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Top 14 reasons for Jazz fans to be excited for the season

K.Malphurs — October 27, 2010 — 5 Comments

In honor of former Jazz great Jeff Hornacek (and because 10 seemed too few and 20 seemed too ambitious) below are the top 14 things I am excited about with the upcoming season and how it relates to the Utah Jazz.

1. Al Jefferson playing with a real point guard. Jonny Flynn, Sebastian Telfair, Marko Jaric and Delonte West are some of the better point guards that have been passing Big Al the ball. Now one of the best low post scorers in the NBA will be playing with one of the best (if not the best) point guard in the NBA. Jefferson is now happy, motivated and in a great situation for him to succeed. I can’t wait to see his first 30 point 16 rebound game.

2. The potential of Jeremy Evans. I have never seen Evans play even one minute of basketball. In fact if he walked past me on the street I don’t know if I would even recognize him. Still it is hard not to be excited about the potential that Evans will be a really good player. I know it is just preseason, but have you seen his preseason stats? There is a great wages of wins article about rookies which predicts his WS/48 (.211). Or what my fellow Salt City Hoops writer Mychal wrote about him when he wrote “Jeremy Evans will be the steal of the draft?” Or the fact that the Jazz seem to know what they are doing in the 2nd round since they have drafted Mo Williams, Paul Millsap and CJ Miles in recent years. I am very excited to see Evans play to see if he is even 1/10 as good as the hype.

3. LeBron James and the rest of the Miami Heat. Come on it is hard not to be excited about watching this team play basketball. I know I am supposed to not like them, but it isn’t like they are in the Western Conference. Also, I didn’t grow up in Cleveland. In my mind there is nothing to dislike about the Heat until the Jazz (possibly) face them in the NBA Finals. In the meantime I am excited about watching to see whether or not this season will be a success.

4. The downfall of the Denver Nuggets. Just the possibility of this happening with all of the off-season turmoil is enough for this Jazz fan to get excited.

5. Deron Williams winning his first of many assist titles. He has finished in the top three in assists per game over the past years, so it isn’t much of a stretch to see him winning the APG title this year. In Vegas his odds of winning the assists per game title is 2/1, which is tied with Steve Nash and just behind Chris Paul.

6. Paul Millsap winning the rebound title. A lot of people might think Big Al is the pick here of any Jazz player who stands a chance of winning the rebound title, but my best guess is Millsap. He won three of them in college and I think the possibility is there thanks to the next point on my list.

7. No more Boozer. Boozer was a great player for the Jazz and someone who provided Jazz fans with some memorable moments. I am a Boozer fan and while it was a good signing at the time it was time for Boozer to go. There should be no more trade rumors or speculation on what is going to happen with Boozer. I don’t know how much it matters, but even the most ardent Boozer fan has to concede that he might have been a slight distraction the past couple years. The Jazz can now move on with Okur, Jefferson, Millsap and no more distractions.

8. The emergence of Gordon Hayward. Since the Jazz normally make the playoffs they don’t normally get lottery picks. The last one they did they used (with the help of Portland) on Deron Williams. That worked out well.

9. Coach Sloan winning the Coach of the Year. Unbelievable that Sloan has never won the award, but this should be the year. I guess I shouldn’t be complaining that much since six of the past seven COY winners (all but last year’s winner Scott Brooks) are no longer coaching the team they won the award with. That might be the most crazy fact I have come across in awhile. Seriously check out the list.

10. The best home court advantage in the league. I don’t know how to make this objective besides pointing out that the Jazz had the 6th highest attendance and 6th best home record. I guess that might point to them having the 6th best home court advantage, but like Raheem Morris of the Bucs said “stats are for losers.” So I’m still calling the ESA the best house in the league.

11. Watching Wes Matthews make $5.7M for the Blazers as their backup. It was fun watching him play last year, but I have no idea why the Blazers signed him for so much. I am on the record for thinking that he isn’t worth the contract he signed.

12. Kosta Koufus as a Minnesota Timberwolves player. Some things just go well together.

13. The new uniforms look great. I can’t wait for my wife to comment on their “outfits”

14. Andrei Kirilenko in a contract year. There seems to be nothing wrong with this situation as the Jazz finally are finally off the hook from paying Kirilenko $10M+ ($17.8M this year). The Jazz hopefully should get a productive player and if not at least he could possibly be used as trade bait.

In NBA, Utah Jazz

Jazz 2010-2011 Season Forecast – Steady With Sloan

K.Malphurs — October 6, 2010 — 10 Comments

My unsolicited advice for those readers with a large ego is to become a forecaster. I am confident that the size of your ego will dramatically decrease when you see just how difficult it is to forecast. The reason I can write this so confidently is that for the last three years I have been a professional forecaster for a Fortune 500 company. In addition to forecasting over 2,000 items I have participated in plenty of training sessions aimed at improving forecast performance. One might think that with this experience that I might be an expert forecaster. I am not. I try my best to increase the probability that my forecast will be accurate, but a good portion of the times the actual demand doesn’t cooperate with the forecast.

Now that I have gone over my credentials (or lack of if you prefer) I am going to try my best to go over certain ways you can forecast the Jazz win total for next year. First I look over a few statistical tools for a top down forecast. For this I used total wins over the years where Coach Sloan was the head coach of the Jazz. After looking at those I looked at a bottoms up forecast by looking at the individual players on the roster for next year. For this analysis I used the Win Score per 48 minutes, which is just an estimate of the number of wins each player contributes to the team divided by the amount of time in a game. For more information on this stat please read the following from basketballreference.com.

Anyway, below are the forecasting techniques (in various levels of complexity) I used with the overall wins since the 1989-1990 season.

Mean – A simple average of the 21 seasons is 51 wins per season
Median – The middle number of wins was 53 wins in a season.
3 year moving average – The average number of wins over the past three years has been 52 wins per season.
Regression Analysis - 47 wins (This type of data looks at past data points and tries to create a “line of best fit”that reduces the amount of error between the model and the data. )
Simple Exponential Smoothing - 52 wins (This type of forecasting places greater emphasis on more recent data points. If you care I used an optimal alpha of 0.79)
Linear Trend Analysis – 45 wins (This type of forecasting technique tries place the best straight line through the data.)

There are other models I could use, but in the interest of time I stopped at those six. Overall the models predicted a pretty small range between 45 and 53 wins. This speaks to the consistency of Jerry Sloan has had in producing winning teams. Now let’s see if the bottom’s up approach to the forecast matches what we got above.

Using the stat Win Score and more specifically WS/48 I looked at each player and tried to predict their WS/48 and the amount of minutes they will play. For some players like Deron Williams it was easy because I used the same minute (2802) and same WS/48 (0.177) to calculate the same Win Score of 10.3 as he had last year. That means that according to this statistic Deron Williams directly accounted for 10.3 wins for the Jazz last year.

There was no reason to mess with those numbers, but with other players I made assumptions detailed below.

Paul Millsap will have the same WS/48 (0.151) but will play more (projected 2673) because of Boozer leaving
Al Jefferson will have the same career WS/48 (0.119) and will play about the same minutes (2900) that he did in the 2007-2008 season.

Andrei Kirilenko will have the same WS/48 (0.171) as last year, but will play more minutes (1802).
Gordon Hayward was probably the most difficult player to forecast. I looked at the rookie year WS/48 for the past ten 9th picks in the draft. The average WS/48 was 0.0768, which included really good players like Andre Iguodala, Amare Stoudemire and Joakim Noah as well as busts like Patrick O’Bryant and Rodney White. The 9th pick of the draft seems to be very hit or miss with he lone exception being last year’s 9th pick Demar Derozan, whad a WS/48 of 0.066 over 1664 minutes. For Hayward I used the average WS/48 of the past ten 9th picks (0.0768) and then estimated he would play 1700 minutes.
Raja Bell - I estimated 1500 minutes and then used his career WP/48 of 0.085.
CJ Miles - I increased his minutes to what Wes Matthews played last year (2025) and kept his below average WS/48 of 0.061 the same. The Jazz could really exceed expectations if Miles improves his game since there will definitely be minutes available for him.
For the other players (Price, Fesenko, Gaines, Evans andJeffers) I made a few minor adjustments, but nothing that would affect that Jazz win total by more than maybe a game or two.

I then made sure the minutes played for the team equaled 82 games X 5 players X 48 minutes per game or 19,680 total minutes. After all of those calculations and assumptions the total win score totaled up to50.1 wins. The 50.1 is in almost exactly between the 45 and 53 wins that we got above so that makes me think that it at least feels correct. Also, as a general rule I tend to agree with a bottoms up forecast approach since it takes more time and analysis to do. With all of that that being written my official prediction for next year’s Jazz team is 50 wins. Now I can just sit back, enjoy the season and see how wrong my prediction is since that is the life of a forecaster.

In Uncategorized

Karl Malone: Best power forward of all time

K.Malphurs — August 11, 2010 — 39 Comments

Karl Malone was gracious and humble as he was inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame this weekend. His incredible accomplishments over a long NBA career are well documented and as John Stockton mentioned, they seem even more incredible as the years pass by.

It seemed strange, then, to follow the jokes and put-downs that showed up during the ceremony on Twitter and in the comments sections of most of the stories. Clearly Malone’s past mistakes are not forgiven by many. On the basketball side, many people seem to remember Malone as someone who would carry a team to the playoffs, and then disappoint. Few took the time to give him credit for carrying assorted rosters of cast-offs and has-beens deep in the playoffs. Pau Gasol couldn’t even win a single playoff game when he was the alpha dog in Memphis. Unfortunately for Malone, his basketball epitaph for many will be the two missed free throws in Game 1 of the 1997 Finals and the infamous turnover right before Jordan’s game winning (offensive foul) shot in the 1998 Finals.

We have had plenty of time since Malone retired to forget a lot of games and maybe our memory has failed in us. Have we been unfair to Malone? Is he the best power forward of all time? Maybe we remember the bad. So let’s beat this dead horse: Here is the case for and against Karl Malone as the best power forward of all time:

The case for Karl Malone as the best power forward of all time:

When you look at Karl Malone’s stats compared to Tim Duncan it is hard to make the case that Duncan is a better player that Malone. Why? Because it is hard to make the case that many players are better than Karl Malone by looking at the stats. He is 2nd all time in career points and 3rd all time in win shares (an estimate of the number of wins contributed by a player) with more win shares than everyone but Kareem and Wilt. Tim Duncan would need 6 more years of his average production to equal Malone. As it currently stands he is still isn’t within shouting distance of the Mailman. However, any Duncan supporter might bring up the fact that of course Malone’s career numbers would be better because he played 19 seasons. If we take that away and just compare averages here are some points in favor of Malone:

Scoring: Malone averaged 25 points per game. Duncan 21.1.
Efficiency: Malone shot 51.6% from the floor and 74.2% from the line. Duncan’s respective numbers; 50.8% and 68.7%.
Reliability: Malone’s work ethic and incredible conditioning was legendary and that shows in the numbers. He played in 99.3% of the Jazz possible games during his 18 year career in Utah . Duncan so far with San Antonio has only played in 94.5% of the possible games. Over an 82 game NBA season that means that Malone would play in about 4 more games than Duncan.
Longevity: The same conditioning led him to be able to play for so long at such a high level. Not to say that Duncan can’t do that, but let’s see if he is still playing as effectively as Malone was when he was 39 and still contributed 11.1 wins (10th in the league) to the 2002-2003 Jazz team.
Front line help – Sure this is a little subjective, but I think that playing with the Greg Ostertags and Felton Spencers of the world didn’t help Malone quite as much as playing along side David Robinson helped Duncan.

The case for Tim Duncan as the best power forward of all time:

Even the most pro-Duncan fan has to respect and take note of points made above in terms of strong regular season production over a long period of time. However, those battles aren’t something that even really interest Duncan fans since they have the following points in their favor:

NBA Titles: 4 > 0. While basketball is a team game it is common practice to assign more credit to individual players who help the team win. Duncan ’s teams have won in the playoffs and he has received his share of praise for those accomplishments.
Playoff Stats: This is where Malone fans might wish the stats contradicted common viewpoints, but unfortunately they don’t. This is where the questions above about how maybe our memory has failed in us in remembering Malone’s playoff performance get answered. Unfortunately for Jazz fans the answers aren’t good and they are the main reason why I think someone can make the case for Tim Duncan being the best power forward of all time. Malone’s numbers dropped across the board from the regular season to the playoffs. He shot considerably worse (from 51% to 46%) in the playoffs and his WS/48 minutes dropped from 0.205 to 0.14. Compare this with Duncan who had almost identical shooting percentages and WS/48 numbers. One thing to consider is that Duncan has more Win Shares (28.6 compared to 23) in the playoffs despite playing in 23 fewer games. Those are just a few stats that I researched, but they all paint a very similar picture. Just like it is hard to make the case that Duncan was better than Malone in the regular season, it is also look like it is hard to make the case that Malone was better than Duncan in the playoffs.

Those are the arguments for both sides. As a Jazz fan I tend to side with Malone. While the playoff stats was something that was tough to digest (again since I had to live though it the first time) it still doesn’t completely overshadow Malone’s incredible career.

I would like to congratulate Karl Malone for his induction to the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. You are the greatest power forward of all time in this biased Jazz fan’s mind.

In NBA, Utah Jazz Karl Malone, Tim Duncan