Why pay good money for coaches and why complain about the young guys' playing time when just plain ol' science will do the trick?
"He's learning through osmosis," O'Connor said of Favors, acquired last season from New Jersey in exchange for Williams. "Each game he gets better." (DN)
More from Kevin O'Connor:
Here are his thoughts on the young guys, in a nutshell:
Gordon Hayward: We even think he's gonna get better.
Alec Burks: He's gonna get better because he wants to.
Enes Kanter: Better than could be expected.
Derrick Favors: We think his growth's ahead of him. (UDQM)
I wonder, though, if there was some mix-up in the editing. In the middle of the interview, KOC says to Tom Kirkland, "Tom, if I sat here and said to you, we were 27-26 and we've got seven more home games and six more road games and we're a game out of Playoffs right now, two days ago we were in the Playoffs and it's gonna go back and forth like that, what would you have said?"
Kirkland responds: Play all these young guys, I'd take it.
KOC's response (nodding in affirmation) I think most people would.
If you haven't, give
Salt City Hoops' podcast with Kirk Goldberry a listen. Goldberry works with statistical visualization and gave a presentation at the most recent Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.
On Goldberry's
site, he recently broke down mid-range shooting in the NBA (most frequent, best, and worst) from different areas of the floor.
If you scroll down a bit (no permalinks), he breaks down mid-range shooting by player. Based on his stats, Big Al shoots the 5th most mid-range jumpers in the league (ranking first in two out of eight areas on the floor). Al is also the best shooter in the league from one of those two areas.
CJ, meanwhile, is the third worst midrange shooter in the league overall. Al is third worst in the league from one area, while Millsap is the worst in the league from another. Pretty interesting stuff.
Yucca Man has shared his [sleepy time] dreams in this space, and while my real life isn't anywhere as interesting as his subconscious world, I thought I'd just share a slice of my life.
I don't know what SLC Dunk and Twitter has done for anyone else, but they've given me the opportunity to talk about the things that interest me most with people that are just as interested in these topics as I am. In real life, the closest I have to that is friends that like hoops in general or other teams.
And so I found myself at dinner, trying to pretend to listen to the conversation as my friends rambled on about their nanny problems and kids and the effectiveness of different brands of face creams and other crap. To amuse myself and/or keep myself sane, I started interjecting into the conversation random comments starting with "I tell you what," silently saying "Drink," and then drinking. Later on, "Are you serious!" also became fair game for drinking. I could never find a way to work "in this league" into the conversation, though.
So...if there are problems with this DB, now you know why.
