This week's mailbag features your questions on the NBA's best college alumni squads and which teams create the most moneyball looks on both ends of the court.
You can tweet your questions using the hashtag #peltonmailbag or email them to peltonmailbag@gmail.com.
If there was an NCAA tournament of alums, which school would win? Seems likely to come down to the Durant/Aldridge Longhorns, the Westbrook/Love Bruins, and the Wall/Brow Kentucky.
- Dellisious (@So_Dellisious) March 13, 2018
I don't think there's any question that Kentucky would be an overwhelming favorite in such a tournament. (In fact, UK won the fan vote over UCLA in ESPN.com's NBA alumni bracket this week.) Let's take a look at schools in terms of their wins above replacement player (WARP) this season, zeroing out players rated below replacement so those teams aren't punished for them.
A total of 28 Kentucky players have appeared in NBA games this season, nine more than from the next-best college (Duke). Of those, 26 played for John Calipari -- all but Jodie Meeks and Rajon Rondo. And when we zero out negative players, they've more than doubled any other school in terms of WARP. The Cats are a little light on shooting, but they can throw out this starting five with DeMarcus Cousins, Jamal Murray and Julius Randle (among others) coming off the bench:
Let's take a look at the other contenders for the Final Four and their starting fives.
The Bruins have a fun team. They don't have much size but do have incredible guard play with Darren Collison backing up Holiday and Westbrook and a number of versatile forwards capable of switching on defense. I think UCLA is the favorite to meet Kentucky in the title game, which would be a rematch of the 1975 final, won by the Bruins in John Wooden's last game as coach.
UConn actually ranks second in terms of WARP from its starting five, but that's driven heavily by the duo of All-Stars Drummond and Walker. The Huskies aren't particularly deep and are lacking in size.
The Longhorns' front line could compete with anybody. Texas isn't as deep in the backcourt, particularly with Bradley struggling this season, and the best lineup might have Durant at shooting guard with P.J. Tucker filling Bradley's spot.
What the Demon Deacons lack in depth, they make up for with quality. The worst of the six Wake Forest players in the NBA, Ish Smith, is still a solid backup point guard.
The Blue Devils boast an excellent perimeter group but would likely be undone by their Plumlee-heavy frontcourt. However, they still best North Carolina, which is lacking in star power. The best Tar Heel this season by WARP has been Wayne Ellington (3.6).
@kpelton what team in the NBA plays the best money ball in regards to shot selection offensively and defensively #mailbag
- David Locke (@Lockedonsports) March 20, 2018
This question grew out of a conversation with Locke about the difficulty for teams having an ideal shot distribution (which he's shorthanding here as "Moneyball" -- you'll also hear it called "Moreyball" after Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey) at both ends of the court. As Ben Falk explored in an article on CleaningTheGlass.com during last year's playoffs, this is a function of personnel. Playing two traditional bigs allows teams to force more low-value midrange shot attempts on defense, but usually leads to more of them on offense. So who's done the best job of managing this tradeoff?
We can attempt to answer this question using shot quality data from Second Spectrum tracking. Second Spectrum's quantified shot quality (qSQ) metric measures the effective field-goal percentage (eFG) we'd expect an average team to make given the location and type of the shots and location of nearby defenders. So which teams have the best qSQ differential between their offense and their defense?
The surprising leader is the Brooklyn Nets, who have the seventh-best shot quality on offense and the second-best on defense. There may be an element of Goodhart's Law at play here, where focusing on the average quality of the shot means players are moving outside their skill set and not performing as well. However, the example of the Philadelphia 76ers -- who have ranked well on this metric throughout Brett Brown's tenure -- suggests that as the Nets get players capable of taking advantage of the opportunities, their high-quality shot distribution will start to pay more dividends.
This year's data doesn't actually show as much tradeoff at the overall team level as Falk found -- there's little correlation between a team's offensive and defensive qSQ scores -- but there are a couple of interesting examples of teams that excel at one end and not the other. One of them is Morey's Rockets, who have far and away the league's best qSQ on offense, which has offset their defensive qSQ ranking of 28th. At the opposite extreme are the Portland Trail Blazers, who have the league's best defensive shot quality but rank 26th on offense.