The Jewish people are not necessarily known for our athleticism, nor are the Sacremento Kings known these days for winning basketball games, so I was a bit surprised when I looked it up and found that Omri Casspi, the 21 year-old forward who’s the first Israeli to make it to the NBA, is not only playing, he’s playing pretty well—8.5 points and 3.1 rebounds on 60.1 TS% and 21.3 minutes per game. Not All-Star numbers, obviously, but the kind of guy you’d gladly have on your team.

And actually Sacramento, which projected terribly during the offseason, is doing pretty well. A return to form by Kevin Martin and a big sophomore leap from Jason Thompson are the main causes but Casspi is part of the change that Sactown can believe in.

But are the Wizards cursed or do they have a sub-par medical/training staff? There seems to be very little attention paid to that kind of issue. But the conventional wisdom is that the Phoenix trainers are unusually good, so doesn’t it make sense that some would be unusually bad. Wizards players not only get hurt a lot (which happens to everyone) but seem to take a very long time to recover.

I don’t think all that highly of my abilities as a sports prognosticator, but I really did think it would take more than two days of action for my NBA predictions to start looking foolish. But I said Cleveland would be the best team in the league and even though I think Boston will be very good thought Cleveland and Orlando would both be better. This theory took a hit when Boston beat Cleveland on opening night. But one game is one game. Then came last night. Boston thrashed a weak Charlotte Bobcats team while the James Gang went and . . . lost to Toronto. Basically nobody except Shaq on Cleveland shot a good percent. LeBron put up a triple-double and took enough free throws (although he shot these with a bad percentage, too) to make the overall scoring pretty efficient, but everyone else stank. And since when is Andrea Bargnani good?

Oh well. Frankly, I don’t much care for the Cavs so I’d be happy for them to turn out to be surprisingly bad. But I just don’t see how this personnel could fail.

The Blazers succeeded with the unusual style that Nate McMillan imported from Seattle. His teams have a unique signature — they regularly rank among the league leaders in offensive efficiency and offensive rebound rate while simultaneously finishing among the league’s slowest-paced teams. Most people think of offensive juggernauts as wild run-and-gun outfits, but the Blazers succeeded with half-court execution and second shots much as McMillan’s outfits with the Sonics did.

Portland played the league’s second-slowest pace, averaging only 89.3 trips per side, and that both muted the players’ averages and obscured how devastating they were offensively. The Blazers were deadly efficient, averaging 110.3 points per 100 possessions — ranking second only to Phoenix in offensive efficiency. Despite a lack of brand-name players, they placed ahead of both the Lakers and Cleveland.

People tend not to believe that Portland had a great offense last year. This is in part because the slow pace led to low per game totals, but also because of the perception that they lack effective offensive players beyond Brandon Roy. This in turn stems in part from the quirk whereby people tend to think of put-backs and such as a kind of second-class scoring. The reality, however, is that grabbing offensive rebounds that lead to easy points is a way of putting points on the board that count toward the final tally. “Believe it or not,” Hollinger writes “they did it while barely shooting better than the league average.” But the minimized turnovers and maximized offensive rebounds and that got the job done.

Jameer Nelson (cc photo by Keith Allison)

According to ESPN “At the moment, the big issue in evaluating the Magic seems to be what you think of Hedo Turkoglu and Vince Carter” and their experts put Orlando in distant third place in terms of who’s most likely to win the East.

This strikes me as much less relevant than the return of Jameer Nelson. In 42 games last year, Nelson averaged 31.2 points per game on a very efficient .612 TS% and had a 6.2 percent rebound rate. That’s really good. But he missed the second half of the season and most of the playoffs and then didn’t play well when he did get back in. But if you can add guy like pre-injury Nelson to your team, then you’re looking at a dramatic improvement. Can they? I have no idea. Nelson never played that well before, and maybe he’ll never reach those heights again. Then again, he was only 26 last season, maybe he’ll play better than he did and do it for 82 games. That’d be a great team. But if not, then not.

(cc photo by Keith Allison)

Eli Lake and I agree that the Portland Trailblazers are the only team that could beat the Lakers in the Western Conference in the coming NBA season. The main reason for this, as I see it, is that basically it’s extremely unlikely that anyone can beat the Lakers—they’re really good. For another team to be better, something weird would have to happen. And Portland is basically the best chance for that to happen.

Brandon Roy is 25 years old; LaMarcus Aldridge, Rudy Fernandez, and Travis Outlaw are 24, Greg Oden is 21, Nicolas Batum is 20. That’s six rotation players who are young enough that it’s plausible to imagine them taking a substantial step forward. And if four or five of them do take simultaneous substantial steps forward, then the team is going to be much better. And it’ll be a much better version of a team that was already very good. Notwithstanding their poor playoff performance, last year’s Blazers has the second best point differential in the West. Now is it likely that four or five of those six guys will all take simultaneous substantial steps forward while veteran guys like Joe Pryzbilla and Andre Miller stay level? No, it’s not especially likely. That’d be a stroke of good luck.

But it does seem to me to be within the realm of possibility. And it seems a lot more plausible to me than the idea that Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili are going to start playing better in their thirties.

DKV Joventut’s teen sensation Ricky Rubio will be traded to FC Barcelona rather than joining the Minnesota Timberwolves as the fifth pick in the 2009 NBA Draft. This is mostly being spun as a bad thing for the ‘wolves and possibly even a tactical error by Minnesota. One factor in Rubio’s decision to stay in Spain is that the bill for buying out his contract with Joventut would have been prohibitively expensive. Thus Bill Simmons speculates that Rubio would have paid for the buyout to join a bigger market team where he could have earned more endorsement bucks and thus afforded the buyout: “Rubio needed big market endorsement $$$ to buy out other deal. LA-NY-Chi-Hou-etc. Minny couldn’t work. Kahn messed up. Shoulda flipped him.”

I think this whole line of thought is a mistake. Minnesota benefits from Rubio’s decisions. In general, basketball players are considerably better at 20 than at 18. Thus, in general you’d rather draft 20 year-old players rather than 18 year-old players. The problem, however, is that players with obvious promise enter the draft at 18 so unless you want to pass up on tons of talented guys, you often need to draft teenagers. Under the circumstances, for your teen draft pick to decide he wants to spend two years getting bigger and stronger while honing his skills in one of the world’s top leagues is a good thing. Maybe over the next two seasons Rubio will prove to be a bust, in which case no loss for Minnesota. Or maybe he’ll play well, in which case he’ll come to Minnesota in 2011, and the Timberwolves will get to have the 20, 21, and 22 year-old versions of Rubio on their roster for the rookie salary scale.

Ricky Rubio (wikimedia)

The Minnesota Timberwolves continue to have trouble bringing their draft pick Ricky Rubio over from Spain. Not, as it initially seemed, because Rubio doesn’t want to go to the Twin Cities. Rather the issue is that Rubio’s contract with DKV Joventut Badalona involves a $6.6 million buyout and the Timberwolves “can only contribute $500,000 toward the buyout under NBA rules, which handicaps their ability to convince an 18-year-old kid who made just $97,000 to make a huge financial commitment to chase his dream in the league.”

One thing that strikes me is that this seems like a scenario in which we could use some financial innovation. I would say that loaning Rubio $6.1 million to complete the buyout and let him come to the NBA is an investment that’s likely to pay off. He could raise the money by selling “Rubio bonds” that pay out a fixed percentage of his NBA earnings over the next ten years. If he turns into a star, you’ll win big. If he turns into a bust, you’ll lose a lot of your investment. I’d buy one. And actually buyouts aside this seems like a device that could be popular for a lot of young players. Promising rookies could sell bonds bring future income into the present and also to hinge against the possibility (*cough* Greg Oden *cough*) that injuries will prevent them from living up to their hype.

The other thing is that once you ignore the principle-agent problem facing Minnesota’s managers, it’s not clear to me that resolving this issue is really in the Timberwolves’ interest. Rubio “has two years remaining on his contract” and is 18 years old. 20 year-old basketball players are almost always better than 18 year-old basketball players. If Rubio doesn’t buy out his contract, Minnesota will still have his draft rights, will still be able to bring him to the United States, and will still be able to pay him a rookie scale contract. But they’ll be paying for what is, in effect, a better player while some Spanish team needs to finance his further development.

$14.2 million in 2009-10 plus an eight percent raise the next year.

John Hollinger explains:

Allow me to explain. The entire guiding principle of most cap-related decisions in the past two decades is that the cap will almost always go up and sure as heck won’t go down. It’s embedded in the contracts, too, most of which contain either 8 percent or 10.5 percent annual raises. Thus teams feel safe gambling on a $5 million player. If they’re wrong, the cap will effectively erase the mistake in a season or two by continually rising.

In the current environment, however, some teams are going to be completely whipsawed by a cap that goes down just as their salaries go up. Clubs that have several players with long-term deals could be well under the tax threshold in 2009-10, and then be well over it in 2010-11 with more or less the same players. This is a real threat for the Philadelphia 76ers and Indiana in particular, and it could grab several other teams depending on what transpires in the coming months.

Since the salary cap and the luxury tax threshold in the NBA are both pegged to revenue, and since teams have a limited capacity (but there is some capacity) to reduce the number of players they field, average salaries need to go down. But because contracts are usually guaranteed, and most players have large raises written into their contracts, the decline in salaries is going to need to be borne by a relatively small number of players. Which means, basically, that any team with the financial resources to be hiring next offseason is going to be able to take advantage of incredibly employer-friendly labor market conditions.

Relatedly, right now the Miami Heat have only Dwayne Wade under contract for 2010-11. In other words, Pat Riley is in pretty good shape.

LeBron James (wikimedia)

Dave Berri’s list of the most underpaid NBA players relies on his controversial “wins produced” theory so naturally most fans are going to disagree with it. At the same time, looking at his top two guys—Chris Paul and LeBron James—I don’t think anyone is going to disagree that these are excellent players. Nor will anyone disagree that Paul could easily secure more than his current 2008-2009 salary of $4,574,189 or that James could secure more than $14,410,581 on an open market.

And it seems to me that these kind of phenomena relating to the rookie scale and, in particular, the cap on how much you can pay an individual player are an under-discussed source of competitive imbalance in the NBA. In a world with unconstrained bidding on individual players, even if you paired with it a team salary cap, potential employers of top-flight talent would face a real choice. Of course you’d like to have James or Paul on your team, but do you really want to pay what they’re worth? The current rules essentially guarantee that those guys will be underpaid, meaning that signing them for “the max” is a no-brainer. But in an open market, you’d have to pay LeBron so much that it would seriously undermine your ability to sign other good players.

Under the circumstances the only way for a GM to build a great team would be to genuinely identify undervalued talent, not just luck into possession of a super-star who’s worth more than anyone is allowed to pay him.

Based on this it looks like he does help. But the upgrade from Steve Blake looks pretty marginal. And Miller’s not the kind of skilled long-range shooter who’d help space the floor for Brandon Roy. So this would be a useful pickup but probably not all that useful.

Not bound for NYC (wikimedia)

You can read the whole tawdry tale here. It seems to me that the big problem with the Knicks’ dreams of scoring a top-notch free agent is the existence of the Miami Heat.

The Collective Bargaining Agreements gives guys like Bosh a pretty strong incentive to resign with the teams that already employ them. But if you’re not going to do that, then if you have responsible people working for you (admittedly an open question) they’re going to point out to you that a contract in Miami will result in substantially more after-tax income than an identical column in New York. And Miami has Dwyane Wade and basically nothing else on the books for the summer of 2010. Combine that with the fact that Pat Riley, loathesome as he is, and Heat management have some kind of track record of success, and you can see that looking like a very appealing options. The Knicks, to put it politely, have no such track record. It’s true that there’s some marketing advantage to being in New York City, but the biggest marketing edge of all is contending for championships and Miami seems like a better place to do that.

In a rather unexpected move, the Orlando Magic decided to match the Dallas Mavericks’ five-year, $34 million contract offer in order to keep their backup center. Orlando was put in a tough place by Dallas’ offer—that seemed like it was more money than it was worth it to them to pay Gortat, but also that losing Gortat would hurt the team in a way that there was no obvious way to recover from.

The flipside is that resigning Gortat leaves them with the reverse problem. The guy’s numbers were good enough last year to suggest that he’s worth this kind of money to someone but since the Magic already have Dwight Howard, Gortat has limited minutes to fill. Maybe the thought is that they should play a Howard-Gortat “twin towers” lineup someone more often. Might be a good idea. At any rate, after trading for Vince Carter—which I think was a somewhat questionable move—the Magic seem committed to trying to win a championship next year, and that means resigning Gortat.

For all the tough talk about raising the age limit to 20, eliminating 10.5 percent annual pay raises and lowering the maximum length of contracts, the real meat of the discussions is expected to be centered around the division of revenues and the percent the players are getting: 57, which is nearly 9 percentage points more than they were allocated when the salary cap was instituted in the 1980s.

What to make of that 57 percent? Well, to put it in context, consider the Kaiser Family Foundation’s report on the evolution of compensation in recent decades in the United States:

Total compensation as a share of GDP is denoted by the topmost line and is a fairly stable over the period, ranging from about 56 percent to 59 percent. Although wages are consistently the largest component of worker compensation, the shares paid to employees for health benefits and other fringe benefits/payroll taxes have increased as a share of GDP, while the amount paid as wages has fallen. Health benefit costs have increased from 0.6 percent of GDP in 1960 to 4.1 percent in 2006. Fringe benefits other than health care and payroll taxes have also increased over this period, ranging from 3.8 percent of GDP in 1960 to 6.7 percent in 2006.

In other words, a 57 percent share of revenue going to the players is pretty much in line with the historically determined rate of employee compensation as an overall share of the economy. Of course owners do have labor costs beyond the players (coaches, guys who sell pretzels, etc.). But the 57 percent in question here is a percent of “basketball-related income” which does not include the full range of income sources available to owners:

Basketball-related income includes most basketball revenue, but it excludes several important income sources. For instance, basketball-related income does not include naming rights (often several million dollars per year), licensing and sponsorship income (around $300 million per year), 60 percent of both arena signs and luxury box income, and parts of related-party income.

To make a long story short, NBA players earn a lot of money because (a) NBA franchises have a lot of revenue and (b) there aren’t very many NBA players (usually 12 players on a roster instead of 25 on a baseball team or hundreds of employees at a given Wal-Mart) so the money is concentrated in a few hands. But I don’t see any evidence that they’re earning an unusually large slice of the pie relative to any other industry.

Teams keep getting better when the Answer leaves (wikimedia)

Sports Illustrated’s Steve Aschburner wonders why we don’t see Allen Iverson signing on for a supporting role on a contending team:

Allen Iverson ought to be next. The ‘01 MVP, nine-time All-Star and four-time scoring leader has the individual résumé for such a move. He presumably has the financial wherewithal to take the requisite pay cut after 13 seasons of superstar wages, including the $76.7 million extension he landed in ‘03 and the “lifetime” endorsement deal (whatever that means) he signed with Reebok in ‘01. He even has the game for it — think instant offense, sixth man, the sort of player a coach could turn loose off the bench to mess with the opponents’ second unit almost at will. At 34, Iverson still is quick enough, slippery enough and crafty enough to change games.

He concludes that “What he doesn’t have, though, is the attitude for it.”

Alternatively, maybe after trading Iverson for Andre Miller made Philadelphia better and then trading Iverson for Chauncey Billups made Denver better, teams are starting to figure out what some people have been saying for a while: Allen Iverson isn’t a very good basketball player. He scores a lot because he shoots a lot, but he’s turnover-prone and subpar at rebounding. And the fact that in order for Iverson to be effective he needs to be paired with a point guard who’s big and strong enough to guard opposing two guards is a major downside.

You could make the case that switching to Millsap, who’s an extremely low volume shooter, might really leave Portland with missing shots. But last season Lee was scoring almost as much as Aldridge on fewer shots and fewer minutes. And he’s snagging more rebounds on a much higher percentage. I think standing pat this offseason would be a defensible move for Portland, but if they’re going to sign someone I think Lee would help more than the now-off Turkoglu deal ever would have.

The other option available to them is just to do nothing. The CW is that Portland needs to use its $9 million in cap space because it won’t be available next summer when extensions for Aldridge and Brandon Roy kick in. That’s true, but the possession of cap room during the season would make them a very appealing trade partner for a team that decides it needs to shed salary. Oftentimes the most one-sided deals out there are this in-season salary dumbs (think Pau Gasol to LA or Kevin Garnett to Boston) so being in a position to be the partner in that kind of deal could be very valuable.

At small forward, L.A. mostly needs a floor spacer, and as far as floor-spacing ability goes, Artest is superior to Ariza — he shot 39.9 percent on 3s last season, Ariza 31.9 percent. [...] Overall, Artest isn’t as efficient as Ariza offensively because he tends to force terrible shots, but that’s likely to be less of a problem in a system in which he’s the fourth option behind Kobe Bryant, Pau Gasol and Andrew Bynum. Additionally, he’s a good passer who might see his assist rate bump significantly in L.A.

Basically the conjecture here is that rather than play in LA as he played in Houston (a guy who shoots more than Ariza, but does so less efficiently), Artest will start playing like a different guy who shoots less, but takes most of his shots in the form of highly efficient three pointers. Hollinger also says that Artest’s inferiority as a rebounder will be compensated for by his superiority as an on-the-ball defender.

Neither argument strikes me as clearly wrong, but I don’t think either is clearly correct. At the end of the day, the facts that Ariza is younger and less crazy seem like controlling tie-breakers to me.

Jason Kidd (wikimedia)

Rick Bucher writes about the enduring value of Jason Kidd:

“His value is in the intangibles now as much as anything,” one Western Conference scouting director says. “He gets guys to play at a higher level. He’s played in the Finals; he’s won gold medals. He was really the guy that set the tone last summer in Beijing.”

I think this is an Andris Biedrins case—a player who is in fact valuable in ways that can be fairly easily quantified, and who’s generally recognized to be valuable, but whose value people insist on making a mystery out of.

Kidd is a well-known triple-double machine because he’s an extraordinary rebounder for a point guard. And even though last year’s 9.9 rebound rate is quite a bit down from the peak of his career, it’s still very good. What’s more, in the past few seasons he’s become an effective three point shooter. Consequently, the .522 TS% he put up last year in Dallas was actually the best of his career. This has partially offset the fact that his assist ratio seems to be on the decline.

The point is that the numbers basically tell the tale you’d expect. Kidd is valuable because he’s still putting up the numbers of a valuable player. He’s also, overall, on the decline at age 36. So any team that signs him will, of course, be worried about further declines in his performance level. He’s also at a point where he probably can’t guard many of the league’s quick point guards, so in some contexts putting him on the floor could create major matchup problems. But I don’t think intangibles have a great deal to do with it.

Nicolas Batum (wikimedia)

I’m not sure it’s such a smart idea for the Portland Trailblazers to be trying to recruit Hedo Turkoglu. Last season he scored 16.8 points per game on .541 TS% in 36.6 mpg. He pulled down 8.2 percent of available rebounds. Portland’s incumbent small forward, Nicolas Batum, only played 18.4 mpg and thus scored just 5.4 points per game. But he did it with a .555 TS% and and a 9.4 percent rebound rate. Plus he was only 20 so he’s likely to get better. If I were the Trailblazers, I would just give Batum more minutes and spend my free agent energy on trying to find a point guard who’s better than Steve Blake.

Now of course if you sign Turkoglu then you can still play Batum off the bench and let Rudy Fernandez go sulk or whatever. But any time you’re considering signing a free agent, especially in the NBA context, I think you really need to ask yourself if you’re not headed for a “winner’s curse” type of situation. When a truly top-notch player comes along, the kind of guy who teams would pay more than the max for if that were allowed, then of course you sign that guy. But otherwise, you’d better have some reason to believe that he either fills a unique need for your team (for all that Rashard Lewis’ contract seems a bit absurd, very few guys can both hit three pointers and defend power forwards credibly) or else that you have some specific reason to believe he’s being undervalued by the market. Turkoglu, a scorer we’re all talking about because we just watched him shine on national television in a run to the NBA finals, doesn’t fit the model of someone who’s likely to wind up undervalued.