There's the one obvious side to the Jeremy Lin story -- I'll trust that you've heard it by now -- which is that Lin is a far better basketball player than anyone imagined.But for the Knicks there's a second, equally important side, one that has played just as large a factor in their going from 8-15 with Lin on the pine to 7-0 with him playing. And that factor provides a kernel of hope to several other teams in similar predicaments.
That side is the dismal point guard play New York was getting before Jeremania struck. Toney Douglas (PER 6.55), Mike Bibby (6.43) and Iman Shumpert (10.63) all were somewhere between replacement-level and close-your-eyes awful before Lin took over. In fact, Douglas and Bibby are 59th and 60th, respectively, in PER out of the league's 62 qualifying point guards.
And this, paradoxically, provided the Knicks with a real opportunity: If they could just replace the terrible players with somebody halfway decent, it would improve the team significantly. Replace them with a star, and you get Linsanity.
It's uncommon for a team to have a rotation player with PER marks in the single digits for any length of time, especially for players who aren't elite defensive specialists. The Knicks, however, had Bibby and Douglas combining for over 30 minutes a game while both were working on train-wreck caliber seasons. Thus, there was a huge opportunity for the Knicks if they could find a quality replacement.
Conversely, it's very different if you have a team full of average-to-good players like, say, Denver, which has had very few minutes this season come from under-performing players. As a result, changing out any Nuggets player with another isn't likely to greatly alter the team's fortunes -- even adding a player of Lin's caliber wouldn't have nearly the same impact that it's had on the Knicks.
Along similar lines, Linsanity wouldn't have had anywhere near the same impact in Golden State or Houston, his two former clubs -- replacing Stephen Curry (PER 21.57) or Kyle Lowry (19.71) with Lin would likely have generated only a small change in said team's fortunes. Even using him as a backup would have been a far lesser improvement than the one the Knicks saw, as Golden State (with Nate Robinson) and Houston (with Goran Dragic) already get good production from those spots.
Which takes us to today's project: The BAD rating.
BAD stands for Below Average Dependency, and what it shows is how much non-production teams are getting from replacement-level or worse players.
A high score in BAD represents both a problem and an opportunity. The problem is that a lot of crappy players are dragging the team down, but the opportunity is that replacing them with just an average player will cause the team to dramatically improve -- perhaps not as much as Lin improved the Knicks, but enough to cause a wave.
To calculate BAD, I started with every player with a PER below 12. I subtracted his PER from 12, and multiplied by his minutes played. For example, a player with a PER of 10 and 200 minutes played would add 400 BAD points for his team.
I then summed the BAD rating across all the players on the team, so that all 30 teams had a rating. And what it found, not surprisingly, was that the Knicks were among the teams most ripe for a Linsanity situation: They're seventh in the league in BAD overall, and their point guard position rated as the second-worst of any individual spot.
BAD: Worst by position
Team Position Players BAD
Nets Small forward Stevenson, James, Sha. Williams, Owens 7,856
Knicks Point guard Bibby, Shumpert, Douglas 5,794
Kings Small forward Salmons, Garcia, Outlaw 5,663
Lakers Point guard Fisher, Blake, Goudelouck, Morris 4,925
Timberwolves Small forward Johnson, Webster 4,749
Looking at the chart, you can see that New York point guard was one of the league's greatest turnaround opportunities. Plugging in a decent player would improve the Knicks greatly, and plugging in a star would more than offset the loss of Carmelo Anthony, and that is what has happened.
Lin could have had a similarly outsized impact with the Lakers, but otherwise the weak links around the league are at small forward. As with the Knicks' point guard situation, this speaks both to a real problem for the Nets, Wolves and Kings and to potential for sudden improvement should they find even halfway-decent solutions.
The good news for each is that help may be on the way. Minnesota may eventually have an answer in Derrick Williams or Michael Beasley, while the Kings and Nets are both likely to have high draft picks. As for the Lakers' point guard hole, that one seems a bit thornier to solve.
Speaking of which ...
BAD: Worst by team
Team BAD
Lakers 12,499
Magic 10,565
Nets 10,020
Timberwolves 9,392
Pistons 9,205
If you're wondering how the Lakers are 17-12 despite having three of the best players in the league, here's your answer. The chart shows that the Lakers lead the league in BAD, with only four players having a PER above 12. Metta World Peace leads the way with 3,553 BAD points (fifth league-wide), but the point guards and frontcourt reserves are also major contributors. In their infinite wisdom, the league's coaches decided to punish Pau Gasol for this by keeping him off the Western Conference All-Star team.
Orlando ranks second, with horrid point guard play the main reason, although the Magic have at least begun to remedy a bit of the problem: Larry Hughes, with a horrid minus-4.84 PER in 114 minutes, was one of the worst offenders but has been waived.
Unfortunately for Dwight Howard, the grass on the other side of the fence may not be greener: New Jersey is right behind the Magic in this category, with its phenomenally bad small forward play the main culprit. The Nets' BAD from small forwards is worse than that of 18 other entire teams.
In each case, this represents an opportunity too. If L.A. or Orlando could just acquire a league-average point guard at the trade deadline (coughRamonSessionscough), it might improve their chances considerably.
BAD: Best by team
Team BAD
Bulls 0
Nuggets 478
Rockets 1,078
76ers 1,264
Spurs 1,844
Alternatively, we can look at teams with the lowest BAD to see those that are a bit "maxed out." Take the Bulls, for instance, who amazingly don't have a single minute played this season from a player with a PER below 12. (At the moment, at least -- Ronnie Brewer and Brian Scalabrine are very close.)
Similarly, Denver, Houston, Philadelphia and San Antonio are four of the league's deepest teams and have benefited from that bench strength this season. The glass-half-empty look at their depth, however, is that there isn't the opportunity for the kind of explosive improvement from a single move that we saw from the Knicks with Lin.
In the big picture, none of these teams can expect a Jeremy Lin to burst onto the scene. What's happened with him is a once-a-decade phenomenon at best. But for the likes of Minnesota, New Jersey, the Lakers and Orlando, their heavy use of under-performing players comes with the opportunity for a micro-version of Linsanity that can catapult them significantly forward.
Hollinger using stats to tell us what we already know. Bibby and Douglas are terrible and Shumpert is no PG.
