NYET THE NETS
-VS-
Game Time Start: 7:00 PM EST
Where: The Fieldhouse, Indianapolis, IN
Officials: T. Brothers, T. Brown, E. Lewis
Media Notes: Indiana Notes, Brooklyn Notes
Television: FOX Sports Indiana / YES
Radio: WFNI 1070 AM / Bloomberg 1130 AM
NBA Feeds:
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PACERS Danny Granger - left knee surgery (dunzo) NETS Keith Bogans - tight lower back (out) |
Avi Friedman: Pacers Mount Epic Fourth-Quarter Comeback to Beat Cavs The Pacers started the game off looking like they were ready to end the two-game losing streak, going up 20-8 with 6 minutes left in the first quarter. Then the Pacers got outscored 76-44 over the next 30 minutes while shooting 30.4% and allowing the Cavs to shoot 59.6%. It got so bad that I was starting to think that the Pacers might not even hold on to the third seed. The way they were playing, I thought they’d lose on Friday to the Nets, lose to the Knicks on Sunday, lose to the Celtics on Tuesday and maybe beat the Sixers, but already be locked into the fourth seed. Then, towards the end of the third quarter, Frank Vogel got himself ejected from the game to try and inspire his team. It didn’t look like it was working going into the fourth quarter. The Pacers were playing as bad as they had all game long. Then, all of the sudden, the Pacers started scoring some points. Then they started scoring some more points. Then they started getting a lot of defensive stops. Before you know it, Indiana went on a 17-0 run and cut a 20-point deficit down to 2. The comeback was led by George Hill (the guy that always stops the bleeding) and great defense. Over the final 8 and a half minutes of the game the Pacers outscored the Cavs 29-6, on a 2-for-15 shooting performance from Uncle Drew & Co. Kyrie Irving is one of the best fourth-quarter players in the NBA. Last year, for example, he led the league in clutch points per game (this year he ranks third). So it was good to see a Pacers team that has struggled recently in clutch situations force Irving into some pretty bad plays. He got trapped...CONTINUE READING AT 8p9s |
Tom Ziller: How important are assists in the NBA? Passing is becoming more important than ever in the NBA due to modern defenses. Yet there are plenty of efficient, low-assist offenses and inefficient, high-assist teams. What gives? Zach Lowe has an unsurprisingly fascinating look at how the Tom Thibodeau-style defenses that have taken over the league have affected offenses. The short version: shooting and smart passing are more important than ever. To counteract the flood- heavy defensive style that is the norm, you have to spread the floor and have players who can hit the open man with quick, decisive strikes. As long as advanced basketball metrics have been discussed, passing has been a bramble. It's lightly represented in the box score and comes with its own set of preconceived notions. Traditionally, we think of the traditional pass-first, high-assist point guard as very desirable: think Bob Cousy, Steve Nash and John Stockton. Yet many of the great teams of the past three decades -- the '80s Celtics, the '90s Bulls and the '00s Lakers -- had non-traditional point guards (like Dennis Johnson) or lead guards who basically sat in the background. Even in the past decade, you have two NBA champions -- the 2008 Celtics and the 2011 Mavericks -- with traditional, pass- first point guards. And even then, Rajon Rondo averaged just five assists per game. (Tony Parker's assist numbers have gone way up since the Spurs' last title in 2007.) But judging anything's importance based on its presence on championship teams is oversimplification. The problem with assists is that it's basically impossible to find evidence in any data that they help teams score more efficiently. In other words, the relationship between tallying more assists and shooting better as a team never seems to show up in the data. To wit, this map shows teams' effective field goal percentage and percentage of field goals assisted this season. If there were a strong positive relationship, the points would group around something like a 1:1 slope. Instead, it's basically a jumble. There actually is a small positive relationship between effective field goal and assist percentage. But it's small, and it's been small as long as assists have been recorded. And this is looking at assists and shooting percentage, the piece of offensive performance most closely tied (in theory) to effective passing. When you look for a relationship between assists and overall offensive performance, you have even more trouble. It basically does not show up in the data at all. This is strange, of course, because on an individual level there is a relationship between assists and conversion. Studies have indicated that players shoot roughly ten percent better on shots that are assisted than ones that are not. (That may be understating it -- the studies on that didn't control for fast-break opportunities or putbacks.) So a player benefits from getting set up for an immediate shot, but a team doesn't necessarily benefit by having a player who sets up players for immediate shots frequently. Strange, huh? And that's why assists...CONTINUE READING AT SB NATION |
Devin Kharpertian: Is Brook Lopez the best center in the NBA? Brook Lopez is the antithesis to what we believe a superstar should be. He doesn't look at the game of basketball as life and death. His waking moments don't revolve around watching Synergy or NBA League Pass. He readily admits that he doesn't watch a lot of basketball when he's not working or scouting opponents. You wouldn't accuse him of having a "killer instinct." He's a walking paradox: an awkward, technically sound, brilliant offensive talent, who sometimes seems like he has a passing interest in basketball to fund his comic book collection. He's a better writer than a leaper, and smarter than he lets on with his goofy public persona. Lopez earned his first trip to the All-Star Game this season as a replacement after an injury kept Rajon Rondo out, and now with the season winding down, there's another award in his sights: a first-team All-NBA selection. The award is voted on by sportswriters and broadcasters (though for some reason they haven't given a vote to stupid Brooklyn Nets fans who started blogging because they couldn't sleep and felt like watching John Wall highlights when I was in college), and Lopez has a shot for a few reasons. Writers may feel anathema voting for Dwight Howard given his off-court issues and team struggles. They may feel that Chris Bosh, Kevin Garnett, and Tim Duncan aren't "true" centers, an admittedly silly distinction. But he's also got a shot for the most important reason: because he deserves it. Everything that Brook Lopez could have reasonably improved on this season, he's done. He leads NBA centers in scoring while doing so at the most efficient rate of his career. His rebound rate of 13.5% is the highest it's been since his second year in the league, and that's while playing most of his minutes with Reggie Evans, a player rebounding the ball at a historic rate. (For the record: Lopez's rebound rate with Evans out of the game is 14.6%, according to NBA.com.) His defense, while far from perfect and dipping in effectiveness as the season wears on, has still improved to "good enough" status. He's blocking shots at the best clip of his career while turning the ball over less. According to Synergy Sports Technology, only four players in the NBA have scored more points per possession while using more plays than Lopez: LeBron James, Kevin Durant, James Harden, and Tony Parker. (Side note: that looks like a pretty solid All-NBA team, no?) Lopez's biggest improvement has arguably come in the area of the game he was already great at -- finding little spaces in the defense to get quick, easy baskets. According to Synergy Sports Technology, Lopez has scored 348 points on plays classified as "cuts" -- far and away the best in the NBA despite missing seven games. No other player has...CONTINUE READING AT THE BROOKLYN GAME |
Pacers Mike Wells @MikeWellsNBA Jared Wade @8pts9secs Tim Donahue @TimDonahue8p9s Tom Lewis @indycornrows |
Nets Tim Bontemps @TimBontemps Colin Stephenson @Ledger_Knets Nets Daily @NetsDaily The Brooklyn Game @TheBKGame |
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