Wright's disappear(ed) playing time...

DISCLAIMER:
Some of this will read like I know what I'm doing. Don't let that detract from what a huge stupid asshole I am. There's enough disorganized ranting here to make up for any brief stints of legibility.

With news of Corey Maggette's improved health and Riley's announcement that no trades are imminent, we can only assume that Brandan Wright has had it. He's on his way out of town, most likely, as 6'9" and taller guys Nelson has shit on for years tend to be following a freak streak of starts with no team success due to Nelson sabotage and player value inflation. I mean, you'd have to be an IDIOT to not see how much better the team is with Wright in as opposed to someone else, at least if you're playing normal winning basketball, not egoball. So some team will jump on Wright, confident this is just another Nellie Big Kill, and that will be that.

The team is much better with Wright in, and it's visible, but who cares? Not Nellie.

Wright has not logged significant time with very many 5 man units, but he is part of the #1 floor time unit, and the 5,6,7, and 14 and 16. The difference for a Nellie team, of course, is that his top 5 man floor time unit has 58 minutes together. The Celtics, by contrast, have 700 (110 is second). They're doomed. Lakers' tops is 302 and 6 other lineups with more time than the Warriors' top unit. Blazers 224 and 6 other 5-man lineups with more floor time together than the Warriors' top unit. Cleveland's top 4 are 457-115-96-61.

The Warriors' top 5: 59-44-33-32. Clearly, there's some mixing and matching going on. Nellie is checking his guys out, in lots of strange variations, with an obvious plan in place for his matchup genius. And he doesn't have one of his 40 MPG guys, Monta Ellis, or another one, Maggette, so the second half figures to settle down a bit. Second half will be more like Ellis-Crawford-Jackson-Maggette-Biedrins 500, etc. I'm sure of it. And we won't make the playoffs but perhaps Nellie can get closer to the Wins Record so we can get our version of the Bonds home run chase fucking over with.

Geoff Lepper mounted an impressive game tape analysis of the Brandan Wright rebounding debacle from OKC:
http://48minutes.net/2009/01/01/brandan-wright%e2%80%99s-incredible-shrinking-rebounding-numbers/

Geoff's analysis is better than I'll attempt and very provocative. I can't discount the work at all. I dig it and I'm in agreement about Wright's green team defensive game. Right now, he's a super-talented "garbage man" who is clearly in the game on offense and has a way of disrupting myriad shots AND rebounding opportunities with his length and body control, though as we've gone over and over and over... he's not Monster in the Painted Area. And as a cursory minutes analysis suggests, the primary mode in which to judge any Warrior right now is indeed as an individual set of habits, mistakes, successes, and statistics, as Geoff did. But the overarching team analysis, measures of consistency, habituation, and balanced chemistry and complementary play, might stop at Nellie Ball. Or Shit Ball, depending upon the depths of your Homer depravity.

At bottom, there is a growing sense around the online fan community that the substitutions and rotations are criminally bad, bad enough to have prompted countless charges of tanking, sabotage, and plain old drunken crazy. Or so I'm told. No one is sure what Nelson is going for besides the default "small ball." Injuries to wing types and Ellis and constantly reinvented excuses for not just checking out new lineups like Randolph-Wright-Biedrins or Biedrins-Turiaf-Kurz or Hendrix-PlayerX-PlayerX, or any other intuitive "Rebound Squads," have left the team a mess of incompletion and sparkling anti-rebounding to depths that even Don Nelson can be proud of. We have the third leading raw individual rebounder in the league and yet we are quite securely the league's worst rebounding team on the defensive glass and in overall team differential. Nombers be damned, we're just the worst rebounding team in the league even if we get some great offensive raw numbers due to an excess of missed shots.

In short, there is no Warriors rebounding efficiency "there" to point at and dissect. Player cooperation, basic fundamental individual play, etc., should be simple analytic targets in a simple situational, satistical vacuum. But Nellie Ball renders it all moot under the sweeping audacity of terrible team play. He has effectively turned this team into something about HIM, not something about the players, and nowhere is this no apparent than rebounding.

To see a second year player struggle a bit with team play should be about the most natural thing in the world. And now, it's time to seriously consider the likelihood that certain Mullin draft picks have been systematically jerked around as pawns in Nellie's front office power machinations. We've heard reports about the excellent work of players like Wright and Marcus Williams from players like Matt Barnes last year and numerous players this year, all of which conflict with the Nelson Speak agenda.

Chances are good Wright struggles now and then in practice, and that he has missed some of the concepts the team tries to get its players set on. Then again, if things change daily in practice the way they change daily in the reactionary Warriors talk points and ass-covering, good luck to any young player without a Mensa membership or Lebron James-caliber natural talent. You'll never survive. And yet, as anyone who has seen Wright in scrimmage situations and game situations will attest, the natural ability and ball sense is apparent. MISTAKES, on the other hand, are just that. If it's easy enough for a beat guy or a couch potato blogger to pick them up on first appraisal, how can the coaching staff be excused for failing to work on these issues since day one? Is the player THIS bad?

As astute comments to Geoff's great work suggest, there's another story here. Brandan Wright may have some bad mistakes to rattle off from the OKC game, other games, and practices, but team rebounding seems better with him around. Those posters are on to something. Only the departed Al Harrington and the still here Corey Maggette top Wright's involvement in top team-rebounding next to Andris Biedrins.

Disregard Stephen Jackson's involvement in any floortime unit rundown and I'll tell you why: He's always on the floor. To investigate Warriors 5-man floor units, all of which basically have sucked so far, is in reality to investigate 4-man accompanying units for Jackson. There's only one top-20 5 man unit he's not a part of, and that unit is naturally the primary unit from the recent stretch of Jackson absence: Crawford-Belinelli-Azubuike-Wright-Biedrins. And on rebounding, it's no mistake to see Jackson part of terrible rebounding teams. He may get some simple individual boxscore stats now and then but, by and large, he's among the league's worst rebounding SFs. This cannot be adequately quantified, though there are numbers that can help. But anyone watching him knows he is perhaps as apathetic on rebounding as Jamal Crawford is on defense.

Back to Wright, since he can improve. Jackson is what he is.

Maggette-Harrington-Biedrins comprised the best rebounding lineup the Warriors have played this year. Maggette, hate him all you want, is one of the league's top rebounding SFs. I hate him, all I want, and I don't give a shit. But he is. Harrington, hate him all you want, was a better rebounder than the shitwing brigade left in his wake. I hate him and don't give a shit. But he was. And Baron Davis and Monta Ellis are uncommonly good lead guard rebounders. They're also gone. So Maggette-Harrington-Biedrins had more minutes at higher rebounding rates than any other set of players. They're in the two head-and-shoulders-best 5-man rebounding units for the Warriors.

Watson, Crawford, Belinelli, and Jackson are not rebounders. They may get some now and then but take a very close look at their best individual rebounding performances and you'll immediately start to see weird team trends and watch the actual tape and, of course, you'll see them putting up 0.0 fight for rebounds at just about every turn. These four players are actually as close to a negative influence on team rebounding as exists in the league. Math geeks, to your calculators. I'm right. Jocks, you watch and you can see it. You see how lazy and weak the little shitwings are. You're also retarded, so you'll defend Jackson and Belinelli because you love the smell of their huge hairy balls. But you know I'm right, deep down in that dark, normal, un'roided corner of your dumb jock heart. Now go play 2k9. Work out. Have another beer. Maybe don't pay. Be a man, tough guy. When you get back, you'll still know that the Warriors don't do rebounding and are struggling to keep a $9 million player, 3rd in the league in raw individual rebounding, on the floor for even 30 minutes a night.

Nellie's shitwing sandwich is predicated upon above average rebounding from his guards and at least one of his other two wings. He doesn't have his pets around to get the job done for him and he can't stand diagramming for players who can't chuck from anywhere on the floor at any given time, so we've got Azubuike doing OK sometimes on rebounding and Watson and Belinelli... not. Hence, the weird use of Wright and Randolph- not enough offensive versatility, too many green bigman mistakes. Nellie needs to WIN, dammit!

Jackson he plays because Nellie is also a dumb jock. He's been babbling about numbers at various stages in his recent Warriors dementia but, really, he just repeats whatever li'l Stevie Silas whisper in his ear as he delivers his Scotch-addled old body to the hotel room after last call and hopes it'll stick for the pesky folks suddenly interested in the terrible shooting of his favorite players or, worse, the shitty defense and rebounding NellieBall seems to engender time and time and time again.

Jackson is so fucking terrible, there should be an award named after him: "Shittiest guy who has played like an All Star in two extremely impressive short term stints, both strangely contiguous to contractual windfall, ever." Unfortunately, he would fall somewhere around pedestrian, average, and sub-Baron Davis on a chart of NBA peak play-new contract correlation.

So here we go, more stupid math I don't actually understand. Circumstantial mumbo-jumbo from 82games.com, extrapolated by a typical hack buffoon. Still, it's more that you did, you sap, so deal with it or do better, like Geoff does.

Of the top 10 rebounding 5 man units post-Harrington, by rebounding percentage, Brandan Wright is in 4 of them, including the top 2. Remember, Wright is only in 6 of the top minutes Warriors units. Let's stop here. Math sucks and we're all bad at it. And Wright is an idiot kid like another very strong rebounding/goal protection element by the numbers, Anthony Randolph (third rated rookie rebounder). So obviously, fuck him. He'd screw up the Nellie mastermind winning genius we get from our shitwing brigade instead of Tall Ball idiocy.

I claim via Stupid Math that the Warriors will rebound better as a team if they play Wright and Randolph more. Or Hendrix. Or Biedrins with another rebounder for more than 5 minutes a game. And I claim that it would make a difference to winning games.

Tell me I'm wrong.

Eff you.