Inertia is a powerful tool in the NBA. Even with all the forces at play, stars usually make boring decisions and stay with their teams or sign a contract with the highest bidder. But LeBron turned heads and signed with Cleveland, leaving Miami confused and apoplectic. It’s the dawn of a new era, but at least their experiment worked and if anything else, they’ll always have their titles on the mantle. Everything else is gravy or, possibly, revenge.
2014 in review
Miami was attempting mission: impossible in the NBA, hunting for the elusive three-peat. They rested Wade aggressively all season since all that mattered was the title. Their defense slipped, LeBron’s in particular, and people shrugged off a disappointing regular season by citing previous threepeat or repeat squads, who often slump during the regular season and turn it up in the playoffs. This was a team that was old the previous year and had no significant upgrades. At the end of the regular season, given the minutes they gave to everyone, they had an effective age of 30.6. Looking back at history, this would have been among one of the oldest champions ever.
The rest program with Wade was unsuccessful, and he was inconsistent in the playoffs, less efficient overall and looking a few years older on defense. The Heat met the Spurs again in the finals and the media gave Miami a fair chance at winning, but all the signs were there. In 2013 the Heat had the better adjusted point differential and a higher win total; the Spurs made it to the finals but Ginobili was hobbled. In 2014, the script had flipped, and, no surprise, the better team won: the Spurs. Although San Antonio was known for its senior status, they were able to inject new, younger talent straight into the pipeline like Leonard and Danny Green. The Heat relied on old veterans and their high-energy, aggressive trapping defense, susceptible to corner three’s, was a step too slow. Miami’s core was running on fumes, and after a small splash in free agency LeBron decided to go home. The reasons for him leaving are irrelevant; all that matters is that they have to move on.
Changes
Exit: LeBron James, Ray Allen, Shane Battier, Rashard Lewis, Michael Beasley, Toney Douglas, Roger Mason Jr., James Jones, Greg Oden, Joel Anthony, DeAndre Liggins.
Enter: Luol Deng, Josh McRoberts, Shawne Williams, Danny Granger, Shabazz Napier, Shannon Brown, Tyler Ennis.
The Heat are dropping a lot of names, but besides LeBron it’s mainly older role players and low minute bench warmers. Battier and Rashard Lewis are off to the wild blue yonder of retirement. (Lewis was last seen failing a physical for Dallas.) Ray Allen is probably in some cryogenic chamber somewhere waiting for a contender to tap on the glass and ask for his talents mid-season. Oden was a low probability bet, but for his contract and his potential it was worth a look. McRoberts excited few people, but he could have been a great fit with the Heat’s LeBron scheme as a floor spacer and passer. Deng’s the emergency replacement at small forward. He’s nothing like an all-star anymore, but it could have been worse. Shawne Williams is turning some heads with his shooting and could earn a lot of playing time. Napier was taken after LeBron mentioned him in a tweet … oops.
Player spotlight
Nearly a decade ago, Josh McRoberts was a coveted athletic forward recruited by Duke, and took part in a dunk throw contest with Gerald Green, Amir Johnson, and C.J. Miles. He’s had a disjointed career so far, bouncing around from team to team, earning a reputation as a dirty player, but found his place in Charlotte as a high-post passer and outside shooter. Via the bar chart below, McRoberts is a low usage, catch-and-shoot three-point shooter along with few free throws and pull-up shots. But he’s also a focal point on offense with above average rates in assists and touches. Also, he has a surprisingly high number of drives for a frontcourt player and as someone who doesn’t shoot often. That reads more like a pure point guard, not a power forward.
On defense, McRoberts has some trouble. He’s a poor rim protector, guarding few shots inside and allowing a high percentage. His block rate is low for a power forward, and he doesn’t generate a ton of steals to make up for it. His rebounding is league average and would be something you’d see from a small forward; however, there were fewer rebounds to grab on the league’s best in that respect and his career average is better. Josh’s eFG% defense is very good, but I would regard that number with caution and it could be misleading. The FFAPM stat is based on a two-year sample, and Charlotte revamped its defense over the summer, improving greatly; FFAPM can’t see those coaching changes and associated McRoberts with better defense since his playing time increased. Since historically his defensive numbers have been below par, I would guess that when engaged and with good coaching he’s an okay defender, but nothing exemplary.
Looking at the shot chart below, Josh has the profile of a typical, modern stretch 4 in the “moneyball” era, eschewing midrange jumpers. Josh has actually been shooting from outside the arc for most of his career, but last season was a breakout in terms of volume. He’s never been adept at shooting and he’s usually around league average. Early in his career he was a better finisher, but his vertical abilities have been reduced.
Charlotte wasn’t on TV much last year, so I hope the videos below (link’s also here) will be useful. In the first one, he sets up a couple times with the ball at the elbow, and he eventually drives to the baseline where he draws a defender in and throws it to Al Jefferson for an easy close-range shot. The second video is the real gem: Josh catches the ball in the post and when the Cavaliers screw up and leave a defender open in the corner, he recognizes this and without a clear passing lane he throws it behind his back around the defense to Chris Douglas-Roberts. The third and fifth videos are simple feeds to Al Jefferson, but take note that Josh is an excellent post-feeder and that he assisted him 69 times all season. In the fourth video, you see a little more of his screening activity. The assist was created after a hand-off to a teammate where also squares up for a screen, making the defender worry his man will drive around him; McRoberts used a lot of those hand-off/screen plays. He does that again in the last video. Finally, the sixth video shows Josh throw a quick pass to a running Neal.
Defense is harder to find videos for without the play-by-play tab working, but there are three good examples of his deficiencies in the playlist below. In the first video, Boozer posts him up, pushes him into the paint, and spins and finishes over him. In the fifth video, Boozer faces him up and drives to the rim, finishing over him again. And in the last video, Boozer is being defended by someone else but McRoberts is only a couple feet away and doesn’t come in with help defense. He’s at his worst defending shots in the paint. He’s not too small and he’s still fairly athletic, but he does not get up to contest shots well.
McRoberts has the statistical profile of a drive-and-dish, catch-and-shoot point guard, but at power forward this makes him a unique weapon. Most stretch 4’s are inactive players who rely on others to create for them, while Josh acts like an offensive fulcrum. He’s had a disappointing career, sullied by a lack of control and inconsistently — I wonder what LeBron truly thought of this play where Josh elbowed him in the throat on a drive — but his skills could be extremely important for a team with two stars reeling from the loss of another.
2015 projected
There are two functions dealing with LeBron’s loss and his effect on the team. One is simply his value as a player compared to the guys who will replace him. Since the Heat were lucky enough to pick up Luol Deng, an above average guy who should pick up most of his minutes where the rest go to below average guys, we can say this is like measuring LeBron by his value over an average player. Using a few different numbers, you can estimate his value over average at an absurdly high 15 wins. This drops Miami to the 0.500 level, assuming the numbers are right.
The other facet to consider is how Wade and Bosh will respond to different roles in the offense. This is an issue of “suppression,” the opposite of synergy with players who minimize each other’s values. At the time of the big three joining forces, it was one of the craziest experiments in basketball because you had two of the most ball-dominant, highest usage guys ever sharing the court along with a scoring power forward. Wade had the 4th highest usage rate ever in 2009 and the 21st highest ever before joining Miami; LeBron, in turn, had the 28th highest ever in 2009 and the 35th highest in 2010. The list of guys historically who used as many of their team’s plays as these guys did is basically Jordan, Iverson, Kobe, McGrady, Carmelo, Bernard King, and them. So when you force them to play together, you fundamentally change how they play, and for Wade this meant, even as a non three-point shooter, you have to learn how to play off-ball more. To his credit he developed cutting game and became one of the best wings at posting up, but to maximize his value you put the ball in his hands — thus, his value was suppressed, and Bosh experienced this too.
You can see how the effect translate to performance with how the metrics were rating them. PER isn’t perfect, but people are familiar with it. LeBron went from 31.1 to 27.3, and once he adjusted he averaged 30.5 in his prime years. He suffered the least as he still had the ball in his hands the most. Wade went from a high of 30.4 at the age of 27 to 28.0 and then 25.6 in Miami his first year. He averaged 24.0 the past three years at the same time he entered his 30’s. Bosh dropped considerably from 25 to 19.4, and averaged 19.3 over the adjustment period during the prime age range of his career. Via basketball-reference their Win Shares, which don’t value usage the same way and focus on efficiency more, dropped too.
Yet if the combination of these stars warped defenses so much it helped other players and opened lanes up for each other, we wouldn’t see that well in box score stats, but plus/minus stats might pick these things up. Turning to a more advanced model that predicts well, an earlier version of ESPN’s RAPM, Wade dropped from +8.2 on offense to +5.9 in 2011, and it never recovered. Bosh declined even further: +3.4 to +0.9. Even as the team fit better he never reached that mark again. Although some will argue a smaller role on offense leads to better defensive results, this is hard to see. Wade and LeBron hardly made significant leaps forward. Bosh made progress, but he has already rated well in 2010 and as a young big man he was due to growth anyway.
One way to measure suppression is to looking at how well the guys were playing before they came together and how well they were playing with each other right before the band broke up. Using one metric, translating their 2010 numbers to 2014 using an aging curve, Wade and Bosh lost 5.2 and 1.7 points of influence, respectively, per 100 possessions with no change in defense. Two of those points for Wade, roughly speaking, were probably due to injury, creating more similar effects on both guys. A lot of this is pure guess-work as we have so few players like these guys, and even fewer examples of teams like they had — Carmelo and Iverson were the only two I could think of from their time in Denver. Based on how Iverson did before Denver and his first year there, and how Carmelo did his last year with Iverson and his next year without him, the range is, again, probably 1 to 2. I would never claim certainty in this area, but it wouldn’t be crazy if Wade and Bosh were both a little more valuable on offense, blunting the impact of James leaving.
Elsewhere, the starting lineup is actually pretty solid and were it not for an awful bench they’d be a decently good team. Miami, surprisingly, rates as a better defensive team because of the switch of Deng and LeBron as well as the probable leave of absence from Ray Allen. McRoberts is okay defensively overall, and this is relative: they gave a lot of forward minutes to Rashard Lewis and Beasley.
Speaking of McBobs, were it not for Noah’s sudden explosion in assists, we’d have discussed his transformation more. He’s actually had a high assist for most of his career and he’s had those perimeter skills, but they were integrated into the team last season and Charlotte used him heavily in making plays as their point forward. One might have noticed his exceptional assist-to-turnover ratio last year, but a better measure, invented by John Hollinger, is pure point ratio. It gives more of a penalty for turnovers and does a better job with standstill players who don’t turn the ball over because they don’t dribble. Josh McRoberts rated high among players last season and was the highest ranked non-point guard by pure point ratio. He beat out such notable guards and offensive leaders like Curry, Tony Parker, and Calderon.
What he did was actually historic. Looking at the best pure point ratios out of every big man since turnovers have been tracked in 1978, and adjusted for pace so everything is set at 100 possessions per 48 minutes — this helps in the faster eras of the past where you could rack up more assists with more opportunities — no one had a better rating than McRoberts: not Divac, not Webber, not Garnett … no one. In fact, only two small forwards had better ratings: Allan Bristow in 1982 and LeBron James in 2010. Most big men had problems with turnovers. Bill Walton averaged 3.6 a game in his MVP season, and forgotten big man Jeff Ruland could hit 4 assists a game but he needed just as many turnovers. Josh’s passiveness in shooting helps him here, but he drives to the basket to pick up assists and noted passer Diaw is passive on offense too. (Volkov is a name few would remember. He had two short seasons in the NBA, and spent most of his time overseas. On the 1988 Soviet team, he led a team with Marciulionis and Sabonis in assists.)
Besides Chris Andersen, the bench is depressing. Granger’s already been tried on a couple teams and he’s failed. The Heat have hope for Napier and Ennis, but you don’t want to bet on non-lottery picks — or rookies at all. Shawne Williams is already 28 and has a career three-point percentage of 33%, which is where he needs to find his value. Shannon Brown should be grateful he’s still in the league, and he’s the only shooting guard on the roster. If injuries hit the starting lineup hard, things will get ugly.
Summary
If my ranking of the Heat leads one to believe I’m high on them, I’ll point to the sorry state of the eastern conference and the questions I have for everyone else. But this isn’t the Miami Heat sans LeBron James: Deng’s still a real, live NBA player, and free from the punishments of Thibodeau’s minutes and the horrors of a lottery-bound Cleveland team he could recover. McRoberts gives them a power forward with point guard skills and three-point bombing — that’s a unique gift and he could develop an amazing chemistry with Bosh and Wade. And Chalmers is still a useful point guard (on most nights) to round out the lineup. The last experiment of the LeBron-Heat era is to see how Wade and Bosh change without him. At the very least, that’ll be intriguing to watch and in a trashed eastern conference the playoffs are an easy bar to clear. Plus if the universe is kind we’ll see them play Cleveland in the post-season.
Wins: 43
Losses: 39
Conference rank: 4th
League offense rank: 19th
League defense rank: 7th
Edited 10/27/14
