Re: Dr. Jack disses Cs potential and PP

[Kim Malo <kimmalo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 09:22 PM 2/11/2004, Celtic4Hire@xxxxxxx wrote:
>I generally agree with you Kim, but remember also that we were playing 
>playing Baker in  addition to Raef. Walta wasn't seeing the light of day. 
>We had a big guy at the four most of the time until Baker and Raef went 
>down. Unfortunate.....

Fair enough, and look, don't get me wrong about any of this - I'm the one 
usually warning about reading too much into stats because as one of my 
favorite sayings goes, if you torture the numbers enough they'll confess to 
anything <g>. So think of me as an expert torturer and take all of this 
with a large grain of salt.

That being said, we were playing Baker well into January and his rebounding 
productivity gets a bit distorted by three 10+ rebounds games in November 
that were not exactly his norm. However, set a cutoff of Jan 5th for when 
we were still playing Baker (he got a bunch of DNPs and a couple of 
meaningless contributions after then). Compare the period with Baker but no 
Raef to the period before Raef went down and there's still a drop off. In 
fact, it's a slightly larger drop off: 4.4 total boards, which is almost 
exactly equal to Raef's 4.6 RPG average. Some of Raef's loss was offset by 
Mihm getting more minutes, since rebounds are what he does, while the one 
stat that did go up during that period was team rebounds. All of which 
indicates that there was something lost with Raef and it wasn't all Baker's 
playing too that made the difference before then. In fact, the rebounding 
since we lost both Baker has gone up slightly over the time Baker was 
playing but LaFraenz wasn't. Not to early season standards with both of 
them playing well, but with signs of others picking up some of the slack.

And that's without getting into things like minutes, where Baker was 
averaging about 1.5 more RPG while they both played (which was also Baker's 
peak play), but also 10 more MPG, with Raef having about the same 1.5 edge 
in rebounds per 48 minutes.

Now the obvious counter argument to some of this is that we were getting 
Baker lite, with Vin's visible decline starting to be evident around the 
time Raef went down (and if you're into conspiracy theories about some of 
the reasons WHY that decision and its impact on our season might have been 
made then, now that we know there were earlier strikes against Baker....). 
But he had 1 more 10 board game after and a bunch of lower rebound games 
before, so that's at least in part perception over reality, especially 
since I took out the bulk of the DNP games that would really undercut his 
stats.

None of which proves anything really, except I think it justifies the broad 
point that Grande and Max were making, that Raef did play a more 
significant role on the boards, particularly the defensive boards than 
memory might indicate. And therefore so did his loss.

Kim
Yeah, I know. Geek <g>
Next up - Walter.