doesn't have this pressure on him. 
Again, I'm hoping that we get a real point guard some point down the line 
but his passing and ballhandling is valuable nonetheless.

Now, I agree with much of the rest. His lack of commitment to All-Star 
conditioning is frustrating. His defense is a definite liability for our team.

I don't know if there's clear evidence that he's satisfied with his game, 
like you seem to perceive. We haven't heard much this offseason about his 
work with Tim Grover since that initial mention, which makes me really 
curious. And he has made gains in various areas in recent seasons.

Much of his play last season was dictated by team needs - the additional 
scoring, the assists, 3 point shooting. My hope is that with the 
composition of the team changing - Joe Johnson, perhaps the return of Kenny 
Anderson - that his game will improve in the direction that we all seem to 
agree on: fewer forced shots, higher percentage inside offensive play that 
gets him to the free throw line, more offensive rebounding, creating for 
his teammates but not as the primary distributor. I still think he's going 
to be shooting a lot of 3's because Pierce is going to need a spread 
offense even more than before if he's going to work inside with the zone 
defense.

Alex