3G4G wrote:As I've said early on in this thread...

The team is managing to win "IN SPITE OF MELO'S PRODUCTION" and his impact is being overblown. While I questioned if the pieces here would come together and thus far have been proven wrong...it's all good....I have been correct in that Melo isn't necessarily a player who makes people around him better, it's highly debatable if it's the other way around. I said this even when Amar'e was the main man here. These guys and their talents are more self contained than anything else.

I REST MY CASE!!!!!

1gm sample vs 4gm sample

3G4G wrote:

3G4G wrote:As I've said early on in this thread...

The team is managing to win "IN SPITE OF MELO'S PRODUCTION" and his impact is being overblown. While I questioned if the pieces here would come together and thus far have been proven wrong...it's all good....I have been correct in that Melo isn't necessarily a player who makes people around him better, it's highly debatable if it's the other way around. I said this even when Amar'e was the main man here. These guys and their talents are more self contained than anything else.

I REST MY CASE!!!!!

1gm sample vs 4gm sample

Ummmm WTF?? Didn't the spurs almost beat the Heat without Duncan and Parker, who you say is a great pg??? Take of the blinders. When Jr and Novak wasn't hitting their shots, Melo was stepping up big time. Now that we are hitting those open 3s we were missing, we're going to be even more dangerous. SMH... enjoy the win and stop trying to have an agenda.

3G4G wrote:

3G4G wrote:As I've said early on in this thread...

The team is managing to win "IN SPITE OF MELO'S PRODUCTION" and his impact is being overblown. While I questioned if the pieces here would come together and thus far have been proven wrong...it's all good....I have been correct in that Melo isn't necessarily a player who makes people around him better, it's highly debatable if it's the other way around. I said this even when Amar'e was the main man here. These guys and their talents are more self contained than anything else.

I REST MY CASE!!!!!

1gm sample vs 4gm sample

Im sorry, you just watched this team play a great game carried by Felton going crazy for 27 pts in 3 quarters, making the Heat double and shade to him, making Lebron want to cover him, making tough shots at the end of the clock when we had little going, if this is what you though of:

THEN YOU ARE A FUCKING IDIOT!

DAT DAT DAT FUCKING IDIOT 3G4G.......

Bonn1997 wrote:There are plenty of Melo Kool-Aid drinkers who do "I told you so" posts too.

I'm sorry, but Melo is a knick and with that said I'm going to root for the man and hope he reaches his full potential. What I don't get is how some ppl try and take every opportunity to point out his flaws and when he improve in that area, they go reaching for another one. That's the problem.

yellowboy90 wrote:

Bonn1997 wrote:

yellowboy90 wrote:Here is an oldy but goody

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/why-carmelo-anthony-is-the-ultimate-team-player-and-what-advanced-stats-miss-about-him/

Why Carmelo Anthony Is the Ultimate Team Player (and What ‘Advanced’ Stats Miss About Him)
By NATE SILVER

Carmelo Anthony, whom the Knicks are considering acquiring in a trade, is sometimes thought of as a selfish player. Indeed, he is the center of the Denver Nuggets’ offense: when he is on the court for them, about 30 percent of their possessions end in Anthony shooting, going to the foul line, or committing a turnover. Nor is Anthony much of a passer: over his career, he’s accumulated 3.1 assists per 36 minutes played, considerably less than that of other high-volume scorers like Kobe Bryant (4.6 assists per 36 minutes) or LeBron James (6.2).

In taking all of those shots, however, Anthony has also done something else: he’s made his teammates much more efficient offensive players.

Anthony is a controversial player among those who devote their time to analyzing basketball statistics. The reason is as follows: although he scores a lot of points, he does not do so especially efficiently. His True Shooting Percentage (TS%) – which accounts not just for two-point buckets but also for three-point shots and drawing fouls, neither of which are a particular strength of Anthony’s – is .527 this year and .543 for his career. Those figures are roughly at the league average, which is about .540 in most years.

Anthony’s TS% is also worse than all five of the Knicks’ regular starters, including Wilson Chandler (.579), Danilo Gallinari (.600), and Landry Fields (.611), the men whom he might replace in the lineup. This has led some to argue that Anthony could actually represent a step backward for the Knicks. David Berri, an economist at Southern Utah University who has developed a statistic called Wins Produced that places an extremely high premium on efficiency, told the Wall Street Journal that a Knicks roster with Anthony, Amare Stoudemire and Raymond Felton — but without Fields or Chandler — would win only 29 games per season.

This strikes me as highly implausible: the Nuggets, with a supporting cast that isn’t obviously any better than the one that Anthony would be joining in New York, have won an average of 48 games per season since Anthony’s rookie year, despite playing in the deep Western Conference. They have also been a relatively efficient offensive team. The year before Anthony joined the Nuggets, they ranked dead last in the N.B.A. in offensive efficiency (points scored per possession) on their way to winning just 17 games. But their offensive efficiently ranking shot up to 8th in the league in Anthony’s rookie season and has remained roughly at that level since.

What is missing from formulas like Berri’s is an account of what Anthony does to the rest of the Nuggets. Because he is able to score from anywhere in the court, Anthony draws attention and defenders away from his teammates, sometimes leaving them with wide-open shots. He also allows them to be more selective about the shots that they choose to take, since they know that Anthony can usually get a respectable shot off before the 24-second clock expires if needed.

These effects produce a profound increase in the efficiency of Anthony’s supporting cast when he is on the floor. In the 135 games that he played with the Nuggets, for instance, Allen Iverson’s True Shooting Percentage was 55.9 percent – much better than the 51.2 TS% that Iverson, a notoriously inefficient shooter, posted outside of Denver over the course of his career.

In fact, this is true of almost every Nugget who has played a sufficient number of minutes with Anthony. I identified 16 players who have accumulated least 2,000 minutes with the Nuggets in years when Anthony was on the team, and have also played at least 2,000 minutes in the N.B.A. without Anthony (either because they were playing for a different team or because they were on the Nuggets before Anthony’s rookie season). All but 2 of the players – Marcus Camby and Voshon Lenard – posted a higher TS% playing with Anthony than without him, and on average, he improved his teammates’ TS% by 3.8 points (to 55.0 percent from 51.2 percent).

The effect of a player who improves the rest of his team’s TS% by 3.8 points is extremely substantial: it is works out to their scoring about 5 or 5.5 additional points per game solely on the basis of this efficiency gain. That, in turn, translates into about 15 additional wins per season for an average team, according to a commonly-used formula. This is how Anthony creates most of his value — not in the shots he takes himself, but in the ones he creates for his teammates – and some of the “advanced” formulas completely miss it.

With that said, there is reason to question whether Anthony would have quite the same effect in New York that he did in Denver. With a few exceptions like Iverson, the Nuggets have generally surrounded Anthony with defensively-minded players like Camby who are not especially eager to shoot or who do not do so especially well. The Knicks, by contrast, are a run-and-gun team with lots of good shooters and they already rank fifth in the league in offensive efficiency.

There are some precedents for pairing several high-volume scorers together and seeing them thrive: when Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen joined Paul Pierce on the Celtics, for instance, all three players took fewer shots, but all three were rewarded with a significant increase in their TS%. On the other hand, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh have not seen an increase in their efficiency since joining together on the Miami Heat, even though they are shooting a bit less often.

So there are no guarantees – one would need to consider more carefully exactly how Anthony would integrate into Mike D’Antoni’s offense and exactly which type of shots he’d take. One would also need to think about Anthony’s defense and rebounding, where he is no standout. But upon a more careful examination, the argument that Anthony is a merely average offensive player turns out to be superficial.

Berri had a pretty good response to that article here. At the very least, Silver's argument has to be considered incomplete because he doesn't take into account the confounding factors that Berri identifies.
http://wagesofwins.com/2011/01/17/commenting-on-nate-silver%E2%80%99s-melo-effect/
The TS% changes appear to have more to do with the age of the players (more were in their primes when playing with Melo and before their primes before joining Melo) and the opponents not adjusting to the altitude change. It may be related to George Karl's coaching too and having two highly efficient offensive players (Nene and Billups), which in turn should elevate their teammates.

You can see here that, consistent with the TS% changes having more to do with those other factors, Melo's teammates played about as well with him off as with him on the floor.
http://arturogalletti.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/untitled28.png

Is it happening in NY too?

yellowboy90 wrote:

Bonn1997 wrote:

yellowboy90 wrote:

Bonn1997 wrote:

yellowboy90 wrote:Here is an oldy but goody

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/15/why-carmelo-anthony-is-the-ultimate-team-player-and-what-advanced-stats-miss-about-him/

Why Carmelo Anthony Is the Ultimate Team Player (and What ‘Advanced’ Stats Miss About Him)
By NATE SILVER

Carmelo Anthony, whom the Knicks are considering acquiring in a trade, is sometimes thought of as a selfish player. Indeed, he is the center of the Denver Nuggets’ offense: when he is on the court for them, about 30 percent of their possessions end in Anthony shooting, going to the foul line, or committing a turnover. Nor is Anthony much of a passer: over his career, he’s accumulated 3.1 assists per 36 minutes played, considerably less than that of other high-volume scorers like Kobe Bryant (4.6 assists per 36 minutes) or LeBron James (6.2).

In taking all of those shots, however, Anthony has also done something else: he’s made his teammates much more efficient offensive players.

Anthony is a controversial player among those who devote their time to analyzing basketball statistics. The reason is as follows: although he scores a lot of points, he does not do so especially efficiently. His True Shooting Percentage (TS%) – which accounts not just for two-point buckets but also for three-point shots and drawing fouls, neither of which are a particular strength of Anthony’s – is .527 this year and .543 for his career. Those figures are roughly at the league average, which is about .540 in most years.

Anthony’s TS% is also worse than all five of the Knicks’ regular starters, including Wilson Chandler (.579), Danilo Gallinari (.600), and Landry Fields (.611), the men whom he might replace in the lineup. This has led some to argue that Anthony could actually represent a step backward for the Knicks. David Berri, an economist at Southern Utah University who has developed a statistic called Wins Produced that places an extremely high premium on efficiency, told the Wall Street Journal that a Knicks roster with Anthony, Amare Stoudemire and Raymond Felton — but without Fields or Chandler — would win only 29 games per season.

This strikes me as highly implausible: the Nuggets, with a supporting cast that isn’t obviously any better than the one that Anthony would be joining in New York, have won an average of 48 games per season since Anthony’s rookie year, despite playing in the deep Western Conference. They have also been a relatively efficient offensive team. The year before Anthony joined the Nuggets, they ranked dead last in the N.B.A. in offensive efficiency (points scored per possession) on their way to winning just 17 games. But their offensive efficiently ranking shot up to 8th in the league in Anthony’s rookie season and has remained roughly at that level since.

What is missing from formulas like Berri’s is an account of what Anthony does to the rest of the Nuggets. Because he is able to score from anywhere in the court, Anthony draws attention and defenders away from his teammates, sometimes leaving them with wide-open shots. He also allows them to be more selective about the shots that they choose to take, since they know that Anthony can usually get a respectable shot off before the 24-second clock expires if needed.

These effects produce a profound increase in the efficiency of Anthony’s supporting cast when he is on the floor. In the 135 games that he played with the Nuggets, for instance, Allen Iverson’s True Shooting Percentage was 55.9 percent – much better than the 51.2 TS% that Iverson, a notoriously inefficient shooter, posted outside of Denver over the course of his career.

In fact, this is true of almost every Nugget who has played a sufficient number of minutes with Anthony. I identified 16 players who have accumulated least 2,000 minutes with the Nuggets in years when Anthony was on the team, and have also played at least 2,000 minutes in the N.B.A. without Anthony (either because they were playing for a different team or because they were on the Nuggets before Anthony’s rookie season). All but 2 of the players – Marcus Camby and Voshon Lenard – posted a higher TS% playing with Anthony than without him, and on average, he improved his teammates’ TS% by 3.8 points (to 55.0 percent from 51.2 percent).

The effect of a player who improves the rest of his team’s TS% by 3.8 points is extremely substantial: it is works out to their scoring about 5 or 5.5 additional points per game solely on the basis of this efficiency gain. That, in turn, translates into about 15 additional wins per season for an average team, according to a commonly-used formula. This is how Anthony creates most of his value — not in the shots he takes himself, but in the ones he creates for his teammates – and some of the “advanced” formulas completely miss it.

With that said, there is reason to question whether Anthony would have quite the same effect in New York that he did in Denver. With a few exceptions like Iverson, the Nuggets have generally surrounded Anthony with defensively-minded players like Camby who are not especially eager to shoot or who do not do so especially well. The Knicks, by contrast, are a run-and-gun team with lots of good shooters and they already rank fifth in the league in offensive efficiency.

There are some precedents for pairing several high-volume scorers together and seeing them thrive: when Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen joined Paul Pierce on the Celtics, for instance, all three players took fewer shots, but all three were rewarded with a significant increase in their TS%. On the other hand, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James and Chris Bosh have not seen an increase in their efficiency since joining together on the Miami Heat, even though they are shooting a bit less often.

So there are no guarantees – one would need to consider more carefully exactly how Anthony would integrate into Mike D’Antoni’s offense and exactly which type of shots he’d take. One would also need to think about Anthony’s defense and rebounding, where he is no standout. But upon a more careful examination, the argument that Anthony is a merely average offensive player turns out to be superficial.

Berri had a pretty good response to that article here. At the very least, Silver's argument has to be considered incomplete because he doesn't take into account the confounding factors that Berri identifies.
http://wagesofwins.com/2011/01/17/commenting-on-nate-silver%E2%80%99s-melo-effect/
The TS% changes appear to have more to do with the age of the players (more were in their primes when playing with Melo and before their primes before joining Melo) and the opponents not adjusting to the altitude change. It may be related to George Karl's coaching too and having two highly efficient offensive players (Nene and Billups), which in turn should elevate their teammates.

You can see here that, consistent with the TS% changes having more to do with those other factors, Melo's teammates played about as well with him off as with him on the floor.
http://arturogalletti.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/untitled28.png

Is it happening in NY too?

That's a good question. I don't have the TS%s of Melo's teammates with him on and off the floor but anything from this year alone would be based on too few data anyway (especially the off-the-court data).

Of course it would. lol. By the way Chandler with Melo .700 without .600 still good either way. Also as a whole in this game the shooting was down I believe. Bonn if you do not read Knickerblogger you might want to they have a lot of Berri discussions. Althought it seems few side with him another poster to even the discussion is always needed I think.

I don't know where you're getting the .600 for Tyson as a Knick without Melo from. The team has played about 200 minutes without Melo this year. You can't seriously think that that's enough for valid shooting data, right? We've already established from a large sample of games with Denver that Melo's teammates were no better with him on than off the floor. So it doesn't make sense to rely on only 200 min of data for the Knicks this year. The Denver data are consistent with the more general pattern that teammates don't have much an effect on each other's shooting %s as long as you look at large enough data sets.

If you have a Knickerblogger article you want me to read, feel free to post it. If he makes valid arguments, I'll read his articles more. If you're interested in an even discussion, let me ask you how much work by Berri or other sabermetricians have you read?

newyorknewyork wrote:Raymond Felton played like a top 5 player in the NBA yesterday. So yes if Raymond Felton averages 27pts and 7ast a game while Novak averages 18pts a game then yes the team won't miss a beat without Carmelo Anthony.

newyorknewyork wrote:

Bonn1997 wrote:

newyorknewyork wrote:Raymond Felton played like a top 5 player in the NBA yesterday. So yes if Raymond Felton averages 27pts and 7ast a game while Novak averages 18pts a game then yes the team won't miss a beat without Carmelo Anthony.

You can't isolate any one player like that. Smith also shot 4 of 15. The team as a whole shot 45%, which is right around where you'd expect them to be. I do think Melo helps this team and they'd be worse off without him, though. If that's all you're claiming, there is no disagreement.

You need someone to be a consistent high level producer. For all the flaws in Melos game that is brought up by sabermetrics none of those flaws have stopped the Knicks from being one of the most efficient and ball secure teams in the NBA which tells me those flaws are covered and don't have the negative impact that they have been made out to have. I don't think anyone outside of Melo or Amare can be counted on as a consistent high producer and even Amare has to prove he is back at that level. Denver with all there team players are stuck in the middle because they don't have that.

if you look at what kidd is doing on the floor and statistically, he simply goes quite far to offset the flaws in melo and felton's games.

felton and melo are not efficient by any stretch (melo will not sustain the 57TS) and their ratio of usage to assist rate is rather poor if not awful for their positions.

meanwhile kidd is off the charts efficient and his ratio of usage to assists is incredible for a putative shooting guard. it's kind of ginobili-esque.

to me that is a huge key to the knicks success and i pray he can stay healthy.

JrZyHuStLa wrote:As I stated earlier:

Knicks not needing Carmelo to win = stronger case for MVP.

zero-sum players seldom win the mvp. if he gets to the line 11-12 times a game, maintains 57.5 or better TS, and plays defense then he will be "in the running." but he lags behind both durant and lebron, who are more important to their teams than melo is to the knicks-- last night showed how this is so.

JrZyHuStLa wrote:

dk7th wrote:

JrZyHuStLa wrote:As I stated earlier:

Knicks not needing Carmelo to win = stronger case for MVP.

zero-sum players seldom win the mvp. if he gets to the line 11-12 times a game, maintains 57.5 or better TS, and plays defense then he will be "in the running." but he lags behind both durant and lebron, who are more important to their teams than melo is to the knicks-- last night showed how this is so.

Lagging behind Lebron and Durant for a individual award is as respectable as it gets.

And although you have personally stated your requirements for the award, none of them matter as much as the Knicks continuing to do what they've been doing.

Last night only proved that the players on this team are capable of helping Carmelo stay in the race.

well if you are going to maintain that the winningest (as opposed to best) team's best (as opposed to most valuable) player always is in the running then i suppose so. but you know that it is probably the case that the player who is most pivotal to his team's winning is the one who ends up winning this award most of the time.

on the heat that is lebron.
on the thunder that is durant.
on the knicks that is ___________.

that said, the subjective nature of the voting bloc and its process (such as it is), means anything is possible.