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Tag Archives: James Harden
Shot Selection Round-Up: Part 2
Over the past week and a half, I’ve been slowly carving out time to go back and review my season-long shot selection numbers, using the metric Expected Points Per Shot (XPPS). If this is your first time reading about XPPS, here are the basics: Shots from different locations are provide different value. For example, a layup has higher chance of being made than a long two-pointer, and a three-pointer earns an extra point. We refer … Continue reading
Shot Selection Round-Up: Part 1
Shot selection and specifically shot locations have become a larger and larger part of the basketball conversation. It’s a topic of great personal interest to me and I’ve written quite a bit about it this season. To add an easily comparably quantitative element to the conversation, I also developed Expected Points Per Shot (XPPS). This metric is based on the expected value of shots from different locations and boils the quality of a player’s … Continue reading
The Myth of Danger
Every year as the playoffs approach one thing is guaranteed. A team or two always gets marked as “the team no one should want to face.” The teams normally fall into one of two categories. First the young up and coming team that does something better than anyone else in the league. Think the Grizzlies of a few years ago, who excelled at the slowdown grind it out game because of an elite defense. … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
With a short week and reserves aplenty, we took a week off from the Stat Study. Here are the stats you missed and trends that were ignored from the past seven days in the Association. Tuesday – In the last three weeks, Jimmy Butler has taken at least 10 shots on seven occasions. The Bulls are 2-0 when he does it against a playoff team with wins over Brooklyn and Miami, but are only … Continue reading
Objectivity, In A Subjective World
This week ESPN gave us a snapshot of what’s become one of their standard summer projects, #NBARank. As an end-of-season treat they put together an early preview, giving their panel of 111 contributors (myself included) the standard task of ranking each player on a scale of 1-to-10 in terms of ‘current quality.’ This time instead of evaluating the whole league we were just asked to assess a core group, assembling a list of the … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
This week I decided to take a look at the impact of free throws on the final outcome. Is getting to the line more important than taking advantage of the freebies when a team gets there? During a 54 game sample, I recorded the free throws attempted and the free throw percentage for every team. Winning teams shot an average of 77.1% on 21.9 free throws per game while losing teams made 76% of … Continue reading
Harden Week: The Ambiguous Rite Of Spring
Jacob Greenberg is the founder and editor of The Diss, an utterly unique voice in the cluttered cacophony of NBA basketball blogs. You can find Jacob on Twitter, @jacobjbg. rss feed widget When I first wrote about James Harden at the beginning of the season, I identified him as this season’s beneficiary of “the ambiguous rite of autumn”, which heralded the arrival of the newest superstar to the NBA’s pantheons of great. I labeled … Continue reading
Harden Week: Second-Round Maestro; Daryl Morey, James Harden, and Moses
Michael Shagrin is a senior at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, a contributor to Hickory-High and ClipperBlog of ESPN’s TrueHoop Network, and a sports columnist for The Dartmouth. Follow him on twitter @MShaggy to find out more about the frequent intersection of his two passions, basketball and politics. rss feed widget Daryl Morey is the Moses of the NBA advanced statistics community. For those unfamiliar with Exodus, God looked down upon the plight of … Continue reading
Harden Week: A Very Special Fridays With Fenrich
rss feed widget Fridays With Fenrich is a weekly feature here at Hickory-High, the aggregation of an extended, week-long email conversation on a single basketball theme, between myself and Kris Fenrich of Dancing With Noah. Ian: Among other things this season, James Harden has been a gloriously shaggy, bearded prism. Hold him up to the light, and sparkling new narratives pour out. One of those narratives that has slowly unfurled throughout the season is how Harden represents the … Continue reading
Harden Week: Wordplay
Over the past two weeks, I’ve gone to Twitter several times asking for people to contribute three-word descriptions of James Harden. Between that and Wednesday’s Harden Haiku, a rich fabric of lexicography has been built. I pulled from both the three-word descriptions and the submitted poetry, plugging nouns, verbs and adjectives into the word cloud above. Clearly there is one defining feature of James Harden that stands out above all others. I also collected a … Continue reading
