From Luke Slippywalker @ Pistonforum.com A recurring theme among all the game threads here at Pistonsforum.com is Age. Playing our athletic youngsters; overplaying our aging core; relying on older veterans; matching up with a young opponent; it all boils down to the same thing. So with round one tucked away, I thought it’d be interesting [...]
From Luke Slippywalker @ Pistonforum.com After last years disappointing loss, the Pistons organization declared three goals for this season: reduce the starters minutes, develop its youth, and find a scoring option off the bench. As the starters stayed in games many fans thought they shouldn’t have, it was easy to get the feeling that this [...]
Introduction Enough of the 2007 / 2008 NBA season has elapsed for me to evaluate the best of the best by position and to put up a candidate for league MVP. The approach, like all things statsprocket-ish, is empirical (at least up to the end), statistical, and semi-complicated. Briefly, what I’ve done to rank players [...]
At the end of the 2005-2006 season three Pistons were in my list of the league’s twenty most underpaid players. (Salary relative to statistical performance, see the Rating Players section below for details of the methodology used.) Ben Wallace was the fourth most underpaid player, Tayshaun Prince the ninth, and Chauncey Billups the thirteenth most [...]
Looking at This Season – Tin Men From about the two thirds mark of the regular season, every nationally televised Pistons game began with a discussion of bench development. The Pistons were playing the bench more, were sacrificing regular season wins for player development that would help them in the post season. After hearing it [...]
Most teams have played at least one third of their games by this point in the season. So, it seemed time to do some ratings and see who is surprising us this year and who has fallen into the dust. In the tables following you will find players ranked by Sprocket Points. The key measures [...]
Twenty games in the 2006/2007 edition of the Detroit Pistons are four games worse than last year at this time with a record of 13 up and 7 down. That’s good enough for the eighth best record in the league and second best, behind the upstart Magic, in the East. Eleven of the first twenty [...]
One reasonably accurate way to think about the overall health of the NBA is through analysis of the average television ratings for the Finals. Higher ratings mean more fans and more money for the owners and subsequently the players. Over the past 31 years the Finals’ broadcasts have averaged a 12.5 rating. This means that [...]
Introduction This summer the unthinkable happened. The best starting five in the league, the 2005/2006 Detroit Pistons, ceased to exist. Pax and Skiles came a calling, and Big Ben went a walking. Ben Wallace. Joe Dumars. Mr. Davidson. Scott Skiles. John Paxson. Space aliens in braids. Pick any two, add the expletive of your choice [...]