The Point Four-ward: Expectations and Chips

Since Robert’s on vacation this week, I’m filling in to author this week’s Point Four-ward: four things I’m thinking about as the Cleveland Cavaliers are just a couple wins from an NBA championship.

1) Matthew Dellavedova belongs to all of us now. “On Wednesday, Dellavedova had the best-selling NBA player jersey on Fanatics, the nation’s largest licensed online sports retailer,” ESPN.com reported. Dellymania has reached fever pitch.

Kyle Welch at WFNY summed up Delly fever well.

Dellavedova went to the Cleveland Clinic on Tuesday night after playing himself into dehydration and severe cramps, then showed up for practice; LeBron James endorsed Dellavedova for Australian knighthood; Dellavedova aborted Coach David Blatt’s attempt to put a minutes restriction on the recently hospitalized point guard (“No you’re not”); his hometown of Maryborough, Australia, announced they would name their basketball stadium the “Dellavedova Dome”; and coach Blatt told Northeast Ohio Media Group’s Chris Haynes that he was “full of ****” for questioning the legitimacy of Blatt’s faith in the point guard earlier in the season. And that was all in the last 36 hours!

Maryborough has gone “bunta.” Kids aren’t going to school because they’re up all night watching the Cavs. Closer to home, hardcore Cavs fans have become bewildered by throngs jumping on the Delly bandwagon. At work, yesterday, I walked into a conversation between four people who I’ve never heard talk basketball before. They were talkin’ Delly. People wondered why he had a “9” in some pictures and an “8” in others. I had to wrack my brain before I remembered that he gave up his number to Luol Deng last year (man, that seems like ancient history now).

@oldseaminer coworkers showing me Steph/Delly memes

— Ben Cox (@CoxSportsOhio) June 10, 2015

Normally, I have what the doctors call “wannabe hipster oppositional disorder.” Basically, anytime anything gets popular, I veer the other way. But in this case, I’ll make an exception because Delly might be my second favorite sports figure of all time. Also, just in case you’d forgotten, the folks here at C:tB have been singing Delly’s praises since he was a rookie.

Robert wrote about Delly’s breakout game, just three weeks into his rookie year: a moral victory over the Wizards.  Heck, over on Gotbuckets, We even named Delly rookie of the year!

His SWAgR of 3.3, derived from RAPM, bests all rookies, as does his 3.2 WAR based on ESPN’s RPM.  These are two of the best publicly available metrics and they both like Delly better than all the other rookies…

In back to back games against Washington in mid-November with the Cavs looking lethargic and disinterested, in stepped the undrafted rookie.  And he was the sun, a beaming ray of light on the otherwise morose Cavaliers.  To Brad Beal, he was like a fly on flypaper, white on rice, impossible to shake… I think Randy Wittman tried handing Beal a taser during one timeout.  Things started happening when Dellavedova was on the court, good things for the Cavaliers.  In those two games, Cleveland was -39 in the 44 minutes he sat and a glorious +39 in the 57 minutes he played.   And it stayed that way much of the season, with the Cavs being outscored by 7 points per 100 possessions during the 2700 minutes he sat, but torching opponents by 4 pp100p for the 1300 minutes he played.

There’s nothing to be done but give in to the madness of this amazing run. Let’s celebrate with a southern Australian news aggregator and their wonderful collection of Delly Memes.

2) We could try to figure out why Delly has been so effective and so captivating. It could be that people identify with a guy who is “unathletic” and “untalented.” Of course, the popular theory that he’s untalented is silly. His non-stop effort, his intelligence, and his focus are talents. In addition, his defensive base stance and footwork are as good as it gets. (Fundamentally, he’s excellent and has to have fantastic core and lower body strength — the speed with which he recovered from Green’s forearm shiver to deliver a hip check, and then recover defensively yesterday was jaw dropping). But he’s also completely the opposite of the expected norm in terms of skillset for an NBA point guard. He’s not a good shooter inside the arc. He’s a lousy finisher — his best “finish” is a 12 foot floater. He is just good enough as a shooter to keep on the floor from three. He’s not a great ballhander. He posts an almost 18% turnover rate (though his assist-to-turnover rate has been respectable throughout his career, it dropped to a “meh” 1.6 in the playoffs). But he’s a very good defender, always plays to the scouting report on offense and defense, helps his team rebound, generates extra possessions, rattles the psyche of his opponents, and rarely gets rattled himself.

But in all actuality, there might be no other team in the league where he could do this. He’d be a very hard player to put at shooting guard, and only the ability of LeBron to run the offense makes all of Delly’s contributions possible. On another team, he’d be a an eighth or ninth guy at best. But that’s what makes this all so compelling. Right now, he’s a guy who’s come from obscurity to play brilliant basketball on the highest stage. He’s Ricky Feature. He’s Linsanity. He’s Flutie Flakes. He’s Jim Craig. There is no gene for the human spirit.

3) Dellavedova’s play belies all current conventional wisdom about playing point guard in the NBA, and his success is just a part of a larger trend involving the surprising (to some) Cavaliers’ success. Few in the field of sports punditry, and even fewer in the analytics community, gave the Cavs much chance to win before Kyrie Irving’s injury and even fewer after it. FiveThirtyEight.com’s Neil Paine rated the Cavs’ Game Two victory as one of the three biggest upsets in NBA Finals history. One of two things is happening. Either the Cavaliers’ play in the first three games has been an extreme outlier, or most of the analytics models and “conventional thinking” were garbage flawed all along — generated by coastal intellectuals with a confirmation bias for a team they admired. I’m going to go with the latter hypothesis.

So many models rely on box score analysis. This is not a box score team right now. PER is one of many box score aggregation stats based on shooting and box score contributions. The Cavs second best playoff PER player is Timofey Mozgov, with 16.4. That’s barely better than “average.”

As David Wood noted earlier this year, so many of the Cavs best lineups look good only through the lens of on-court scoring differential. If you’re just going to look at box scores, the Delly, Shump, James, Thompson, Mozgov/Smith (to go big or small) lineups aren’t very good. But, they’re killing other teams when they’re on the floor this playoffs. It should be no surprise that they’re hanging with the Dubs. Some people just don’t get this.

As far as predicting winners, I’ve seen predictions and numbers throughout the postseason that make my head spin. More than a couple sites had the Cavs at 3:1 underdogs versus the Warriors, before the series started. What is going on here? For one thing, many analysts have to be using full season data to “grade” the Cavs’ talent levels and play, in a year where full season data is sketchy at best. Cleveland’s 19-20 start should be thrown out of their computers, but having talked with at least one analyst, that’s not always even possible. We simulate “series thousands of times based on our internal efficiency metrics,” he told me. “We run the numbers, not give our opinion. The math says that Cleveland got hot at the end of the regular season, but was simply not that great in entirety of the regular season. In a way, we are underrating the Cavs.”

In addition, as we’ve noted, Mozgov, Smith, and Shumpert’s pre-Cavs numbers from this year should be thrown out as well.  This kind of thing was obvious to Cavs fans when reading pieces like Neil Paine’s on the Cavs supporting cast, in which he posited that this was the third worst finals crew since ’85 (right above the ’07 Cavs and the ’99 Knicks). But there’s also another thing going on. To anyone who watched the Cavs much this year, it was completely obvious that LeBron was “dogging it,” “mailing it in,” and/or “slacking” at times during the regular season. I’m not even mad about it. I’ve come around. The amount of energy LeBron’s expending, and his constant sacrifice of his body and daily “rebuilding” is staggering. It’s no wonder he can’t exert that effort at all times in the regular season. I’ve asked for a happy medium in effort level, but honestly, next year, I’m not complaining.

To David Blatt’s credit, he didn’t go Thibs or Scott Skiles on the Cavs, running them through the ringer every night and every practice and exausting them. He didn’t demand maximum effort, he demanded consistent effort and focus. The statistical models that so many of these guys are using rely on the assumption that everyone’s trying their hardest all the time and playing up to their maximum level. The models might work well for high-octane regular season teams like the Hawks and Warriors, but there is no Bayesian function to quantify LeBron’s sandbagging.

4) All that aside. I’m still super nervous about tonight — more nervous than I’ve been an any Finals game so far. Steph Curry’s sudden late game explosion in game three worries me greatly, as does Steve Kerr’s coaching ability. As SI’s Rob Mahoney wrote, “The Warriors learn you and then break you.” There are plenty of tactical things Golden State could do: play David Lee, push tempo, trap, double team, go small, and push a rebounding advantage with those lineups, etc. And yeah, I expect the Warriors to come out like caged animals. Hopefully, Cleveland can use their aggressiveness against them — especially Draymond Green. But, what worries me most is that Cleveland got a lot of calls in game three (LeBron James slide tackle…) as a result of awful calls in game two. I could see the officiating evening up or go into the Warriors’ favor. The NBA always has a vested financial interest in making these series go as long as possible. Lord knows the Dubs set moving screens all the time and Draymond is a lunatic who fouls guys every play. It just takes a subtle officiating adjustment. The series is so close that Cleveland will have to adjust to the refs quickly tonight, and an officiating disparity again could hurt.

The other thing bothering me, is that the Cavs aren’t in their familiar underdog role, and I don’t know what to do with myself now that they’re in the driver’s seat. Matthew Dellavedova is a known quantity. LeBron is proving he’s still the best player in the world. David Blatt is no longer considered the world’s worst coach. Around town, people are talking like a trophy is an inevitability. It’s easy to play with a chip on your shoulder when you’re expected to lose. That’s harder to do when you’re expected to win. Expectations feel a lot heavier on your shoulders than chips. Someone on the Warriors please tweet something infuriating to take everyone’s mind off of this.

There is only one way forward: the same one we’ve had and this team has had all playoffs: 12 minutes at a time. There is only game four, and game four is all there is. Go Cavs.