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Tag Archives: Rajon Rondo
Mike Conley, Top 5?
The Memphis Grizzlies are playing as good a brand of basketball as any of the eight teams left in the NBA playoffs, with the emergence of Mike Conley being a big reason why. But when Tony Allen, following an emotional road victory in which Conley led the way (26 points, ten rebounds, and nine assists), declared that his floor general was “one of the top five point guards in the league,” it smelled a … 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
Game of the Week: Miami Heat at Boston Celtics
Hello again, Hickory High. Sorry I wasn’t around last week. I was in Istanbul. And the first thing I saw when I got out of the airport was a giant poster of Hedo Turkoglu, the Turkish Michael Jordan. Hedo gets a pretty bad rap because we feel he hasn’t reached his potential. There were moments when he was in Orlando when it seemed like he could be a key player on a contender, but … Continue reading
Fridays With Fenrich: Reading Between The Lines
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. This week Kris and I worked on the Hickory-High Question Of The Week. Ian: You’re starting a book club and the first selection is the classic Phillip K. Dick novel, ‘A Scanner Darkly.’ Which four NBA players do you invite to join? Kris: 1. Joakim Noah: By … Continue reading
New Look Celtics
Last night the Boston Celtics beat the Denver Nuggets in triple overtime, 118-114, stretching their win streak to seven games since Rajon Rondo went down with a season-ending knee injury. At the time, removing the Celtics’ All-Star point guard seemed like a fatal blow to a team that was already struggling to keep their heads above water. Despite a slew of off-season additions, efficient offense has been just as elusive as ever in Boston. … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
As mentioned in the previous edition of the Weekly Stats Recap, the suggested #StatStudy for this week was orchestrated to determine the impact of elite assist men. Perry Missner (@PerryMissner), a noted doubter of the importance of great point guards, estimated that 65% of the teams with a double digit dime man would win. As it turns out (for this week at least), Perry wasn’t pessimistic enough when it comes to the correlation between … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
For this week’s study my brother (@KurtSoppe) pondered if FG% or FT% was more directly correlated to the game’s final outcome. He hypothesized that both FG% and FT% would be consistently higher for victorious teams, with the stronger correlation being found in the field goal percentage. In support of Kurt’s guess, winning teams shot an average of 47.9% from the field while losing teams shot only 42.3%. Winning teams shot better than 50% from … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
This week I had a stat request from Jesse Silverman (@JesseBeau), a Cortland intramural champion and defending March Madness king. He wondered if the number of double digit scorers was directly correlated to victories, guessing that winning teams would have more double digit scorers in each game. As it turns out, there was not a considerable difference in the number of players in double figures for winning and losing teams. Over this holiday week … Continue reading
Weekly Stats Recap
For this week’s study I took a look at how often (and by how much) winning teams lost individual quarters. For the 52 games played this week, the victorious team lost an average of 1.2 quarters per game. This indicates that more winning teams lost at least two quarters than winning teams that won/tied every quarter. In quarters in which the eventual winner was outscored, they were outscored by an average of 4.97 points. … Continue reading
