the last 2 years of Danny's tenure were a complete head-scratcher. I wanted to throw him this one bone
OKC Thunder (1) vs Dallas Mavericks (5) - 2024 WC Second Round
- Thread starter Kliq
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He's toast.
Kind of a sad career, given the hopes when he joined the Celtics. The date of his injury is pretty obvious from the graph, he's actually lucky he had that 2nd "peak" allowing him to get his Charlotte contract.
But his trajectory was totally changed from the terrible ankle injury he got right when his Celtics career started, I'm sure it still bothers him. Likely has post traumatic arthritis in his ankle.
How open some of their players needed to be to take those shots. According to NBA.com, 65+% of OKCs 3 point attempts were wide open in the regular season. Celtics were at roughly 45%. By my eyes, that seemed super relevant in this series. How many times do you remember OKC repeatedly driving and kicking, passing up openish 3s, until they essentially ran out of time and had to take a midrange shot or a more tightly contested 3? Williams, Dort, Giddey are all guys that REALLY need to be open to be willing to shoot that 3 pointer. Same with Shai, really.
Just being able to play a bit further off those guys because you know you don't have to close out that tightly to dissuade them from putting up the 3 was a real problem in that series and allowed Dallas to crowd the paint to dissuade rim attacks while still being able to close out well enough to discourage the 3 point shot. I simply underestimated the magnitude of that problem.
Edit: To be more specific, what I mean here is they don't have true five out spacing as a consequence of so many of their players being unwilling to shoot lightly contested 3 point shots.
Feel free to disagree, but I simply won't be convinced otherwise.
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Now that we have heard how this rule is interpreted, similar in a way to The Tuck Rule, I am pretty certain that it is more likely than not that the OKC video assistants in charge of replay did not fully understand how this rule is interpreted.
The blaming Daigneault, not necessarily here, are pointing the finger at the wrong guy just as Celtics fans blame Mazzulla when he does/doesn’t challenge a call. As a head coach, you make the final call however you’re at the mercy of your video person(s) to provide you with their Yes/No opinion.
I,e., the difference between having Smart and Al on the floor versus Jrue and KP. Amazing what it does for spacing.
The other issue here (and I've been very supportive of the NBA officiating changes) is that no one really knows what contact is allowed anymore, under a strict replay standard.
There is a 0.0000% chance that foul would have been overturned in November, and now no one really knows, including coaching staffs. The post-hoc explanations can probably be justified with reference to the rulebook, but that's not predictively useful for the staff members.
They probably will need to release updated guidelines around contact on shots, to help the officials in real-time in nothing else, but the league seems (understandably) reluctant to relinquish unilateral ability to set how the game is played.
This never gets overturned imo. Anything can get missed at game speed but once they go to the monitor this is never not a foul.
SGA acted like an adult after getting whistled for a questionable call that ended the series. Didn't throw his hands in the air and whine like a little baby. Imagine if Luka committed this foul on the other end?
100% agree, but we did see the JB play get overturned when he got hit in the head.
It is a foul but the only counterpoint is whether a jump ball was necessitated at the time of the block. If Washington didn’t land to reset and that’s the argument ok - but that’s not what Brothers said
I mean, I agree, but then we have the JB call.
They've decided to drastically change the rules via interpretation, and that has created weird cases in which screenshots are no longer sufficient to know whether something is a foul.
You can always come up with the retroactive reason for why X was a foul, but it's quite literally impossible for coaching staffs to feel comfortable knowing what is or isn't, so it's harder to blame them.
Yeah, the issue is about consistency---that is almost identical to the JB play---difference being the JB play it is not totally clear the contact with ball was even first and here it definitely was. There simply is no way to reconcile the two calls, imo.
If we chalk it up to "they changed this and many other interpretations mid-year" that all fits. But we should acknowledge that the challenge highlights a key problem with changing interpretations without any written and distributed standards mid-year----the teams don't actually know what the rules being called are anymore.
Also, the limited statements they have made about different interpretations are not about this situation---they are about driving, off-hand contact, and other stuff. So again - if they change the interpretation, they need to somehow let people know becuase "more contact is ok" isn't really a practical adjustment for teams to try and interpret.
I will say, having reflected on it, the decision to challenge remains fascinating to me. Some assumptions to shoot at, others will do probabilities better I suspect....which net out to it being a toss-up.
PJ is a 70% FT shooter give or take. So you are expecting 2 points (on average) from his three free throws. So the actual 117-116 is probably your default assumption if you do not challenge. Then you have a maybe at best 30% chance of scoring yourself after a timeout to move ball up to midcourt (that's from memory on a study of it -anyone have better numbers?) - so that's a win 3 times out of 10 and a loss 7 times out of 10. Maybe there's a small subset where you get fouled, hit one of two, and play on into OT - which is a 50/50 proposition imo. And then you have the chance PJ misses 2 of 3...which is non-zero (others will do the probabilistic math more accurately than I will, but it's gotta be 1 in 10 or so he misses 2?) And you don't really care about the scenario where he hits all three--you need a basket either way. That feels to me like, if you do not challenge and save your timeout, you have something like a 40%
If you challenge and think 50/50 you win, you then have to assume a jump ball on the 50% you win. So then you have:
- 50% chance you win jump ball. Some of those 50% you will run out clock, some you will get fouled and have 2 fts, a 1 pt lead, and leaving Dallas 1-2 seconds coming back the other way. A lot of math there and thus assumptions. But feels like you win most of those, 80% of them or more?
- 50% chance you lose the jump ball. And here again, I'll assume a 30% chance at most that you lose after you lose the jump ball - Dallas may not even get a shot off. So it's probably even a bit lower than 30% here.
Net of this seems to be that in the 50% times you get to a jump ball (50/50 you win challenge) you win 70% or something of those scenarios - you lose only if Dallas wins jump and gets a lowish probability last-second shot.
In the 50% you lose the challenge, you're in the actual scenario - assume PJ on average puts in 2 of 3, and then you have a very low (10%? Less?) chance you score back the other way.
So the net of that is if you challenge you're looking at 40% chance you win, very roughly?
Live I thought you challenge. Having sat with numbers, feels like you definitely challenge if you feel it's more than 50/50 you win given all of above. And I don't dislike challenging even at 50/50 or maybe a bit less. But I did this quickly and may be missing something, and the "other" factors here matter given what feels close---do you think making PJ wait increases chance he misses two? Do you believe refs will or won't be inclined to overrule (regardless of merits)? How do you think of the sequencing of the FTs---because while PJ hitting 2 of 3 is the default, as OKC you much prefer he misses one of first two and you get it out of bounds after a third 'make'.
If we chalk it up to "they changed this and many other interpretations mid-year" that all fits. But we should acknowledge that the challenge highlights a key problem with changing interpretations without any written and distributed standards mid-year----the teams don't actually know what the rules being called are anymore.
Also, the limited statements they have made about different interpretations are not about this situation---they are about driving, off-hand contact, and other stuff. So again - if they change the interpretation, they need to somehow let people know becuase "more contact is ok" isn't really a practical adjustment for teams to try and interpret.
I will say, having reflected on it, the decision to challenge remains fascinating to me. Some assumptions to shoot at, others will do probabilities better I suspect....which net out to it being a toss-up.
PJ is a 70% FT shooter give or take. So you are expecting 2 points (on average) from his three free throws. So the actual 117-116 is probably your default assumption if you do not challenge. Then you have a maybe at best 30% chance of scoring yourself after a timeout to move ball up to midcourt (that's from memory on a study of it -anyone have better numbers?) - so that's a win 3 times out of 10 and a loss 7 times out of 10. Maybe there's a small subset where you get fouled, hit one of two, and play on into OT - which is a 50/50 proposition imo. And then you have the chance PJ misses 2 of 3...which is non-zero (others will do the probabilistic math more accurately than I will, but it's gotta be 1 in 10 or so he misses 2?) And you don't really care about the scenario where he hits all three--you need a basket either way. That feels to me like, if you do not challenge and save your timeout, you have something like a 40%
If you challenge and think 50/50 you win, you then have to assume a jump ball on the 50% you win. So then you have:
- 50% chance you win jump ball. Some of those 50% you will run out clock, some you will get fouled and have 2 fts, a 1 pt lead, and leaving Dallas 1-2 seconds coming back the other way. A lot of math there and thus assumptions. But feels like you win most of those, 80% of them or more?
- 50% chance you lose the jump ball. And here again, I'll assume a 30% chance at most that you lose after you lose the jump ball - Dallas may not even get a shot off. So it's probably even a bit lower than 30% here.
Net of this seems to be that in the 50% times you get to a jump ball (50/50 you win challenge) you win 70% or something of those scenarios - you lose only if Dallas wins jump and gets a lowish probability last-second shot.
In the 50% you lose the challenge, you're in the actual scenario - assume PJ on average puts in 2 of 3, and then you have a very low (10%? Less?) chance you score back the other way.
So the net of that is if you challenge you're looking at 40% chance you win, very roughly?
Live I thought you challenge. Having sat with numbers, feels like you definitely challenge if you feel it's more than 50/50 you win given all of above. And I don't dislike challenging even at 50/50 or maybe a bit less. But I did this quickly and may be missing something, and the "other" factors here matter given what feels close---do you think making PJ wait increases chance he misses two? Do you believe refs will or won't be inclined to overrule (regardless of merits)? How do you think of the sequencing of the FTs---because while PJ hitting 2 of 3 is the default, as OKC you much prefer he misses one of first two and you get it out of bounds after a third 'make'.
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The JB call was in the new rules regime. I think what happened is that they initially wanted that type of contact to be allowed, and then decided it was going too far. In essence, they decided that, upon reflection, they agreed with @HomeRunBaker -- that screenshot should be a foul.
As you note, this is a big problem with changing the rules on the fly based on "interpretations"! It shares many similarities with frustrations that arise from executive agencies in politics doing the same. However, as with those agencies, it's the only realistic way to make changes rapidly.
Basically, Silver needs a TV deal. They didn't like the product. Since it's more expedient to beg forgiveness than ask permission, and since the owners forgive a lot if a new TV deal happens, he took strong, unilateral action to make it happen. That has a lot of collateral damage (awful consistency and no one knows which challenges will be successful), but I think they're mostly happy with the result.
There's a good exercise for the reader here: what does raw 3 point % leave out that might be relevant for how good an offense will be, and how well it will be able to space?
It's interesting to link to TV deal - because I'd expect TV to prefer 130-125 games to the more physical and lower-scoring games. That's just an impression.
I'm sure you are right that part of the calculus mid-year was the TV deal and also the internal chatter about scoring. The fact they netted that out to "slow down scoring" may suggest you're right about what TV wants but that does surprise me!
I'm sure you are right that part of the calculus mid-year was the TV deal and also the internal chatter about scoring. The fact they netted that out to "slow down scoring" may suggest you're right about what TV wants but that does surprise me!
They clearly thought it was an issue for the product, which basically means "TV".
Fans like scoring, but basketball already has so much scoring that you don't have soccer/hockey/baseball concerns when it's low.
A lot of scoring increase was FTs, which are AWFUL product. Limiting layup success rate also leads to a lot of transition runouts and fast-paced play. There are lots of things that reduce raw point totals, but that are more exciting to watch.
They still got good to great three point shooting from SGA, JW, Joe, and Dort. Chet had a terrible playoffs. I don't think they were a "fake 5 out team". They smoked New Orleans, and were within a questionable foul call of going to game 7. They lost because they are young and inexperienced and couldn't grab a rebound to save their life when they needed to
Scoring was indeed up but in fact the number of free throws per game has stayed relatively flat throughout the years. which makes sense since guys adjust to how the game is being called.
edit: just double checked to make sure my memory wasn’t off and actually free throws have been on a pretty consistent downward trend for a long time now. what do you know!
I'm pretty sure that the new rules reduced FTs further though, right?
Beyond that, I'm mostly guessing at reasons that the league prefers lower scoring, while holding "it clearly wanted lower scoring" as a constant, because that seems obvious at this point.
Agreed - I’d be surprised if reducing FT delays was much of a motivator. Though I agree they are bad TV.
Part of the problem early season was, imo, defenses assumed fouls on a lot of drives and in paint so they resisted less often. Leading to similar FT numbers, but a lot more scoring. I do think that’s more TV friendly. But also that it probably isn’t great for game longer-term, it just creates this video game/track meet feel.
Part of the problem early season was, imo, defenses assumed fouls on a lot of drives and in paint so they resisted less often. Leading to similar FT numbers, but a lot more scoring. I do think that’s more TV friendly. But also that it probably isn’t great for game longer-term, it just creates this video game/track meet feel.
A shot to win/tie with 2 seconds an an ATO play is what, 25% or 30%? You absolutely challenge at 50% and 40% is probably still the right call. I think that the call was right and it’s just a circumstance where OKC got very unlucky that the initial clean block didn’t knock the ball out sufficiently to stop the later contact from being a foul. I also think this is one of those scenarios where there’s enough uncertainty that you cannot fault the coach for challenging (you also couldn’t fault a decision not to challenge). It just is what it is and the good news for OKC fans is that their team is at the beginning of its journey as a contender and it’s normal for a young inexperienced team to underperform their first go around in the playoffs.
I don't know how anyone can watch that series where the Thunder shot better than league average for the playoffs (35.6% v 35.2%) and argue it was their shooting. That said, I think @lovegtm is on to something with their roster construction. They need to add size because Dallas essentially bullied them as the series went on. Chet isn't built for that, at least not yet and he needs more help.
Lower scoring probably translates to closer games. The last few minutes of a close game are the highest level of entertainment the NBA has to offer.
He knew it wasn’t questionable which is probably why and felt he had to get really lucky w the replay. 99% sure that SGA wasn’t away of the dislodge rule and only knew that he raked the guys arm.
A big issue is volume from 3:
Game 1 - 35 attempts
Game 2 - 30 attempts
Game 3 - 30 attempts
Game 4 - 27 (!) attempts
Game 5 - 40 attempts (25% on them, so they were inefficient when jacking more)
Game 6 - 41 attempts, 36%
Low attempts, bad efficiency at higher attempts, and low point totals are indicative of a team getting its water shut off. The fact that some players and the team shot their percentages tells you very, very little relative to those other numbers.
I don't know that I'd say shooting is the problem per se, but the current roster's offensive ecosystem definitely has significant flaws. SGA and JDub are superlative offensive talents, so I think there definitely is an elite playoff offense that could be built here, but the current roster isn't it, afaict.
We need to think of shooting less as percentages, or individual players' efficiency, and more as an ecosystem that can find answers when a playoff defense stresses it in one direction. For example, the Celtics used to be very vulnerable to this when Spoelstra and Kerr would stress their preferred Tatum actions, and they've improved players and scheme to fix that, at least somewhat.
OKC needs a very, very hard look in mirror this offseason, if they want to be a serious playoff offense in the future.
Or they get a year more mature SGA, JW, Chet, etc and they make minor changes and they are fine. I think this team is well set up to keep improving and have plenty of assets to make the necessary moves. I am sure they are disappointed, but everyone knew they were a young team and unlikely to advance to the finals.
Don’t they have a boatload of cap space? Like 40M or something.
Plus a lot of draft assets and Giddey to move.
Big offseason for Presti.
Plus a lot of draft assets and Giddey to move.
Big offseason for Presti.
Yep, OKC will be a thorn in the Celtics side for the next half-decade.
Their BIG3 continue to grow along with maturation from JWill, Joe, Wallace, Wiggins, Dieng
Giddey at 21, should be moved before more of his value is destroyed (step back this season).
Their draft haul, attached, is insane and Presti can be involved with Mitchell, Markkanen, Ingram, Bridges, Randle, KAT, etc
Frankly, they could go all out if Brad wants to move Jaylen Brown.
Projected 2024/25 salary cap amount: $141,000,000
Maximum salary cap space: Approximately $42 million
Realistic salary cap space: Approximately $34 million
Projected 2024/25 luxury tax threshold: $171,345,000
Luxury tax space: Plentiful
Projected 2024/25 first apron threshold: $178,655,000
First apron space: Plentiful
Projected 2024/25 second apron threshold: $189,486,000
Second apron space: Plentiful
https://basketball.realgm.com/nba/draft/future_drafts/detailed
I don’t view Giddey’s season as a step back as he showed what he could do as a 21-yr old lead guard when SGA was out. The problem is that the teams he would fit best during a rebuild are in asset-collection mode and not looking to move these assets for one player. Agreed that he needs to go for both parties sake….it reminds me of Steve Nash’s rookie year when they had a still-prime KJ and just trade for an entering prime Jason Kidd. Not that Giddey will reach Nash’s level but he absolutely has All-Star level upside.
They were starting Joe instead of Josh by the end. Giddey needs the ball to add value and SGA/JDub have that covered. Its a clunky fit now, and it's not entirely his fault. I agree with you, a 21yr-old Giddey has real value. Teams like the Wizards (Kuzma), Blazers (Grant), Orlando (WCJ or Isaacs) should be offering their experienced vets. Knicks probably could be coaxed into moving Randle for a package, adding picks/Giddey could help them get the final Nova piece in Bridges. Ultimately I'd guess Danny gets a draft haul from OKC for Markkanen.
OKC is in fantastic shape, but Presti needs to be bolder than he was at the trade deadline.
Well the question is does one of those teams in asset collection mode have a veteran or two that could help OKC. They are not going to get anything close to full value for him for sure
Could you make some sort of deal around Giddey For Sochan with potentially other pieces involved
That’s what I’m saying. His “value” as a player is very high but not necessarily good fits with rebuilding teams for a trade.
OKC-NYK bidding war for Hartenstein? OKC could do a 2 year overpay, like the Bruce Brown contract, so he’s off the books when they need to do all the extensions for young guys.
Hartenstein isn’t the 5-out shooter they want, but brings the passing / defense / toughness.
Hartenstein isn’t the 5-out shooter they want, but brings the passing / defense / toughness.
Very true. They need an initiator so freakin badly, can eliminate Fultz from their rotation and maybe the NBA altogether. What do they have to offer?
Suggs. Helps fill holes on both teams and would leave Orlando looking for more shooting but that’s easier to find than a plus facilitator.
Good framework for a deal. Orlando gets the better player and OKC gets the better fit.
Danny and Presti making a big trade would be fun. Two asset collectors. It remains to be seen whether Presti can shift gears and make that kind of consolidation trade.