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Why I Hate The Preseason
Posted on | October 20, 2009 | 12 Comments
(We interrupt these regularly scheduled predictions to bring you this emergency message)
I love the internet. I love that I can talk to people on the other side of the world as easily as I can talk to someone a block away. I love that you can find just about any information immediately. This is especially true as a basketball fan. Believe it, or not, there was a time when you had to wait for the newspaper to come to read about the NBA, and then you’d just get a story or two. I subscribed to Sports Illustrated back then, despite following no other sport other than basketball. It was quite difficult to get my basketball fix. Then came the internet.
Now, however much I love the internet, it does have it’s downsides, not the least of which is the decline of the correct use of grammar. Now, with everything being immediate, we expect immediate news all the time, and not just news, but conclusions, as well. The first time I really noticed it, in relation to basketball, was back when Kobe was in his third and fourth seasons in the league. More specifically, the playoffs. The problem with the playoffs, is that there are sometimes two or three days in between games, and in internet time, that’s an eternity. Fans yearn for information and sports writers are obliged to give it to them. After a good game, people were touting him as the next Jordan, after an off game, they were writing him off. It was ridiculous that people were trying to come to conclusions based on one or two games.
Now, some of you may be wondering what on earth this has to do with the Raptors. Well, it explains why I hate the preseason. With so little to actually write about, writers and fans alike start seeing too much into what are really meaningless games. Here’s one example:
“[DeRozan], shooting woes aside, has shown flashes in these pretend games. He’s willing to go to the rim (although it’d be nice if he’d be a better free throw shooter when he did) and his defence, while spotty, is not despicable.”
Now, Doug is usually pretty even keeled, so I was a little taken aback by the statement about his free throw shooting. You see, before Sunday’s game against Boston, DeMar DeRozan had gone to the line 30 times, and missed only 6 of them. That’s 87%. Now, he’s obviously not that good a free throw shooter, as his 3-7 shooting night against Boston showed, but the guy is still shooting an extremely respectable 78% for the preseason. But today, people’s memory are short, so anything beyond the last game is too far to remember.
Here’s another example:
“Pre-season is pre-season, but a glance at the league standings more-or-less corresponds with the general expectations of what the standings will look like when the ball goes up for real: In either conference there are no projected top-four seeds that are simply stinking it up…..The bottom third of the standings in each conference look about right, with clubs like Minnesota, Sacramento, Memphis, Jersey and Toronto all struggling. The Raptors better hope they’re the exception.”
Now, I realize that Grange was not making grand conclusions based on the standings, but he was certainly not giving all the information. This is how Raptor fans get in a tizzy (I think that’s the first time I’ve ever typed that word). Someone writes something, and fans latch onto it and get WAAAY ahead of themselves.
Let’s look at this logically. Grange mentions that teams like the Lakers, Spurs, Orlando and Boston are all at the top, and Cleveland is not far behind despite battling the flu. Well, without being too blunt…DUH! Those are all veteran teams with the majority of their core intact. Even their bench probably knows all the plays pretty well. Is it any wonder they would play well, even in pre-season? Even Orlando, which probably had the biggest core change, has seven of their top ten players returning. The systems for the top teams are well in place, most of the players know one another, and most of the new players are veterans. And believe me, that makes a difference.
“When we were running through one drill with Rasheed, he’d say “oh yeah, that’s the one where Paul pops up here…etc, etc.” Many times Sheed would know the play better then some of our own guys!”
Doc Rivers, as reported by Raptors HQ
Read that quote again. It says a lot. There’s a reason that contenders like San Antonio and Boston always go after veterans to fill out their roster. Even if they don’t know the plays, they know how things work and require very little maintenance.
Let’s look at the Spurs, who added four players, three of whom will be heavy rotation players (Richard Jefferson, Antonio McDyess and DeJuan Blair). McDyess is a 13 year veteran, Jefferson an 8 year veteran, and both of them ironically have been to the Finals where they lost against the Spurs. Even Theo Ratliff, who probably won’t play much more than 10 mpg, if that, is a 14 year veteran. My guess is none of them required much attention during preseason. In total, the Spurs have ten players with at least 5 years experience, and of the players who figure to be in the top eleven in the Spurs rotation, only two have fewer than 5 years experience.
In contrast, of the top eleven Raptor players, only four have 5 or more years experience (Turkoglu, Nesterovic, Evans and Bosh). And of the new players who figure to be part of the rotation, four (Weems, Johnson, Belinelli and DeRozan) have never played a thousand minutes in an NBA season.
And we haven’t even discussed the fact that it’s a new system that none of these players have learned before, taught by a coach who has been a head coach for less than a year.
Another thing that Doug Smith did, in his blog, was show the preseason records for the Raptors over the years and then how they did in the regular season. He did it to show how little correlation there was between preseason and regular season, but some readers realized that when they had their best season, they finished 6-1, and when they were a bad team, they finished below .500 in the preseason. Well, you can imagine the conclusions they jumped to. Well, a little digging would have brought up some interesting facts about that season…
- Minnesota went 5-3 in the preseason, and 32-50 in the regular season.
- Golden State went 5-1 in the preseason, but went 42-40 the rest of the way.
- Meanwhile, Phoenix finished with a 3-3 record in the preseason, yet somehow managed to win 61 games that year.
- Dallas barely made it through preseason with a 3-5 record, but won a league best 67 games.
Now please, tell me again that you can see some correlation between the preseason and regular season.
And let’s not forget that team’s make up their own preseason schedule, and can play anyone they want. Some teams go easy, others play tougher teams. Some teams try to win, and play their starters more than others. Speaking of which, of Bargnani, Bosh, Turkoglu and Calderon, the players who will probably play the most minutes on the team, how many times during preseason do you think they played at least 30 minutes?
Answer: Once. Total. Bosh played 31 against Boston.
This Raptors team is young, inexperienced, unfamiliar with each other, and are all learning a new offense and defense from a relatively new coach. Can anyone explain to me why anyone would think that the Raptors have a hope in hell of looking half decent during this preseason? Or why it won’t take at least a month to start figuring things out?
12 Responses to “Why I Hate The Preseason”
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October 20th, 2009 @ 11:51 PM
Unintentional comedy alert:
“Now, however much I love the internet, it does have it’s downsides, not the least of which is the decline of the correct use of grammar.”
You probably shouldn’t rail against other people’s grammar in the same sentence you add an apostrophe to the possessive “its”, which doesn’t require one!
October 21st, 2009 @ 11:34 AM
Michael,
re: the relationship which exists between pre-season W-L records and regular season wins
Since some Raptors fans don’t seem willing to accept it when someone like Michael Grange mentions this relationship, these are two links which might serve to clarify the facts at the heart of the matter:
1. http://khandorssportsblog.com/wordpress/2009/10/09/exhibition-game-results-in-the-nba/
2. http://www.82games.com/preseason.htm
Just because some uninformed people might like to think that the pre-season doesn’t indicate “anything” about the coming regular season doesn’t mean it happens to be an accurate observation.
October 21st, 2009 @ 11:35 AM
Sorry … that should be addressed to Tim, not Michael.
October 21st, 2009 @ 11:44 AM
re: “It was ridiculous that people were trying to come to conclusions based on one or two games.”
Believe it or not … there are some experts in a field who only need to take a close look at how something [or someone for that matter] works one time, in order to make an accurate assessment of its actual quality, relative to others in the same environment.
This is one of the characteristics which separates The Best in a specific field of activity vs Elsebody Else.
1. It takes Everybody Else a long time to reach a conclusion which The Best in a field ascertains with a high degree of accuracy almost instantaneously.
2. While Everybody Else makes an incorrect judgment if they try to come up with an assessment of a situation right away, The Best in a field is eventually proven To Be Right More Than Wrong in the assessments arrived at on first inspection.
Cheers
October 21st, 2009 @ 12:37 PM
I agree with everything you’ve said here. Everything. The Raptors are going to get murdered in November – the test is how they do in December. Really important month. That’s when they need to be gelling.
October 21st, 2009 @ 1:22 PM
khandor,
I’m not saying that preseason games definitely mean nothing, but because of the margin of error, it’s impossible to take anything out of preseason results. There are far too many examples of teams that have done well in preseason, only to finish in the lottery in the regular season, and visa versa. Any statistician worth his salt would throw out results like these because of the high margin of error.
This is the same reason you can’t take anything away from one or two games. The Best would never try and reach conclusions based on one or two games because there are far too many factors that come into play. The margin of error is far too great. A player, or even a team, can have two off games or two great games, so your sample size is simply not big enough to gather enough information.
As I wrote, you expect teams like the Spurs and Boston to do well, because they are veterans teams with veterans benches running a system that’s been in place for years.
Every preseason has an asterisk. You have to look at injuries, which players played heavy minutes and which didn’t. how many players are new to the system, their NBA experience of the players, what they did during their offseason, coaching strategy for preseason games, strength of competition. The list is endless. And when we’re talking about 5-7 games, a swing of just a couple of games makes a HUGE difference. What if Bosh and Turkoglu were available for the games against Philly, and the Raptors won those ones? Toronto would now be a much more respectable 4-3, the same record as Cleveland and Houston. What if Battier’s shot had been off when the Raptors played Houston, and they ended up winning that game? There are just too many variables that have little to do with how good the team will be throughout the entire year, especially a young, inexperienced and new team like the Raptors.
October 21st, 2009 @ 1:35 PM
GM: “You probably shouldn’t rail against other people’s grammar in the same sentence you add an apostrophe to the possessive “its”, which doesn’t require one!”
Uh…ya, I meant to do that. I was trying to show people the type of bad grammar I was talking about. Glad you noticed. I was afraid it was too subtle. Also, I was dictating to my assistant, so the mistake is hers, not mine. She’s one of those young folks with bad grammar I was talking about.
October 21st, 2009 @ 1:55 PM
Tim,
re: 1 or 2 games make a big difference
The fact is … the Raptors lost those games.
The Best in a field of endeavour take ALL of the factors you mentioned above into consideration when they make an immediate assessment of the “quality” of a specific something/situation.
e.g. The Best evaluators of basketball ability can watch different players in a game or practice setting as little as one or two times only and … whether or not the ball goes in the basket with a high degree of frequency during that specific session … tell you with a great deal of accuracy which players will be able to knock down those same shots when the brights lights come on at crunch time.
re: the role of statisticians and probability in the game of basketball
In general, it’s a mistake to think that statisticians can correctly interpret, “How the NBA game actually works,” by attending to such things as “margins of error” when applied to number-crunching.
e.g. The numbers say that Charlie V may have a better chance of getting a key rebound for his team than does Jason Maxiell, but … does this mean that Charlie V should be considered a better rebounder than Jason Maxiell?
[IMO, the correct answer is, "No," he shouldn't.]
One of the other things that The Best are capable of doing is identiying correctly which results should be considered as “the outliers”, in a given situation. Once this component is added to the mix, the relationship between Pre-season W-L Records and Regular Season Wins, in the NBA, becomes quite apparent.
Cheers
October 21st, 2009 @ 2:03 PM
Tim,
re: “Uh…ya, I meant to do that. I was trying to show people the type of bad grammar I was talking about. Glad you noticed. I was afraid it was too subtle. Also, I was dictating to my assistant, so the mistake is hers, not mine. She’s one of those young folks with bad grammar I was talking about.”
Unless your assistant is also the actual owner of this blog, then, you shouldn’t fall prey to laying “blame” on her for something like this.
A lack of personal accountability is a major problem in our society, in general.
October 22nd, 2009 @ 6:01 AM
Well said, Tim. First time I’ve read your blog. I’ll check back in (bookmarked – saw the link at RR, btw), but this column was balanced and straight-ahead. Agreed with everything that you said here, but as far as the Raptors go, the last paragraph really said it all.
October 23rd, 2009 @ 8:45 AM
khandor,
One should follow the statistics blindly either.
Especially when the exceptions to the rule are as common as the rule.
“The Raptors lost those games” – Were those the “Raptors” on the floor who will be playing this season? Or were some of them just guys wearing Raptors uniforms?
October 23rd, 2009 @ 9:30 AM
brothersteve,
Not to be a smart-aleck, but …
The players wearing Raptors uniforms are in fact the Raptors.
- injuries and absences are a fact of life in the NBA for every team
- when the Back-ups of Team A play against the Back-ups of Team B, what you still get a chance to see reveals a great deal about the way in which those two specific teams actually work
To discount the pre-season in this league … when evaluating where teams stand relative to one another, as the regular season is set to tip-off … is simple folly.
e.g. The Meaning of Pre-season Stats
cheers