Oden blocks way more shots than Dwight Howard, but fouls way more often.  And the extra 10 minutes a game that Howard is able to play far outweighs the difference in shots blocked, of course.  But Oden is already a better offensive player.  They turn over the ball about equally, but Oden has a shot at improvement.  Howard does too, but after this many years in the league, you have to figure he is what he is, at least in that respect.  And Oden has a much better touch with either hand—thanks in part (I suspect) to being forced to only use his left hand for a year, when his right was injured.

Oh, and Howard’s the iron man of the NBA, while Oden has had serious injury problems.  So the gaps between them in durability and foul-frequency are big marks against Oden’s chances of being as good or better than Howard, for sure.  And though it’s just my observation, Howard seems to be quicker laterally—though I think his grace and Oden’s awkward looking movements make the gap seem somewhat larger than it is.  But taking all of this into account big-if Oden puts the injury stuff behind him and big-if he can limit the fouls enough to play 32–35 minutes a game, and if he’s willing to dress up as Sho’Nuff the Shogun of Harlem for Halloween, he’ll be the better player.  Yeah Mark (of Vince Carter apologist lore) is a good man, and thorough

Amid a bevy if impressive sequences, the most significant play of the game to me (in a big picture way) occurred in the second half when Beasley caught the ball in the post against Oden.  It drives me nuts when smaller guys are in this situation and then dribble out only to fake and jab for 5 seconds before taking a step back jumper.  You see this at least two or three times a game.  But Beasley, recognizing the mismatch, dribbled out to the wing to exploit his speed advantage (Oden followed half way) and then went right at the rim.

Oden slid his feet quickly enough to keep pace with Beasley, jumped in perfect sync with him to contest the shot, and kept his arms straight up to avoid fouling.  There was contact in the air, but it was incidental, chests and shoulders, and refs typically don’t call if you keep your arms up and as long as one guy doesn’t go flying.  Oden played it just perfectly.  But Beasley scored anyway.  He took the contact in the air, switched the ball to his right hand, and finished softly over Oden.

GREG ODEN

That Oden didn’t block the shot is irrelevant.  He’s been a shot-blocking machine this season, and that alone invalidates concerns that microfracture surgery would limit his explosiveness.  No, the only thing between Oden and true greatness is foul trouble (his other injuries don’t seem like chronic threats.)  If he can limit his fouls enough to stay on the court 35 minutes a game, he’ll be a superstar.  That a goodly number people wrote him off as a bust as soon as he had knee surgery was absurd.  But I also find fault in the plethora of apologist commentary that said we need to adjust our expectations of Oden’s ceiling, to appreciate him for what he is.  For example, consider John Hollinger’s (espn insider) profile on Oden from the pre-season:

So let’s be honest here about what Oden is and what he isn’t. What he is, certainly, is an effective, slightly awkward big man who can rebound and block shots. What he is not is a once-in-a-generation center. Oden is too awkward offensively and too foul-prone to be the kind of dominator some thought he might be coming out of Ohio State.

Wipe away those expectations and it was a solid rookie season.

I wouldn’t take umbrage with this if Hollinger had spoken in the past tense and told us what Oden was and wasn’t in his rookie year, that he wasn’t a once-in-a-generation force in his rookie year.  Of course he wasn’t.  Between injuries and going one-and-done in college, Oden has played vastly less basketball than any previous NBA great center in his rookie year.  Check out this list of all time shot-blockers; it’s made up almost exclusively of guys who played three or four years in college.  And it isn’t just the all time greats and players from previous generations.  Check out the list of active shot-blockers; only the high-school kids had less experience than Oden and only Dwight Howard caught on quicker than Oden has been.  He’s much better than the others were at 21.  Really, considering the circumstances, it’s way too early to give up on hoping that Oden can be a once-in-a-generation dominating center.  I’m not saying he will, but I think he’s got a good shot.

Regarding his supposed clumsiness, so far he’s less turnover-prone than a bunch of greats at his age, like Patrick Ewing.  How else do you judge clumsiness in basketball?  Lack of obvious grace?  Whatever; Dwight Howard is somewhat less than graceful on offense.  Oden’s already got a much better shooting touch.  And how does anyone know if Oden will remain foul-prone?  What evidence is there that it’s a question of innate ability?  Frankly, the most important data I see for Oden is his free-throw percentage.  He took 200 foul shots in college, lefty, while recovering from right-hand surgery.  And he sunk over 60% of them.  So far this season he’s over 75% with his right hand.  That he picked up shooting it lefty in so little time and shot it better than a number of highly skilled alltime great bigs…  This year’s present clip, albeit a fairly small sample size, isn’t likely a clip, given that lefty shooting in college.  It’s more likely to be a result of time, practice, repetitions.  It’s evidence of his ability to improve.

Anyway, regardless of what Bill Simmons and lesser lights believe, I think the Oden or Durant argument is far from over.  But for injury concerns for Oden, they’d be neck and neck.  Durant’s a scoring machine, but he’s not yet anywhere close to the defender Oden is.  And while Oden isn’t nearly as good an offensive player, but he’s far better on offense than Durant is on defense.  Then again yesterday Durant looked like top-form Andrei Kirilenko on defense for a few plays, so who knows.  That’s the point, who knows?

It doesn’t mean I’m rooting for something entirely implausible; there are plenty of reasons that the Magic could beat the Lakers.  Kobe could choose to have surgery on that poor injured finger of his, tonight, and miss the rest of the Finals, for example.  More likely, Pau Gasol could play like cotton candy; Odom could disappear for a few games; the Lakers could shoot poorly from 3; the Magic could shoot well enough (often enough) to give Howard some space, so he could get more touches in or near the paint; Orlando’s defense could improve to regular season level.  No, it’s not a yoga stretch to see Orlando winning (though winning in 6 is, but whatever,) but yeah, it’s more likely the Lakers will win.

But there are so many reasons to root against the Lakers.  I won’t go into them all here, because I have to run, but Kobe being less likable than Barry Bonds (though not Roger Clemens) is enough.  Add the nauseating adoration showered upon Phil Jackson, from every television commentator and most sports writers, and Dwight Howard dressing up like Shonuff, and there’s really no question who should win the NBA Championship in a good and just world.  It’s been a crappy year for the world; it would be nice for the Lakers to lose…er, for the Magic to win.

Billy Beane’s thinking and process of deliberation might be the same, but valuations are often conditional, and they change all the time.  Lewis would have you believe that success is all to be found by signing high OBP players at the expense of anything else.  The Athletics, rather, look not just for the most significant ways of valuating players, but (having relatively limited resources) the best deals available—undervalued players.  I haven’t paid attention in a few years, but last time I checked, Oakland was acquiring cheap, excellent defenders, and drafting high school pitchers.

Lewis wrote this Times article about analytical thinking in basketball, centered around Shane Battier, one of my favorite players, ever—I have always maintain that the Rockets got the better of the deal, acquiring him for (essentially) Rudy Gay.  And at one point he discusses the plus/minus stats that annoy me so much—which I go into here, and here.  One thing that’s very interesting to me, quoted below, is the talk on +/- stats.  Lewis gracefully calls the raw numbers “hardly perfect”, but I think it’s more accurate to say “utterly useless, absent more data to provide context.”  Daryl Morey says they can do that, isolating a player’s value by using +/-, adjusted in certain ways.  Cool:

“One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.” He names a few other players who were a plus 6 last season: Vince Carter, Carmelo Anthony, Tracy McGrady.”

I can understand them “being coy about how they do it” but it’s annoying for outsiders like me, especially those who don’t have the stats chops or data (like me) to dig out answers, by themselves.  Their methods are “black box” by intent, rather than Hollinger’s condescending tendency (paraphrased) “the way I put this together is complicated, so I’ll just give you my results, not my methods.”  But either way, it just leaves me with the choice of accepting that their valuations or not accepting them.  Hollinger’s thinking is so blatantly flawed that his PER is easy to discard, but the Rocket’s valuations?  I don’t know, except that Morey seems to have a better idea of what he’s doing, and my feeling there is partially influenced by his credentials, academic and professional.  But I don’t know, and I don’t like accepting things as given without understanding them.

The real problem is that basketball just doesn’t seem to have the massive stats community that helped push the sabermetric movement, in baseball.  Yes, Bill James started it, and Rob Neyer and Michael Lewis re-broadcast that thinking to a much wider audience, but I think it’s the stats community outside baseball and popular media that finally cemented it’s place in baseball, in part by making it an open discussion for anyone to see.

Anyway, I don’t have a strong opinion yet, as I haven’t seen him play this season.  I’m going to try to get a Miami game into my schedule on the East Coast.  I love watching Wade, of course, and I really want a look at Michael Beasley, who seems a lot more impressive to me than he does to a lot of other people.  I’ll get back to that in a sec.

As I’ve previously written, I’m a big fan of O’Neal, not just for the play, but because of the way he backed up the prep-to-pro kids, when almost no one else did.  Barring high schoolers going directly to the NBA was terribly wrong, violated their rights to work, and O’Neal said just that in various interviews the NBA and Players Association colluded to prevent high school basketball players from jumping directly to the NBA.

The issue is simple enough for me.  If teams are willing to draft players that means those players are ready to go pro ipso facto.  It’s age descrimination to prevent players from competing for employment in the NBA, and it’s done partially to protect owners’ investments.  High school players may take a while to develop and owners don’t want to spend the players’ rookie-scale contracts developing them just in time to see them hit free agency when they ripen.  Tough sh*t.  Owner coddling has always pissed me off; condescendy nonsense about players getting an education in college pisses me off; holding high school players resposible for the NCAA’s deterioration is absurd.  And the most ludicrous argument that you still hear sometimes, “Sure, there’s Kevin Garnett and Kobe Bryant, but what about all of those players who don’t succeed?  What about them?” Players who have gone directly from high school to the NBA have been phenomenally successful.

Consider: Kevin Garnett, Kobe Bryant, Jermaine O’Neal, Tracy McGrady, Al Harrington, Rashard Lewis, Darius Miles, LeBron James, Josh Smith, Dwight Howard, Amare Stoudemire, J.R. Smith, Andrew Bynum,  Al Jefferson, Monta Ellis, Louis Williams, Amir Johnson, C.J. Miles, Kendrick Perkins, Shaun Livingston, Tyson Chandler, Travis Outlaw, Martell Webster, DeShawn Stevenson, Desagana Diop.  Are you kidding me?  25 out of 39 high school draftees, since 1995, are/were major contributors, according to my quick look judgement (which is impeccable).  These successful players include a plethora of Allstar-caliber players, a few perennial MVP candidates, a bunch of rotation players (some still young enough to make big strides), and Shaun Livingston and Miles, who were promising until severely injured.  Sure, Eddy Curry and Kwame Brown were huge busts.  Tough sh*t.  There are too many college players for me to calculate their success rate, but I’ll bet they don’t come close to matching the high schoolers’ 64% success rate.  Considering the upside you also find in high school players, there’s no question which group gives you favorable odds, on draft day.

Finally, what happens if a high school player gets injured in his mandated year away from the NBA?  It’s going to happen someday, and I hope the player/players sue the NBA and Players Association for a max contract.  The MLB has an Anti-Trust exemption.  The NBA doesn’t, and I look forward to the day they get rudely spanked, in court.

Look, I’m as big a fan of the game as you’ll find, but I’m not going to let my principles go to sh*t (after all, I have so few) because Leon Smith was nuts and Kevin McHale drafted an undersized high school point-guard who can’t pass, shoot, or defend.

There, I’ve said my piece, how’s your mother?