ChuckBuck wrote:Holfresh with the predictable lame rebuttal.

Pierce averaged over 4 assists a game for 5 whole seasons before Doc and company arrived.

Better career and better all around player than Me7o ever wishes he could be.

#Factonly

I can also look at career numbers in segments, Melo is the better three point shooter since coming to the Knicks..

mreinman wrote:

holfresh wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:

MaTT4281 wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:Anybody that says Me7o's NBA career is in anyway more accomplished than Paul Pierce is just being a biased homer.

The Truth career actually had 2 stanzas, began his career similar to Me7o as a numbers gunner. Out for self, and buckets, in the 'Toine Walker days.

Once Doc, KG, Jesus, and Rondo came aboard, he sacrificed his offensive game, switched to small forward from 2 guard, became a better facilitator, played much better defense and just became a great teammate overall. He saved his bucket making for clutch time in the 4th quarters of close games. True Knicks fans know this.

There is really no comparison between the 2...maybe young Pierce, but not Paul Pierce from 2008 on.

2008...when Pierce was 31 and playing alongside KG and Ray? He was also the second best player on his team those years.

30 years old. He actually changed who he was as a player. Bought in completely to teamball.

Season       Age  Tm  Lg Pos    G   GS   MP  FG  FGA  FG%  3P 3PA  3P%  2P  2PA  2P% eFG%  FT  FTA  FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV  PF  PTS
2006-07       29 BOS NBA  SG   47   46 37.0 7.9 18.1 .439 2.3 5.9 .389 5.7 12.2 .463 .502 6.8  8.6 .796 0.8 5.1 5.9 4.1 1.0 0.3 3.2 2.6 25.0
2007-08       30 BOS NBA  SF   80   80 35.9 6.4 13.7 .464 1.8 4.6 .392 4.6  9.2 .499 .529 5.1  6.1 .843 0.7 4.5 5.1 4.5 1.3 0.5 2.8 2.5 19.6

Just became a more efficient player, took less shots, higher percentage shots, less turnovers, and the numbers reflect this buying into Doc's system.

Yeah he changed because he was playing amongst three all stars...

uh ... he didnt change. He sacrificed points not smarts. Even you can't spin how melo the player that PP was.

And, TS of course gives more weight to 3 point shots. Can you figure out why?

I'm begging Phil to give Melo a reason to sacrifice..Melo is begging Phil for a reason to sacrifice....Melo told Phil bebfore he resigned that he doesn't want to have to carry the load every night...

holfresh wrote:

mreinman wrote:

holfresh wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:

MaTT4281 wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:Anybody that says Me7o's NBA career is in anyway more accomplished than Paul Pierce is just being a biased homer.

The Truth career actually had 2 stanzas, began his career similar to Me7o as a numbers gunner. Out for self, and buckets, in the 'Toine Walker days.

Once Doc, KG, Jesus, and Rondo came aboard, he sacrificed his offensive game, switched to small forward from 2 guard, became a better facilitator, played much better defense and just became a great teammate overall. He saved his bucket making for clutch time in the 4th quarters of close games. True Knicks fans know this.

There is really no comparison between the 2...maybe young Pierce, but not Paul Pierce from 2008 on.

2008...when Pierce was 31 and playing alongside KG and Ray? He was also the second best player on his team those years.

30 years old. He actually changed who he was as a player. Bought in completely to teamball.

Season       Age  Tm  Lg Pos    G   GS   MP  FG  FGA  FG%  3P 3PA  3P%  2P  2PA  2P% eFG%  FT  FTA  FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV  PF  PTS
2006-07       29 BOS NBA  SG   47   46 37.0 7.9 18.1 .439 2.3 5.9 .389 5.7 12.2 .463 .502 6.8  8.6 .796 0.8 5.1 5.9 4.1 1.0 0.3 3.2 2.6 25.0
2007-08       30 BOS NBA  SF   80   80 35.9 6.4 13.7 .464 1.8 4.6 .392 4.6  9.2 .499 .529 5.1  6.1 .843 0.7 4.5 5.1 4.5 1.3 0.5 2.8 2.5 19.6

Just became a more efficient player, took less shots, higher percentage shots, less turnovers, and the numbers reflect this buying into Doc's system.

Yeah he changed because he was playing amongst three all stars...

uh ... he didnt change. He sacrificed points not smarts. Even you can't spin how melo the player that PP was.

And, TS of course gives more weight to 3 point shots. Can you figure out why?

I'm begging Phil to give Melo a reason to sacrifice..Melo is begging Phil for a reason to sacrifice....

Why did PP sacrifice before the dudes came?

Poor Melo. He has nobody to pass to so he just needs to chuck. so sad!

mreinman wrote:

holfresh wrote:

mreinman wrote:

holfresh wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:

MaTT4281 wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:Anybody that says Me7o's NBA career is in anyway more accomplished than Paul Pierce is just being a biased homer.

The Truth career actually had 2 stanzas, began his career similar to Me7o as a numbers gunner. Out for self, and buckets, in the 'Toine Walker days.

Once Doc, KG, Jesus, and Rondo came aboard, he sacrificed his offensive game, switched to small forward from 2 guard, became a better facilitator, played much better defense and just became a great teammate overall. He saved his bucket making for clutch time in the 4th quarters of close games. True Knicks fans know this.

There is really no comparison between the 2...maybe young Pierce, but not Paul Pierce from 2008 on.

2008...when Pierce was 31 and playing alongside KG and Ray? He was also the second best player on his team those years.

30 years old. He actually changed who he was as a player. Bought in completely to teamball.

Season       Age  Tm  Lg Pos    G   GS   MP  FG  FGA  FG%  3P 3PA  3P%  2P  2PA  2P% eFG%  FT  FTA  FT% ORB DRB TRB AST STL BLK TOV  PF  PTS
2006-07       29 BOS NBA  SG   47   46 37.0 7.9 18.1 .439 2.3 5.9 .389 5.7 12.2 .463 .502 6.8  8.6 .796 0.8 5.1 5.9 4.1 1.0 0.3 3.2 2.6 25.0
2007-08       30 BOS NBA  SF   80   80 35.9 6.4 13.7 .464 1.8 4.6 .392 4.6  9.2 .499 .529 5.1  6.1 .843 0.7 4.5 5.1 4.5 1.3 0.5 2.8 2.5 19.6

Just became a more efficient player, took less shots, higher percentage shots, less turnovers, and the numbers reflect this buying into Doc's system.

Yeah he changed because he was playing amongst three all stars...

uh ... he didnt change. He sacrificed points not smarts. Even you can't spin how melo the player that PP was.

And, TS of course gives more weight to 3 point shots. Can you figure out why?

I'm begging Phil to give Melo a reason to sacrifice..Melo is begging Phil for a reason to sacrifice....

Why did PP sacrifice before the dudes came?

Poor Melo. He has nobody to pass to so he just needs to chuck. so sad!

ChuckBuck wrote:

mreinman wrote:

holfresh wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:Holfresh with the predictable lame rebuttal.

Pierce averaged over 4 assists a game for 5 whole seasons before Doc and company arrived.

Better career and better all around player than Me7o ever wishes he could be.

#Factonly

I can also look at career numbers in segments, Melo is the better three point shooter since coming to the Knicks..

hahahahahah so typical. C'mon ... why do you have to be right? Its not worth sacrificing your integrity.

I know right. I mean it's perfectly okay that Pierce is a better player than Me7o. Numbers and career already proved it.

We just want Me7o to change for the better. Pierce is an excellent career model to aspire for.

What numbers prove it????...Not rebounds, not fg%, not fts%...Pierce average a whopping 0.6 assit per game more than Melo in his career..You are hanging you hat claiming he sacrificed on that??...I have tons of respect for Paul Pierce but let's not ignore what his team record was before and after 3 all stars and a real coach arrived.

mreinman wrote:

CrushAlot wrote:

mreinman wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:

Knixkik wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:Gross....comparing Me7o to The Truth who won a NBA Finals MVP and made it to 2 NBA Finals.

Disgusting comparison.

Look at them as individual talents. Remember, his championship and finals mvp aren't possible without Garnett and Allen. 2 stars. Prior to the celtics adding those 2 players, their careers were very comparable, even with Melo possibly having a slight advantage (to age 31). Remember, there were years Pierce missed the playoffs in the east. But Pierce has had a better career, for the reasons you stated.

Agreed, they were comparable, pre big 3(4).

Pierce 2007-2008 season on, a better all around player than Me7o, for reasons stated in the previous posts.

No matter who they brought in, you still have to play the games.

Kobe had Dwight and Nash before that experiment failed. Barkley went to Houston with Pippen even. No matter what players come in, you have to make it work and Pierce made it harmoniously so, after averaging 25-26 pts/game for his Boston career. He could've easily said, this is my team, you guys make sure I average my 25, but he sacrificed.

again ...

melo never had years like PP did in 2005 and 2006

Celtics won 33 games in 06.

and?

So its possible I guess to have efficient stats with shytty teammates.

You know KnickerBlogger had an interesting discussion on Melo's efficiency a few days ago.

It heats up here..http://knickerblogger.net/knicks-morning-news-2015-08-05/#comment-506576
some key points..

Take this link.
http://bkref.com/tiny/v02Qd

It’s all player seasons of the last 3 years with TS% above 54.5 and pts/36 above 24. Looks like Carmelo Anthony is right there with everyone else. Then sort by TS% or WS, and Melo goes to the bottom with Boogie, Klay Thompson, and 52 year old Kobe Bryant.

Notice that the top slots are all LeBron, Durant, Curry, and Harden. AD also makes his first appearance just outside of those 4.

@143 first off thats a great list. Second there are alot of repeats of names so it makes it look like the list is bigger than it is. There are only 11 unique players on that list of 16 entries. Only Melo, KD, LBJ and Harden are on there more than once. If you sort by FG% harden is dead last.

Your list is a list of elite, so i dont understand the point that you were trying to prove?

Well, first if you’re familiar with Bill James, you’ll know the “make a list” fallacy. Carmelo Anthony looks like an elite scorer depending on how you parse the lines. Why did I arbitrarily draw the line at 54.5% ts% and 24 pts/36? Why not 56.5% and 20 pts/36? Then ‘Melo falls off the list and you get Kyrie Irving and Goran Dragic and Isaiah Thomas, among others.

Second is that even if we draw the lines favorably to Melo, it makes it seem like he’s in the same group as LeBron and Durant. But sort the list and it’s pretty easy to notice the gap between the truly elite and Melo.

Actually, Mike, what you demonstrated is that it’s pretty damn hard to average above 24pts/36 and to have a TS% of over 55%. Only players in the conversation of “elite players” make the list. He is also near the top of that sort in usage and by far the best in turnovers vs. possessions used. He’s near the top in offensive rebounding. So while PER, WS and TS% don’t bear him out so well, other things do.

Also note that his 2 best years are wrapped around last year’s LeBron. Does that mean that at his best, Melo is similar to LeBron’s current level of performance, at a league-leading usage? I’m good with that.

http://bkref.com/tiny/JGjtO

Here’s a search of player-seasons since 2000 of over a 30% with a TS% of .560 or above. It’s a very elite list. The only non-consensus HOFer on that list is Arenas, and maybe Amare.

Change the sort to a TS% below .560:
http://bkref.com/tiny/mlB8e

Quite a few new players show up: Stackhouse, Webber, Baron Davis, Ben Gordon, etc.

So Carmelo is a rare player. That doesn’t make him highly productive.

If anything, that rarity should suggest that a team does not need a high volume scorer to be successful.

Here’s a search of player-seasons since 2000 of over a 30% with a TS% of .560 or above. It’s a very elite list. The only non-consensus HOFer on that list is Arenas, and maybe Amare.

Why 56% and 30%? Why not 56.5%?

I changed it to ts% of 60%, usage of 25% and minutes to 2500. Guess who shows up?

Rk Player Season USG% TS%
1 LeBron James 2012-13 30.2 .640
2 Kevin Durant 2013-14 33.0 .635
3 Kevin Durant 2012-13 29.8 .647
4 LeBron James 2009-10 33.5 .604
5 James Harden 2014-15 31.3 .605
6 Dirk Nowitzki 2006-07 28.9 .605
7 Kevin Durant 2009-10 32.0 .607
8 LeBron James 2013-14 31.0 .649
9 Stephen Curry 2014-15 28.9 .638
10 Amare Stoudemire 2007-08 28.2 .656
... http://knickerblogger.net/knicks-morning-news-2015-08-05/#comment-506604

PPP 2012-2014

FWIW
Melo: 1.13
Harden: 1.13
Durant: 1.20
James: 1.22

When turnovers are considered, Melo is not “slightly above average”!! Not even close.

The most efficient offense in the NBA the last 3 years is the Los Angeles Clippers. They have averaged 1.12 points per possession. Melo averaged 1.13 prior to last year, according to NBA wowy.

Melo is more efficient on the possessions he uses than the most efficient offense in the league.

The league average PPP the last three years is about 1.06, (an offensive rating of 106). Melo is worth 7 more points per 100 possessions than the average offensive player.

That’s WAY above average. It’s not off the charts like Lebron, Durant, and Paul, but it’s at the end of the chart.

1.002, 1.033, 1.032, 1.05, 1.07, 1.03, 1.12, 1.05, 1.06, 1.10, 1.01, 1.05, 1.06, 1.06, 1.055, 1.02, 1.08, 1.07, 1.04, 1.06, 1.09, 1.10, 1.05, 1.09, `1.05, 1.08, 1.087, 1.03

What is Melo’s value to an NBA offense?

Year, +/-, O-Rating
’14-15: +12.5, 107.9
’13-14: +6, 109.4
’12-13: +5.7, 113.4
’11-12: +2.1, 105.5
’10-11:+2.7, 114
’09-10: +4.3, 113.5
’08-09: +7.5, 113.5

When Melo is on the floor, regardless of teammates/synergies etc., you can bank on having a really good offense.

Mike, there is a huge difference (bell curve-wise) between 25% and 30+% usage, you know that. You are actually helping to make my points, which are:

1. Only HOF-level talents are able to maintain a solidly above league-average TS% at the high extremes of usage. Melo is clearly one of those talents, as only he, Bryant, LeBron, Durant, Wade, and O’Neal have done it at least 4 times. This makes him an elite offensive talent, albeit the least efficient in that group.

I won’t argue that Carmelo Anthony is an above average scorer. Very high usage. Above average efficiency. But let’s not pretend he’s in the same category as Bryant, James, Durant, etc. Because if he is, then so is Cousins. And then you don’t really have a group of elite players. Rather you have a group of players that score a lot at a pretty good efficiency.

“…when a player decreases his usage by 1%, his efficiency increases roughly by 0.2 (in offensive rating), while increasing his usage by 1% decreases his efficiency by 0.2.

(http://ascreamingcomesacrossthecourt.blogspot.com/2013/05/usage-versus-efficiency.html)

Over at WaPo’s #FancyStats, I took another look at a question to which I’ve returned to over and over again which is measuring playmaking beyond simply counting assists. I’ve felt like the “Assist Usage” component of True Usage does a decent job of measuring activity, but measuring achievement in terms of decoupling the skills of the passer and shooter have felt pretty intractable for a while. A big stumbling block has been the lack of passing/assist data on missed shots. I’ve bemoaned this a little before, but that one simple addition to SportVU or PBP logs would make all sorts of comparisons possible for both playmaking and individual shot creation.

In any event, there wasn’t room in the Post article for any sort of data-dump, so I figured I’d drop the overall numbers here. Below are the estimated Playmaking TO%, Playmaking Usage and Playmaking eFG% for every player in the league who played more than 2000 possessions with any one team. I’ve found that changing team contexts has a pretty big effect on these types of stats so I’ve purposefully not included season totals for players who switched teams mid season. A few miss the 2k possessions cutoff (Dragic in Miami, Rondo in Boston, etc.)

http://nyloncalculus.com/2015/07/25/scoring-efficiency-by-touch-frequency/

There are lots of different ways of parsing the variables to make for more detailed comparisons, but some measure of usage is probably the most common, as usage implies a great many things about shot locations and defensive attention. However, I thought it would be interesting to try and weave some of the SportVU possession data into this question, looking specifically at half court touches. The NBA’s SportVU player tracking statistics page lists half court touches and points scored per half court touch for each player.

Obviously, those two things are incredibly intertwined. Not every touch is a scoring opportunity and players who handle the ball a lot will have a much lower ratio of points to touches because of their responsibilities for initiating the offense. For example, Pau Gasol and Derrick Rose had nearly identical per game scoring averages last season–18.5 to 17.7. However, Rose averaged nearly 30 more half court touches per game than Gasol which makes comparing their points per half court touch futile.

If we graph the entire league, we can see that the relationship between touch frequency and scoring per touch is fairly strong.

holfresh wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:

mreinman wrote:

holfresh wrote:

ChuckBuck wrote:Holfresh with the predictable lame rebuttal.

Pierce averaged over 4 assists a game for 5 whole seasons before Doc and company arrived.

Better career and better all around player than Me7o ever wishes he could be.

#Factonly

I can also look at career numbers in segments, Melo is the better three point shooter since coming to the Knicks..

hahahahahah so typical. C'mon ... why do you have to be right? Its not worth sacrificing your integrity.

I know right. I mean it's perfectly okay that Pierce is a better player than Me7o. Numbers and career already proved it.

We just want Me7o to change for the better. Pierce is an excellent career model to aspire for.

What numbers prove it????...Not rebounds, not fg%, not fts%...Pierce average a whopping 0.6 assit per game more than Melo in his career..You are hanging you hat claiming he sacrificed on that??...I have tons of respect for Paul Pierce but let's not ignore what his team record was before and after 3 all stars and a real coach arrived.

SMoked!!!

Rk            Player From   To    G    MP  PER  TS% 3PAr  FTr ORB% DRB% TRB% AST% STL% BLK% TOV% USG%   OWS  DWS    WS WS/48  OBPM DBPM BPM VORP
1    Carmelo Anthony 2004 2015  830 30266 21.2 .546 .162 .385  6.0 14.6 10.3 15.9  1.5  1.0 11.1 31.8  58.1 27.9  86.0  .136   2.5 -1.2 1.4 25.6
2        Paul Pierce 1999 2015 1250 44372 20.1 .570 .291 .447  2.8 16.3  9.6 19.1  2.0  1.3 13.2 27.2  87.7 61.4 149.1  .161   3.0  0.5 3.5 62.0

yellowboy90 wrote:Regarding Melo and Paul Pierce. Pierce was better point blank.

exactly ...

and we all know that Melo is a great player and a HOFer but we also know that he could be and needs to be so much better to be considered elite.

mreinman wrote:

yellowboy90 wrote:Regarding Melo and Paul Pierce. Pierce was better point blank.

exactly ...

and we all know that Melo is a great player and a HOFer but we also know that he could be and needs to be so much better to be considered elite.

That's what all of us "lovers" have been trying to preach this whole time.

For Me7o to take it another level, take it another notch, while he's been in Blue and Orange. Make his teammates better, make that extra pass, play some D for once.

All we ever hear are excuses....Roster this, coach that, system this, wahhhhh wahhhhhhh

Shut the phuck up and play!

mreinman wrote:

yellowboy90 wrote:Regarding Melo and Paul Pierce. Pierce was better point blank.

exactly ...

and we all know that Melo is a great player and a HOFer but we also know that he could be and needs to be so much better to be considered elite.

Very true. If he wants to be a top 10 player he has to play smarter.

Side note.

If you read the efficiency article I posted, take a look at where your favorite player(Westbrook) ranks.