2010 Round One Series: Oklahoma Thunder vs Los Angeles Lakers: How the Thunder are Challenging the Lakers

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SCALE FOR REGULAR SEASON REAL PLAYER RATINGS
Perfect for all Practical Purposes / Major Historic Super Star 1.100 and more
Historic Super Star 1.000 1.099
Super Star 0.910 0.999
A Star Player / A Well Above Normal Starter 0.830 0.909
Very Good Player / A Solid Starter 0.760 0.829
Major Role Player / Good Enough to Start 0.700 0.759
Good Role Player / Often a Good 6th Man 0.650 0.699
Satisfactory Role Player 0.590 0.649
Marginal Role Player 0.530 0.589
Poor Player 0.470 0.529
Very Poor Player 0.400 0.469
Extremely Poor Player and less 0.399

The User Guide for Team Grids is here.

THE LAKERS-THUNDER SERIES
One interesting thing about this series, which is at the moment two games to one in favor of the Lakers, with all games having been won by the home team so far, is that the Lakers' players other than the starters and the best non-starter are not as good as those for Oklahoma. Not counting historical superstar Lamar Odom, the Lakers' non-starters are practically scrubs compared with the Oklahoma non-starters.

In terms of actual number of players, due to injuries and due to having too many disappointing players, the Lakers don't have as many playoff quality players (those whose ratings are greater than .600) as do the Thunder! But Phil Jackson likes to have a nine or even a ten player rotation in the playoffs because he knows those extra "wild card" players are sometimes secret (and sometimes not so secret) keys to tough wins in the playoffs. Alas, Phil is not a happy camper this year because there is no way in hell he can run a nine or ten man rotation.

Shannon Brown and Jordan Farmer are decent but definitely not outstanding guards. The injured 2-guard Sasha Vujacic was just a role player this year, but every one of the mighty Lakers who play in the playoffs are supposed to be better than mere role players, Derek Fisher included.

Coach Scott Brooks (who is the NBA official Coach of the Year) is, chances are by accident, conducting an unusual experiment where the non-starters are about as good as the starters (in fact, they are even better in this case).

Incidentally, Quest for the Ring does not have a "Coach of the Year," but we do annually give Real Ratings for coaches that are based on the coaches' entire NBA coaching careers. See here for the 2009 Report.

"Coach of the Year" is not a very meaningful thing because coaching is complicated and subject to a lot of luck (for example, do you have good players or not?). The only truly meaningful way to rate coaches is over their entire careers. But of course, coaches who have been coaching for less than about five years don't have enough performance data to have a Rating that is high quality statistically, but we have a few tricks we use to improve the quality of their ratings so that we can include those newer coaches in the annual Coach Rating Report.

All of that said, it sure would appear that Scott Brooks is a fine new coach; he certainly seems to be one of the more intelligent coaches, which by itself is an important factor. If you don't have a smart coach you can generally forget about winning the Quest for the Ring. Brooks was a point guard for ten seasons in the NBA and point guards are supposed to be smarter than the average player.

THE MUCH IMPROVED THUNDER
Firstly, note that another interesting thing about this series is that the Oklahoma non-starters are better than the Oklahoma starters!

Secondly, check out last years' Thunder Ratings:

Kevin Durant OKC 0.876
Thabo Sefolosha OKC 0.820
Joe Smith OKC 0.780
Russell Westbrook OKC 0.753
Chris Wilcox OKC 0.731
Nick Collison OKC 0.716
Nenad Krstic OKC 0.716
Malik Rose OKC 0.697
Johan Petro OKC 0.662
Jeff Green OKC 0.661
Robert Swift OKC 0.596
Earl Watson OKC 0.590
Kyle Weaver OKC 0.578
Damien Wilkins OKC 0.491
Desmond Mason OKC 0.482

First notice that last year's Thunder had too many players for there to be much of any chemistry to develop.

Second, compare last year to this year. For the following, the first rating is last year and the second rating is this year.

Kevin Durant: .876 to 1.050
Russell Westbrook: .753 to .919
Thabo Sefolosha: .820 to .596
Jeff Green: .661 to .675
Nenad Krstic: .716 to .644
Nick Collison .716 to .806

Durant at small forward and Westbrook at point are up huge from last year to this year and have become an historical superstar and a superstar, respectively. Collison is up big and is a solid starter (who doesn't start because Jeff Green is starting at power forward). Collison should be starting and if he did start the Thunder would pose a slightly greater threat to the Lakers than they already do.

Or if not Collison than Serge Ibaka should start at center over Nenad Krstic. Due to chemistry and due to the inherent risks of playing rookies in the playoffs, I wouldn't go so far as to say that both Collison and Ibaka should start over Green and Krstic respectively, but at least one of those switches would have to be made if the Thunder really wanted to defeat the Lakers in this series.

But Brooks is doing the next best thing to starting Ibaka or Collison; he is making sure they get playing time equal to or greater than the starters. For example, in the game three win over the Lakers, Ibaka played 27 minutes and Krstic just 16. At the four, both Collison and Green played 28 minutes a piece. So there is some nice work by the Coach of the Year, for you.

The Thunder did have one big disappointment this year, Thabo Sefolosha at 2-guard, but that position is where relatively low ratings are often a fact of life that you can offset to a good extent. If you were to judge just from this year, the rookie James Harden should be starting over Thebo Sefolosha in this series. Rookies at the 2 spot in the playoffs are relatively common and a relatively low risk thing.

But Scott Brooks is apparently following the "Reverse 2-Guard" strategy whereby the inferior 2-guard starts but plays fewer minutes than the best 2-guard on the team who checks into the game sometime in the 1st quarter and ends up playing more minutes than the starter. In last nights' 101-96 win over the Lakers, Harden played 32 minutes and Sefolosha just 19. Quest does not recommend this strategy (despite the fact that Greg Popovich, the second best Coach in the League swears by it). But we are not ready quite yet to completely condemn this strategy for all eternity. We are going to continue to recommend against this but to technically have the jury out on this for awhile longer.

Eric Maynor, .829 this year, James Harden, .788 this year, and Serge Ibaka, .843 this year, are all NBA rookies. I would bet good money that this is by far the best group of three rookies on one team in the League this year. To have three rookies playing that well is nothing short of amazing, and also nothing short of an actual threat to the Lakers winning this series, especially considering the Lakers play relatively poor non-starters versus these three, non-starting rookies.

Phil Jackson really has his work cut out for himself this time. If Jackson can not staunch the bleeding caused by his sorry ass scrubs in his non-starting squad (excepting Lamar Odom, of course) the Thunder might conceivably humiliate the ten-time winner of the Quest for the Ring. Oh well, its high time he earned his ridiculously high pay, laugh out loud.

SCOTT BROOKS COULD HAVE BEEN AND PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE BEEN COACH OF THE NUGGETS
Interestingly, Brooks used to be an assistant coach for the Denver Nuggets for whom coaching seems to be one of the big franchise shortcomings. I don't know about you, but quite frankly it seems to me that the Denver Nuggets are never in my lifetime going to be coached by one of the best coaches in the NBA.

Denver seems to be motivated in other directions than high quality coaching. It appears that Denver thinks that coaches are more important from a player management perspective than they are from a winning playoff games perspective. In other words, the number one duty of the Nuggets coach is to manage players (to "keep them in line" and so forth). Both at the high money end in trades and at the low money end on pickups of players other teams are staying clear of, Denver likes to grab players with personalities which are more volatile and/or more immature than average. I sometimes call the Nuggets a hyena type organization: they look for players who have been cast out of most other teams and can often be obtained cheaply (but not always, for example, Kenyon Martin). All teams do this once in a while but Denver in recent years has been going out of their way to do this kind of thing.

Having a team loaded with personalities less mature and more volatile than average is dangerous, so realizing that, Denver has apparently elected to offset that with a coach who will crack the whip (with benchings for example) if necessary to make sure those players with their somewhat wild and/or somewhat immature personalities don't go completely off the reservation and cause the team to lose cohesiveness and morale. This is my main theory for why George Karl, who has very seldom had any success coaching in the playoffs, has been doggedly supported by the ownership and management of the Nuggets. It is in fact true that Karl is one of the better coaches you could have if your primary objective is to make sure that an unusually large number of players who might fly off the reservation don't do so. But unfortunately for Denver, Karl follows inconsistent and often inferior strategies and tactics for winning in the playoffs.