Save some for after the break!

Boobie Gibson took 20 shots in tonight’s Rookie/Sophomore game, making 11.  Every one, all 20, were 3s.  Wow.  Undoubtedly, that would make for a regular season record, and to make them at that clip makes it worth every shot.  Tonight it earned him the MVP trophy.

Tomorrow he trots out for the 3 point shooting contest, as the favorite in my eyes.  I’m not saying he’s one dimensional.  He is.

See you during the game Sunday with our mid-year grades.

(Quick afterthought: Jordan Farmer had 12 assists, mostly from feeding Boobie. I’m not saying I wish we could redo the 2006 draft, I’m just saying we took Shannon Brown 25 and Farmar went 26. And that I wish we could take that one over.)

Deep Thoughts By Ori Handy

As I walked into work today, I was thinking of all these thoughts and notes I had for the blog about specific players, and the team in general.

As I sit to write this, I remember none of them. Hopefully they will come to me.

(note: Because I can, I’m leaving my responses inline. You miscreants can use the comments. -Matt)

LEBRON:
Matt stole some of my thunder with his previous post about Lebron’s Yankee shoes (scroll down if interested). I couldn’t have really said it better myself. Why is this even really a story? Like Matt said, we all like NYC, it’s probably the coolest city in the USA (maybe some douches in LA might argue with that). And frankly, If there was a REAL world series of baseball and we had to pick any major league team to represent the US year in and year out on the world stage, Wouldn’t the Yankees be everyone’s choice? So in short…whatever.

I was watching Youtube videos the other day, and watched Lebron’s game against Utah (in Utah) where he scored 51 points, and the Jazz crowd in the end basically stopped caring about their team and only cheered Lebron. I think sometimes we forget how awesome it is to have Lebron here. We are fans of Cleveland. If Lebron James retired right now, would anybody really argue that he isn’t one of the Top 10 players of all time? That’s ridiculous.
(If he retired right now, no. He hasn’t done enough. But he’s close, and we get the point. He’d be the NBA Sandy Koufax.)

BOOBIE:
This is intended mainly for Matt because he’s so hard on the little guy. But if you watched the game against the Miami Heat, the announcers basically contradicted all of Matt’s issues with the boobster (Matt believes that Boobie is not yet a good defender and that he’s not quick enough to guard PG’s but too small to guard SG’s). Since I’ll assume that Matt watches more Cavs than the TNT announcers do, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt but two comments they made flew in the face of Matt’s criticism’s of Boobie.
1. After driving past Chris Quinn to the basket for a lay-up: “The Heat have nobody who can stay with this athletic guard, he is just too quick.”
2. After bodying up Ricky Davis: “Gibson is a solid defensive player, in last year’s Eastern Conference Playoffs he did a great job guarding Chauncey Billups and taking him out of his game.”
(Chris Quinn is the one player Boobie can beat off the dribble. I believe I mentioned that in my Heat recap. According to the TNT guys [Reggie Miller, the Spurs game] Boobie isn’t even the top-notch shooter we need. As for his D, I should have given Boobie some credit when I mentioned DJs improvement. They’ve both been solid. But then, we haven’t faced the glut of big PGs we did early in the year. I watched the Pistons series and I remember Hughes’s length taking Chauncey out of his game, not Boobie’s… existence.)

DAMON JONES:

I still hate him because he’s been a distraction, but he’s been much better as of late both on offense and defense.
(Amen!)

ERIC SNOW:

Have we all forgotten about him? Why is he getting 0 minutes? I know he’s not a great offensive option, but in close games (which we’ve had recently) I would much rather see him out there than any guard we have on this team to get a defensive stop.
(My guess is that he’s noticably older and slower now. Plus what we’ve been doing works, so why screw with it? I think of him as an assistant coach.)

Z:

We need to use him more. There is no doubt in my mind that he is the second best/most important player on this team.
(We’ve definitely gone away from the “throw it inside for the first 3 possessions” offense. Whatever inspires and allows him to take his one man show to the offensive glass needs to happen more often.)

ANDY:

We should already begin working on a new contract after this season. After Lebron and Z he is the next most important guy on the team. You can just tell that Lebron loves playing with him, the fans love him, and he is always the hardest working guy on the floor. If he continues to work on his offense and can average 12 pts a game, I have no problem signing him to a 5 year 50 mil deal.
(5 years, 50 mil still scares me, at least while Hughes is on the books. I’m guessing Ferry plans to follow the Spurs model of 3 well paid stars supplemented with veterans and spare parts. 10 mil per means Andy HAS to be in that big 3. We would NEED his offense or he just turns into another Larry Hughes.)

SASHA:

By far the most interesting guy on this team. I can’t really make sense of him. There is no doubt that he is the second most skilled player in this team. He is a solid outside shooter, super athletic and can play solid defense. I tried to think of a guy in the league that best compares to him and I came up with Mike Miller. If you think about it, they are pretty much the same player. Except Mike Miller is on the US Olympic team and Sasha has been struggling to get crunch time minutes. It seems as if Sasha still doesn’t get “it”. I’m not even sure what “it” is, but there is no reason that Sasha shouldn’t be what Larry Hughes should have been which is a guy who plays good defense scores about 18 pts. a game and grabs 5 and 5.

Last year, when Sasha got hot, Lebron was saying that he was telling everybody how good Sasha is and that they match up in practice everyday. He should be great. What’s his deal?
(Sasha has been none of the above so far this year. But Lebron seems to love him. Too bad love doesn’t build a house the way all those bricks do. I hope he turns it around.)

WIZARDS:

Tonight we play the Washington Wizards. A team that is actually pretty good (really no drop off at all after losing Gilbert “Agent 0″ Arenas, which enforces my feelings that the Cavs should NOT go after him as a free agent or trade.) The Wizards are led by Matt’s Man-Crush Caron Butler and the very underrated Antawn Jamison. Should be a good game and a chance to see how we stack up against a good team that won’t quit. Hopefully, like last game, other players step up and Lebron won’t have to carry us. We will see!
(I’m interested to see if Lebron Ds Caron. I expect Caron to be on Lebron, but I’m guessing we’ll protect Lebron early by sending Sasha at Caron.)

Go Cavs!
(Watch the Cavs and every NBA game this week on the free preview of NBA league pass.)

Hughes > Boobie ?

My eyes doth decieve.

I watch the Cavs and jump on the crowd mentality of “Hughes is teh suck!” and “Boobie is my baby!” But the numbers looks us all the eye and offer a quick kick to the shin to the contrary.

I was kicking around 82games.com looking at the Cavs stats when I noticed a slight change in the “Roland Rating” hierarchy.

The Roland Rating is a balance of man vs man production and team +/-. It’s roughly calculated by doubling the difference between a player’s productivity and there counterpart’s productivity, then adding his average +/- number and dividing by 3.

Hughes has just barely eclipsed Gibson, by a one tenth of a point, largely on the power of his defense. While his own production, in terms of PER is only 10, 4.5 points lower than Gibson, his opponent only manages 12.6, compared to Gibson’s man’s 21.3. Gibson makes up a lot of ground through his +/-, largely a part of playing more minutes alongside Lebron. (Boobie has played 605 minutes with Lebron, for the 2nd best 2 man +/- on the team. Hughes, only 266.)

I assumed the Roland Rating wasn’t tell much of the story, so I started looking elsewhere – next to my 2nd favorite deep-dig stats site, Knickerblogger.net, where things started to straighten out.

First, Hughes is up 1.5 points per 40. Looking further along the stat line, you can see that that is largely a product of Hughes’s usage rate, a mysterious stat the measures the number of touches a player gets per team possession while he’s on the floor. Hughes is a full 50% higher – his 22.6 trails only Lebron and ball-hoggin, trash-talking, turnover machine Shannon Brown (25.5).

Further look at those in depth “deep” statistics shows that Boobie assists much more than Hughes while turning it over only slightly more commonly. Hughes rebounds slightly better, but Gibson has a vastly superior edge in every shooting metric except for free throw shooting.

What it seems to shake out to is that Mike Brown has found the right formula bringing Hughes off the bench.

Gibson thrives off of being the support player alongside Lebron. His numbers certainly aren’t those of a player who can carry the team for long stretches, but for when space is created for him.

Hughes, on the other hand, offers a change of pace. Dreadful as he looks, he brings some positive numbers. He offers a slightly disruptive force defensively and is able to turn touches into points. Clearly he’s not the caliber player who contributes big numbers, but off the bench he should fill the void while Lebron rests.

I’ll never trust the numbers 100% in basketball. It’s too much of a team game. Still, for all the love we pour onto Boobie, Hughes can’t be that awful to be in the same ballpark numerically.