While not as compelling considering that we have no friggin' clue who's going to be on roster, I thought I'd take a look at the D-League schedule and see some of the... erm... highlights.

I'm hearing that NBATV may pull the D-League games completely, which is fine, except for me screaming and throwing things and lighting buildings on fire. Other than that, no big deal.  Come on, Turner.  Don't show us the same boring promos and Ahmad Rashad fests over and over again. Give D-League a Chance!

Fri. Nov 28th:

Utah Flash at  Austin Toros: Two of the best franchises in the league go at it on opening night.  Toros might have Ian Mahnimi back, the Flash might have Morris Almond back.  Scoring galore.

Iowa Energy  at Sioux Falls Skyforce: Also on opening night, the Energy, who should have quite a bit more talent with their new affiliate Phoenix, take on the Skyforce, who always field a competitive team.  If DJ Strawberry is here and Skyforce coach Nate Tibbets manages to talk one of his speedy guards from last season back, it could be special.

Dec 5th:

Idaho at Austin: Finals rematch, this time at the ACC.  Should be a good test for both squads early.

Dec 7th:

Sioux Falls at Dakota:  The rivalry is reborn. This is the best rivalry in the league. Should be a good one, with a good crowd.

Dec. 11th:

Iowa at Erie: The Bayhawks finally get a homegame!  The expansion team opens with a five game road trip.  Welcome to being the furthest most east team in the league, Bayhawks!

Dec 25th:

Reno at Iowa, Dakota at Sioux Falls:  Apparently the schedule planners were sitting around going "How can we make sure that the players in Dakota, Iowa, Reno, and Sioux Falls hate us. I know! We'll have a Christmas Day game!  What, are you kidding me? FAIL.  You're going to seriously piss off the players with this, guys.

February 16th:

Ft. Wayne at Iowa, Austin at Anaheim:  Right after the All-Star game.  Expect a lot of hungover dudes.  At least they didn't schedule them for the Sunday after this time.

April 10th:

Colorado at Utah: This could be a playoff matchup, given the strength of the two systems.

I'll have more on this stuff once, you know, we know who's actually playing.

Former Clipper/Maverick/66er Nick Fazekas really shouldn't have gotten ditched.  He's got enough upside and made enough of an impact last season to stick on the clippers, who are short on bigs anyway.  But no.  Mike Dunleavy Sr.'s on-again, off-again reationship with the D-League continues.

If Fazekas goes back to the D-League, considering how close he is to a contract, it's likely that he'll end up with Reno.  He went to school at UNR, and is hanging out at the Bighorn facilities as a celebrity dance judge this week. Poor guy. Rough life. If his name goes into the D-League draft, expect him to be Reno's #1 pick.

Premature Evaluation looks at how certain rookies seem to be fitting in at this point in their very young careers, and what the next year looks like for them. It's based on an extremely limited set of information like summer league, and roster changes that we haven't seen in action yet.  So we're jumping the gun by far, and we're aware of it.  The biggest reason we want to do this is to look at just how different things seem after the useless summer league before the season.  A year from now, we expect to look back at these and be stunned by how wrong we were. But we're all about looking at things way ahead of time, and in that spirit, here's the first in our Premature Evaluations series, regarding Chicago point guard Derrick Rose. 

So we've taken a look at Rose's pure point skills and where they match up with Gordon and Hinrich.  Common consensus over at Blog-A-Bull seems to be that Hinrich is expendable because he's not a playmaker, and Ben Gordon is not expendable, because he's offensively solid.  Elsewhere, Bulls fans feel that  Derrick Rose is the next coming of something between Chris Paul, Michael Jordan, and Magic Johnson.  Now, I've made it pretty clear in other forums that I don't necessarily think either line of thinking is on the money. But for the sake of this analysis, let's throw that out completely.  

The Bulls are, as we all know, obscenely loaded at guard.  Well, maybe not loaded. How about overstocked?  Larry Hughes, jacking machine extraordinaire, Kirk Hinrich, king of the underwhelming, and Ben Gordon ... um.... yeah.  Ben Gordon (This is one of those "if you can't say anything that doesn't piss off Blog-A-Bull's readers, don't say anything at all" moments.)

Continue reading this post »

The following is an independent work based off of the previous work done by Tom Ziller for BallHype.com.  While Ghostface Ziller was kind enough to provide me with the resources for this analysis, he was not involved in this project, nor does this column present any data he supports. I'm basically piggybacking off of his hard work.

"Derrick Rose is not a pure point! I'm going to kick the next guy that says that in the nuts!"

This was me about three weeks before the draft, screaming at Corn in a Winston-Salem bar.  ESPN was having a little draft preview segment and I caught the words on the subtitles and immediately started freaking out.

This isn't a criticism of Rose, in fact, some might consider it a compliment.

Particularly when you start to look at Tom Ziller's BallHype Ballad for the Combo Guard.

In short, Ziller's analysis measures "pure" point guard tendencies and "impure" point guard tendencies, and creates a metric, which is then translated to a 100 point scale to analyze a guard's "purity." This scale isn't an efficiency scale like PER or even a Pure Point scale like Hollingers', which rewards assist tendencies as a positive metric.  Basically, it looks at the tendencies of NBA point guards without putting value judgments on them. It's descriptive, not good or bad. I cannot stress this enough, because it's easy to get caught up in that when you start looking at numbers. You have to examine it as a descriptive look at relative skills, not an analysis of how good or bad a player is at passing.

The result puts Kidd, Nash, and Calderon at the top, and Barbosa, Terry, and Ellis at the bottom.  So it passes the common sense tense.  What's interesting is where the Bulls' guards lie.

On the scale, seen here, Hinrich ends up as a 56, which is on the far end of combo guards, right on the cusp of pass-first guards. Gordon is, predictably, much lower, ranking in at about a 21 for last season, as well as his career. But that's Gordon's job, as a primary scorer.

But it got me thinking.  Where would Rose ift on this scale? Was I completely nuts in my perception that Rose's game focused on transition baskets and that he was much more of a scoring force than he was an assist passer? It's not that I think Rose isn't an all-world talent, it's that I'm concerned about his career being hurt by the Bulls trying to make him into something he's not.

What I wondered was where the rookies would end up on this scale.

After obtaining the necessary formulas from Mr. Ziller, I decided to compare the players based on their last year in college.  Now, this is a messy comparison, I'm in no way denying that.  You could choose to take their total college statistics, or just the freshmen years (a highly valuable comparison), or a differential-based projection of their rookie seasons based on previous cases (a dangerous projection I'm not willing to make).  I settled on their final year of college because I felt it best represented where they were when they entered the NBA.  This is an exploratory study, not a formal one.  If further work is going to be done on this, a comparison of both this metric and the comparative seasons is advisable.

So I took five point guards in the NBA, and analyzed their last years in college on the purity scale.  I decided to look at Jason Kidd, Steve Nash, Chris Paul, Deron Williams, and Baron Davis.

Here's how they shake out.

Now, the Purity Scale is only if you extrapolate them onto an average of NBA players, not college players.  So, if anyone's got some time and wants to develop a baseline average for college basketball players across time, that would be awesome.  For now, we're just looking at where they were coming into the season, so the second column, purity, is really the important analysis. Since this isn't a value based tool, but a descriptive tool, the third column can be used to look at comparisons between players in comparison to where they end up in the NBA.

Outside of Nash, who of course was a bit of a late bloomer as far as his passing prowess, this seems to match up with our conceptions. 

Now let's take a look at the rooks. I started with Rose, Mayo, Gordon, Bayless, Augustin, and Westbrook.  I threw in Chalmers later after his summer league performance and the needs of Miami, specifically.

So if we look at this, it's clear that the idea of Mayo running point may be a dangerous idea.  Rose is right about in the middle, which makes sense, and Augustin is considerably lower than you would anticipate him being.  Bayless is another player that if you look at this, the coaching proclamations about forching him to play point may be trying to put a square peg in a round hole.  Oh, and Russell Westbrook is in a pretty nice spot.  Let's look at the two lists together.

First off, you'll notice that most of the first round draft picks are more scorers than pure points.  Also, Jason Kidd is freakishly pure, not only in the pros, but college as well.  Also, Deron Williams is a pretty pass oriented guy.  We've been looking at the Heat and saying they need to find a guy to complement Dwyane Wade. Well, as far as skill set goes, not skill value, but skill set, Mario Chalmers is what they're looking for. Ditto for OKC and Westbrook. Hope the Bobcats are looking for a scorer, and dear Lord, despite what Corn tries to tell me, if this analysis has any validity whatsoever, don't let Eric Gordon go near the point guard position. 

Now, of course, you've got to look at growth potential. Nash of course made an atmospheric jump on this scale, but so did several other players, and that's just in this limited analysis. So, while any good statistician will tell you that any metric is merely one way of looking at the game, this is a particularly narrow look.  This is like looking at the Sears Tower in pitch black with a flashlight.  While it does provide us with some interesting concepts, it also must be taken with a considerably large grain of salt. I'm not saying this to backpeddle on the research, but there's a reason I'm not posting this on APBR, you know?  I think it's interesting, not predictive.

So that leads us back to our original question that led me to pursue this little endeavor.  Where does Rose fit in with the Bulls? With Gordon as low on the scale professionally, and Hinrich as mid to high, looking at those two's college numbers should produce a similar result which will validate me and let me gloat, right?

Oh, hell.

Take a look at the three.

Well, ain't that a doozy.  So Hinrich goes from a 27 to a 56, while Gordon goes from a 32 to a career 21.  And Rose is more of a pure point than either of them.  A bunch of ideas spring to mind here.  One is the effect of coaching on players.  The second is that Rose could end up going either way.  He could move more towards a negative purity (which is not bad, but more scoring oriented) and be the primary scorer the Bulls have been looking for.  Or he could focus more on his passing talents and become more of a pure point than Hinrich is.  Right now, this only shows that Rose is more of a centric guard on the scale than either of the main Chicago guards.

So to sum up, while this analysis is not meant to be predictive in any sense, it does illustrate the strengths of the rookies in comparison to other elite guards upon their entry to the NBA.  Further development might help to present a more accurate view point and provide a predictive scale for purity, but that's certainly a task better left to those more capable in statistical analysis than I. The realities are that the pure point scale analysis provides a descriptive tactic for examining the strengths of players upon entry to the NBA, and helps us to understand where they were at this particular point in time. It'll be interesting to compare rookie years of this year's crop with the rest of the guards discussed here in a year.

Special thanks to Tom Ziller for his assistance with this work, i.e. the actually hard work.

Hey, technology is awesome.  There's so many new ways to participate in online discussion groups, and the realm of communication between people gets wider every day. 

Of course, there are some ways in which the internet should not be used as a replacement for certain things.

Like, oh, say, letting D-League pres Dan Reed know you're interested in bringing a D-League team to Las Vegas (which is a whole can of worms unto itself) by leaving a comment on his blog. 

Go ahead, scroll to the bottom of Mr. Reed's latest post (which is interesting, but nothing groundbreaking, since he covered most of it in my last interview with him).

There you'll find:

"

Mr. Reed, My name is Alexis Levi: I am the owner of the LV Stars an IBL Team. I am the first woman in history to own a team and be a GM and CEO of a Mens Team. Though I am two years away form taking the next step, I want to start planning now. I would like to bring a D-League Team to Las Vegas. I know that you just started one in Reno. I have several investors that would like to see this happen since there is no NBA Team here at this time. Please feel free to google my name Alexis Levi and you can find out additional information about me. Please feel free to email me at (actual email given, withheld here).

Yeah, she's real. And while I think it's cool that she's the first African-American female owner of a men's club, she might want to think about trying another form of communication next time.  Like an email. Or a phone call. Carrier pigeon.  Smoke signal. Something.

Still, it'll be interesting to see how this turns out.  Stern wants an NBA club there, but if he can't get one, maybe a D-League club could serve as a warmup. We'll see.

You know, maybe with the Euroleague being broadcast on the web next season, these things won't bug me as much.  I'm not xenophobic or anything.  It just bothers me that guys with considerable talent and a passion for the game don't get a chance to live their dream while Kwame Brown gets $8 million over two years.  Stephon Marbury is making about 25 times what it would cost to get these guys to sign.  And that just irritates me.  I'm glad somebody out there values talent.

First off, Carlos Arroyo is of course, headed to Maccabi Tel Aviv. That article came across a little colder than I meant for it to.  I like Arroyo, and don't think in any way, shape, or form that the Magic should have dropped him.  I think capable point guards are hard to find, and that the Heat are being way too damn picky. 

Much more depressing, though, is that Pacers standout and D-League veteran Earl Calloway signed with Croatian Euroleague team Cibona Zagreb (Hat tip: Indy Cornrows). Calloway is a great point guard with good handle, offensive versatility, and defensive commitment.  That he hasn't gotten even an exploratory offer is really depressing, considering Jameer Nelson is a starting point guard in this league.

Ugh.

Number one response I got yesterday when I asked publically about what team was getting Milwaukee's affiliation?

"The Bucks are their own D-League team."

Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.

Here's the thing.  I feel like the league made a significant error in not working this out before hand.  Now, their hands may have been tied.  I'm not exactly sure what the rules are regarding the sale of D-League teams, whether they have to be approved, or what, but judging from Brandt Anderson said today in his blog (MUST-READ), it sure as hell doesn't sound like there's an owners' vote. So if Kahn just up and sold it, especially if he did it suddenly, the League had to react positively, even if they were unprepared.  However, if the League had acceptable prior notice on this, they should have had some sort of clarification.

The reason I say this is because it was Milwaukee. Ramon Sessions was the biggest D-League story last year, along with Lance Allred and the Miami Three.  This is a team that actually, you know, used the thing, and now they've got Skiles, who had a good relationship with Iowa, even though none of the players developed very well. I wouldn't mind if they stuck Orlando or Sacramento without a team.  Both of them are completely and totally ignorant that this "so called 'Developmental League'" even exists.  But Milwaukee has shown good faith in supporting the league, and deserves better than to be left hanging.

I know, I know, the season's not till November.  But from what I saw at Summer League? Lil Joey Alexander could use some time in the D-League, and it would be nice to have the staffs meet.  Skiles has used the D-League before, but its mostly been a "let's get rid of him for a while because he disgusts me."  You need to build a relationship.

Of course.

There is one more option.

Halifax has been trying desperately to get approval for the D-League.  Last I heard, there was some sort of breakdown, because President Reed went from "Hallifax, yeah!" to "Well, there's a lot to discuss."  Meanwhile, Hallifax joined the PBL. It's obviously not a long term move.   Ownership there clearly wants to get into the D-League, but my thought is it's going to take till next year when the worst kept secret is revealed and the D-League announces the Portland, ME and Harlem teams (You hear that, D-League? I'm on to you!).  Then they can have a northeastern division with Erie, New York, Portland, and Halifax. By the way, Halifax needs two ls. I'm just telling you. The one l bugs the hell out of me.

Anyway, so the other option is that with the sale, go ahead and approve Halifax. It hurts the burgeoning PBL (term used loosely, though I'm rooting for it), gives them another team to send MIlwaukee to, and while it's a bit of a distance for the other teams, they have a team in Rio Grand Valley, for God's sake.

So what are the other options? Well, the next option is to triple load a team.  Danger, Dan Reed, Danger.  Loading up three different teams' interests on one squad is not a good idea.  Does Reno sound like a good option, considering the Kings will never look at the Bighorns?  Yes.  But Reno's going to depend on the association with the Kings for marketing and promotional support, even if the Maloofs could give half a damn about it.  So you can't go there. You still don't want three teams vying for control. All that's going to create is distrust, which hurts the system. 

But let's say they opt for that. What are some sensible alternatives to Tulsa? Well, there's Fort Wayne.  Indiana can't afford to send down players because all their guys either get hurt or suspended, and they haven't shown that they understand how to use it anyway, even though it's only a few hours away. So that's good. That just leaves the Pistons. And therein lies the problem.  The Pistons LOVE the Mad Ants.  Chiekh Samb, Jason Maxiell, Amir Johnson, Aaron Afflalo, all have spent time in Fort Wayne.  Which means you're dealing with two clubs, in the same division, who both use the D-League, vying for control. That's going to get sticky.  What happens when Samb nails Mbah A Moute in the mouth during practice and injures him? Or vice versa? Samb's already been injured in the D-League.  Having it happen by a rival's player? Bad mojo.

How about Sioux Falls? Skyforce are a terrific squad. The Bobcats don't and won't use it.  But Minnesota had Skyforce coach Nate Tibbets on staff for summer league (NOTE: Look for an exclusive interview with Coach Tibbets on Monday! Only on Ridiculous Upside! VERY FUNNY. /shameless plug).  So we run into the same problem.

Iowa Energy? Yeah, that's Skiles' former club's affiliate.  Awk-ward.  No dice. Plus, I have some serious questions about Iowa right now.

Which leaves us with Colorado.  Denver's invested there, they have a lot of connections, but they still hardly use it. Elton Brown sat there under their nose last year and they still didn't pick him up.  The Nuggets have bigger concerns right now than their D-League affiliate.  What about the Nets?  The Nets WANT their young players on staff.  They don't want to send anyone down. They're good.  Plus, there's a strong connection.  The Bucks hired former Colorado 14ers' coach Joe Wolf (AKA ther tersest interview, EVAR, though I can't blame him for being bored with me) for an assistant coaching gig.  Makes sense.

The other option is Dakota.  Dakota's got a strong reputation for producing winning teams, and the coaching staff and organization are top notch, and it's close.  Plus Memphis and Washington ignore the D-League completely.  That's right, the Memphis Grizzlies, the one team that needs to concentrate on young talent more than any other, completely ignore the league specifically geared to develop young talent.  They're winners.  The Wizards need to send JaVale McGee down for a spell, but they won't.  The Grizzlies need to send Darrell Arthur down, but they won't.  Dakota makes for a solid option, particularly with how close it is.

So those are the best options for a third affiliate.

The other option is to give the Bucks a freebee.  Let them assign players to any team outside of the NBA-Owned three (Tulsa, Austin, LA), provided they get permission from the other clubs.  Skiles won't try and send him anywhere there are issues, and if the Bucks aren't comfortable with that assignment, they can yank him and send him elsewhere. 

Worst case scenario is to deny a team affiliation.  If you're going to do that, though, the list goes 1.Charlotte 2. Memphis 3. Sacramento 4. Orlando. 

I hope the league comes out with a policy on this soon, but I'm not holding my breath. I'd imagine we're not going to know for a while where the Bucks' assignments are headed.

UPDATE: Spoke to a league representative that informed me that the sale is still pending a vote.  Also, since the Sonics didn't move to OKC until just two months ago, the league didn't have notification before then.  So the League's off the hook, but it needs to find a solution pretty quick.

Well, you can't argue with tradition, apparently.  Renoans... Renoites... Renoes (?) know their Western Basketball Association history, my friends. The D-League unveiled the newest D-League team, The Reno Bighorns tonight.

Here's the snazzy new logo! Get excited! Be! Be! excited!

Okay, the logo's pretty cool.

I, for one, cannot wait for the first Bighorns vs. Mad Ants game. The clash of classic versus new age is simply amazing. 

Welcome to the D-League, Bighorns. Expect me to make lots of fun of your name. It's all in love.