Thursday notes and highlights

I've run out of time for a pithy subhead!

Good morning. Let’s basketball.

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An Update on Ja

The team says Ja Morant will remain away from the team for at least an additional four games. That puts the total time away around two weeks, at minimum. Still carefully not using the word suspension. Still no word from the NBA league office on any sort of sanction or reaction.

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Folks, I’m Not Sure About Kendrick Perkins

Kendrick Perkins implied some wild stuff about racism impacting NBA MVP voting last week, and continued to lean into that as he got some pushback. I mostly ignored it as I mostly ignore Kendrick Perkins’ other NBA opinions. Of all the current and former players who are on TV talking about the NBA, his stuff is broadly the least essential for me.

I don’t want to put words into his mouth but Perkins implied that Nikola Jokic will win his third MVP because “80% of MVP voters are white” while close to that percentage of players are black. Needless to say, that number is wildly inaccurate and ESPN had to broadcast a correction to that fact.

J.J. Redick received a ton of attention for vigorously pushing back on Perkins’ narrative with Perkins on the same broadcast.

Awful Announcing @awfulannouncing

JJ Redick condemns First Take and pushes back on Kendrick Perkins alleging NBA MVP voters have a racial bias against Black players:

After the yelling stopped Perkins retreated to the explanation that black former players are talking about this and have been thinking about this for a long time with respect to other award votes or general recognition. As such, Perkins feels the conversation needs to be had. Fair enough, though the absurd construct Perk created to get there is a real bad path in my estimation (and apparently Redick’s estimation too). There might be something interesting to discuss around who gets held to certain standards in terms of team success (postseason and otherwise) and why certain players get credit for success without high-performing teammates, and whether there are trends that pop out in that aspect.

Bomani Jones had an excellent thread on this the other day, correctly pointing out who drove the conversation around whether race played a factor in Steve Nash’s back-to-back MVPs: white media members. He also wisely points out that part of the discourse around Jokic is convoluted specifically because Jokic has performed even better this season than the prior two. That’s inarguable: Jokic has been absolutely incredible this season.

Where I disagree with Bomani is in his use of Win Shares and Win Shares/48 as a good solo metric by which to quickly evaluate excellence and superiority. Jones doesn’t exclusively rely on Win Shares of course, but he has mentioned it enough times to pique my interest.

The flaw with Win Shares is that it assigns success in team defense a bit clumsily, using rebounds as one of the major proxies. Win Shares are adopted by a baseball metric by Bill James. Calculating them in basketball relies on Dean Oliver’s individual offensive and defensive rating metrics. In those metrics, DeanO works to take a team’s rating (i.e. 101 points allowed per 100 possessions) and assign credit to players (i.e. Player X is a good 99 points allowed per 100 and Player Y is a worse 103 points allowed per 100). How we get there is tricky. From Basketball-Reference’s article on how to calculate individual Defensive Rating:

The core of the Defensive Rating calculation is the concept of the individual Defensive Stop. Stops take into account the instances of a player ending an opposing possession that are tracked in the boxscore (blocks, steals, and defensive rebounds), in addition to an estimate for the number of forced turnovers and forced misses by the player which aren't captured by steals and blocks.

And:

Out of necessity (owing to a lack of defensive data in the basic boxscore), individual Defensive Ratings are heavily influenced by the team's defensive efficiency. They assume that all teammates are equally good (per minute) at forcing non-steal turnovers and non-block misses, as well as assuming that all teammates face the same number of total possessions per minute. Perhaps as a byproduct, big men tend to have the best Defensive Ratings.

Jokic is a superb rebounder and that is certrainly a factor in any Denver defensive success (they are now above average on the season). But no one would rate Jokic as Denver’s best defender, or more important defender — even when considering defensive rebounding. Yet Jokic leads the Nuggets in Defensive Win Shares *by a lot* — about 30% higher than Kentavious Caldwell-Pope and Bruce Brown despite similar minutes played and even further above Aaron Gordon (with a noticeable minutes gap creating a small impact there).

Jokic is averaging 0.076 Defensive Win Shares Per 48. Gordon is at 0.053. Does that reflect reality? Joel Embiid is at 0.082 and Giannis Antetokounmpo is at 0.091. Is Jokic really that close defensively to those two?

This gets to what I think is the true divide on Jokic right now: trust in advanced metrics, especially with regards to defense. It’s not cut and dry — there are non-metric folks who really support Jokic and metric folks who really support Embiid or Giannis (going back to last year as well). But that’s an essay for another day.