Two ways to go from the middle

Song: Hobo Johnson, "Sacramento Kings Anthem (we’re not that bad)"

Stats are as of 12/1/2025. Spreadsheet here

The Kings

The Sacramento Kings are going through it. Again. For most other teams, the choices they've made recently would be a historically incompetent period, a basketball Dark Ages. For the Kings, it's just another season.

Firing the only coach that's had success with the team in a long time and replacing him with a buddy of the owner who is willing to work cheap. Drafting two All-Star point guards and trading both of them away. Trading for two guys (LaVine and DeRozan) who everybody knew would be a bad fit from their years playing together on the Bulls. Trading the very good, ultra reliable Jonas Valančiūnas for the washed Dario Saric just to save a tiny bit of money.

Do you know the definition of insanity? The Kings' front office doesn't.

Sacramento is 5-16 so far. They're definitely not a good team, but maybe they're not that bad? They went 40-42 last season, which is respectable in the loaded Western Conference. They've had a brutally hard schedule, and 21 games is not a large sample size.

I'll get back to the Kings, but first, the other side of the coin.

The Heat

The Miami Heat were arguably in a worse place than the Kings at the end of last season. They won 37 games, 3 fewer than the Kings, and play in the easier conference. They looked totally checked out by the end of the season, another team stuck in the middle of the NBA standings.

It was a disappointing, dysfunctional run where they traded away their best player and seemed to be going nowhere. The vibes were bad, but they didn't blow up the team for the hope of maybe being good again someday, or run back the same players and the same scheme for another bout of mediocrity. Instead, they trusted the culture they built and tried something innovative.

They've been one of the best stories in the NBA so far, greatly outperforming expectations by playing a radical brand of basketball on the offensive end. They completely overhauled their offense to quickly attack one-on-one matchups before the defense can get set, rather than the traditional approach of creating mismatches using pick-and-rolls.

Here's a good video from Thinking Basketball explaining the strategy, an even more turbo-charged version of the scheme the Grizzlies used to great success last year. As a basketball fan, it's a bit weird to watch at first, because pick and rolls are such an traditional part of basketball, but it's refreshing.

I don't know why more teams don't have the courage to try unconventional things -- or in the Grizzlies' case, stick with something unconventional that was working. In the NBA, it takes a great coach and front office to defy the conventional wisdom and try to get more out of the players already on the roster -- putting them in a position to succeed rather than re-shuffling the deck.

The most remarkable part is that overhauling the offense hasn't sacrificed the Heat's identity as a top-tier defensive team at all. They have the 4th best defense in the league so far by Defensive Rating. They're doing this while playing at the fastest pace in the league this year. Teams that play fast are usually just trying to outscore their opponents, with little attention to defense.

But the Heat are using their scheme to generate high quality offensive opportunities for players that are primarily on the court for their defense. They're building on their core identity rather than changing directions entirely. They're building on strength.

An elite playmaker like Tyrese Halliburton, or a generational talent like SGA or Jokic, can set up defense-first players for easy looks, but most teams that concentrate on defense struggle generating enough offensive firepower. The Orlando Magic have been plagued by that problem for years. The system Miami is running seems like a cheat code for defensively minded teams -- at least until the league inevitably figures out ways to slow it down.

I couldn't find anybody in the media who knew the Heat's scheme change was coming, much less an idea of how much of an impact it would have. I looked at a bunch of preseason power rankings, and they were all pretty down on the Heat for the same reasons, without any hint that they could fix the problems with a different play style. It's much easier to assess the impact of roster changes.

For example, this is from NBC Sports' preseason power rankings:

this was a middle-of-the-pack Heat team last season that made no bold moves, no massive upgrades, leaving them in the same spot they were a year ago.

Here's Bleacher Report's

for an offensively challenged team, replacing [Tyler Herro's] scoring (21.5 points over the last four seasons) and distribution (4.6 assists in the same span) is going to be tough.

And USA Today's:

Losing Tyler Herro for the first two months of the season, potentially, comes as a significant blow to a team that struggled to score — especially late in games — even when he was on the floor.

With the change in style the Heat are still only a mid-tier team on offense, ranking 14th in Offensive Rating. But that's a big step up from last year, when they were 21st, especially given they haven't had their best offensive player for the first month of the season.

Are they going to win a title with the present roster? No, but in addition to giving their fans something to cheer for, all their players will look much better on paper than they did at the start of this season. If they do decide to trade players, the Heat can get more in return for them. And it's not hard to get free agents to move to Miami if the team is winning and the vibes are good, so they could be a real contender again quickly.

It's weird that tanking is seen as the best way to increase the chances of future success in the NBA, rather than building a winning culture and innovating. The two teams with the most success in recent years at doing a major rebuild have been the Spurs and the Thunder. They were both bad for a few years, but they're also two of the best run teams in the league. They draft well, they trade well, they do player development well, they do analytics well. They had a clear vision of the type of team they wanted to build and the clear ability to develop players. If a team doesn't have those organizational competencies, what's the point of a tank? They're just going to waste their high-level draft picks, not develop the rest of the roster, and be mediocre again in 5 years.

Power ranking the power rankers

I collected data from six preseason NBA power rankings. There's a link to the spreadsheet at the top of the article. I would've liked to collect more data, and I'm sure there are other sites that did good NBA power rankings, but stuff like that is basically impossible to find these days, lost in a sea of completely LLM generated baloney or locked behind paywalls. It's not useful interrogating why some LLM stochastically decided that the Warriors are the 4th best team in the NBA this year, but there's seemingly an endless supply of that type of nonsense. Which is to say: thanks for reading this, however you managed to get here. I hope you'll keep coming back for this completely human generated baloney.

I compared the rankings from each list to each team's point differential, which is a better estimate of how good a team is than their win-loss record. How good were our mighty morphin' power rankers at predicting the current standings?

So far, the most accurate ranking has been RotoBaller's, with a Spearman correlation of .76. The worst has been USA Today, at .69. Taking the median rank of all six sources produced a correlation of .74, which was better than 5 out of the 6 individual scores. So we're getting a "wisdom of crowds" effect, which is interesting, since all the rankings are fairly similar to each other. (Previously discussed in Majority voting in ensemble learning.)

I also included rankings based on my own preseason win total estimates. I got a score of .73, right in the middle of the pack. That's respectable, but I can't believe I'm getting beat by the freaking New York Post.

Comparing rankings to records, the power rankers were too high on the Clippers, Cavaliers, Pacers, Kings and Warriors. They were too low on the Raptors, Suns, Heat, Spurs and Pistons.

Strength of schedule

Scheduling matters. Some teams have played much harder schedules than others, and we're dealing with small sample sizes, so win-loss records can be deceiving early in the season.

I grabbed adjusted Net Rating (aNET) data from dunksandthrees, which calculates the offensive and defensive ratings for each team, adjusted for strength of schedule. I also included Simple Rating System (SRS) data from basketball-reference, which is the same idea as aNET, but a different methodology.

The difference between aNET and average point differential gives a sense of which team records might be the most misleading compared to the team's actual skill level. For instance, the Sacramento Kings have already played the Thunder, Nuggets and Timberwolves three times apiece, going 2-7 over those games. Even a decent team would be expected to have a losing record against those opponents.

Based on aNET, the Cavaliers, Warriors, Clippers, Kings and Celtics are probably better than their records indicate.

Going the other way, the Raptors have had a deceptively easy schedule, going 7-1 in games against the woeful Nets, Hornets, Pacers and Wizards. Going 7-1 doesn't tell us much, because those are teams pretty much everybody should be able to beat.

The stats indicate that the Raptors, Hornets, Spurs, Jazz, and Suns are probably not as good as their records.

Most of the teams the power rankers got wrong have been hurt or helped significantly by their schedules so far. The biggest exception has been the Miami Heat, who apparently nobody saw coming, and are probably about as good as their record says they are.

The Kangz

What to make of the Kings? According to basketball-reference, they've had the hardest schedule in the league so far. It's fair to say they're not as bad as the record says.

While they're 28th in point differential, they're 25th by aNET, and 26th by SRS. So they might have 7 or 8 wins instead of 5 if they'd played a league average schedule. That's not that much, though, and a clear step back from last year.

Their rookie, Nique Clifford, has not looked good so far, and they don't have many players that other teams would want in a trade. It doesn't seem like they have any clue of how to develop young talent. Their highest paid player, Zach LaVine, has another year on his contract, doesn't play defense, and has put up a -1.1 VORP this year. They just benched their one big signing of the offseason (Dennis Schröder), and are instead starting Russell Westbrook, a man born during the Reagan Administration playing on a one year minimum deal.

On paper, they don't have much they can do to get better. But everybody was saying that about the Heat at the end of last year, and look at them now. I just can't see the Kings having that type of organizational courage, but I hope they find it somehow rather than spend years on another doomed rebuild. Sacramento fans deserve better than another version of the current mess. At least an innovative mess would be a change of pace from trying the same stupid thing over and over. What's the worst that could happen?

Sacramento's roster isn't great, but like the Grizzlies, the biggest problems I see are organizational. I understand the Kings are a rich man's toy, not a serious basketball team, but wouldn't it be more fun to own a team that wasn't a giant tire fire? I don't get spending billions of dollars to buy a sports team just to run it into the ground like this.

The Mathletix Bajillion, week 5

As usual: One of these teams picks NFL games randomly, the other uses a simple algorithm.

4 of 5 Ringer 107 teams had a losing week, going 10-15 collectively. All five still have a losing record on the season, so right now the McAul-Stars are the undisputed leaders.

Bluster aside, the important thing to notice is how much they're saving taking cheaper lines than the standard -110 odds. The McAul-Stars would be up +110 instead of +176 if the bets were taken at a retail sportsbook, and the Hand-Eggs would be down -620 instead of -563.

Lines taken Tuesday morning. Since it's early in the week, the reduced juice isn't quite as juicy as usual.

The Neil McAul-Stars

last week: 4-1, +296
Overall: 11-9, +176
line shopping: +66

• SEA -7 -108 (lowvig)
• DAL +3 -104 (prophetx)
• CIN +5.5 -108 (draftkangz)
• JAX +2 -108 (prophetx)
• LAC +2.5 +108 (prophetx)

The Vincent Hand-Eggs

last week: 1-4, -316
Overall: 7-12-1, -563
line shopping: +57

• WAS +1.5 +100 (lowvig)
• CIN +5.5 -108 (draftkangz)
• LAR -8 -101 (prophetx)
• DEN -7.5 +100 (lowvig)
• CLE -3.5 -108 (prophetx)

Free throw merchants and the value of stars

Song: The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Voodoo Child (Slight Return) (Live In Maui, 1970)

Jimmy Butler: still good

Last season, Jimmy Butler quiet quit on his team. He wanted a new contract from the Miami Heat, and they didn't want to give him one, so he just stopped trying. As a fan, it seemed like an annoying and entitled thing to do. He couldn't just play the season out?

Butler eventually ended up getting traded to the Golden State Warriors, who gave him the extension he wanted, and he started trying again.

Setting aside whether Butler was justified, was the extension worth it or not? Butler is 36 years old, an age where it's totally expected for players to start to decline. The NBA salary cap rules now make it so a team can't afford to get a contract as big as Butler's wrong.

The Warriors took a calculated risk, and it paid immediate dividends when Jimmy helped them sneak into the playoffs last year, but the team is about in the same position they were before they got him -- a few high level players, but not in the upper echelon of the league due being old and incomplete.

Jimmy's doing great, though. He's at career highs in True Shooting (TS%) and effective FG percent (eFG%).

He's always been an efficient scorer, due to his ability to draw a lot of fouls. That means shooting a lot of free throws, which are easy points. Jimmy has been getting about 2.4x the number of free throws per shot attempt compared to the league average.

That's about where he's been for several seasons now. His free throw rate saw a huge jump when he moved to the Miami Heat in the 2019-2020 season, and he's maintained that ever since:

The career highs in TS% and eFG% probably aren't sustainable, though. Butler's a career 33% 3 point shooter who's making 45% of them this season. I wouldn't bet on that continuing, but he'll always be valuable on offense if he can draw that many free throws.

Butler's defense is still great, as well. The Warriors are 6.5 points per 100 possessions better on defense when he's on the floor.

He stands out on all the advanced metrics. Right now, he's 4th in WS/48 (behind Jokic, Shai and Giannis), 8th in PER, 8th in VORP, 3rd in Offensive Rating, 8th in Box Plus/Minus, and 11th in EPM.

For the numbers he's putting up, I think he's worth the money.

Ewing theory, 2025 edition

Individuals don't win games, teams do. Sometimes it can be hard to tell how much of player's individual contribution is actually increasing the likelihood of their team winning. And there's always opportunity cost: perhaps a big man would've been more valuable to this team than Butler has been.

When a star player gets injured, sometimes a team plays better, a phenomenon Bill Simmons coined "The Ewing Theory". We're seeing some of that this year.

The Atlanta Hawks are 2-3 this season when star Trae Young plays, and 9-4 when he doesn't.

The Memphis Grizzlies are 4-8 when star Ja Morant plays, and 2-4 when he doesn't. (While the win percentage is the same, the team has looked less hapless in those 6 games.)

The Orlando Magic are 6-6 when star Paolo Banchero plays, and 4-2 when he doesn't.

All three players have distinctive play styles that their team must run to maximize their talents -- to paraphrase James Harden, they are the system. Sometimes maximizing the opportunities for the best player means wasting some of the talents of the other players on the team.

Similar distinctive players like Harden, Jokic and Halliburton are far more essential -- their teams are much worse when they are out, despite the same potential on paper for holding their teams back.

What's the difference between the Hawks, who have been doing better without Trae Young, and the Pacers, who are completely hapless without Tyrese Halliburton? I'm not going to read too much into such small sample sizes, but it's an interesting thing to watch out for.

SGA's FTAs

Debates involving subjects anybody can have an opinion about tend to be much louder than subjects requiring specialized knowledge. It's the law of triviality. The purest form of this in sports is the question of who is the most valuable player. TThe NBA version of this debate is probably the loudest and least interesting of any sport.

There are people who don't know much about basketball or statistics, but will argue endlessly on the internet whether BPM or EPM or RAPTOR or VORP is the right metric for deciding who is the best player. Or rather, they decide on the player they like, then find the statistic that says what they want to hear.

For me, the MVP usually comes down to personal preference -- there are always a handful of players that are clearly better than everybody else, and which one is the most valuable among that set is a matter of taste, and often gets decided by narratives rather than anything rigorous. Perhaps rigor is futile. Pretty much every MVP caliber player is a unique basketball talent. None of them are really interchangeable -- they all break the mold in some way. Any sort of all-in-one number is bound to fail at capturing what makes each one special.

Perhaps because it is a matter of taste and ultimately a very trivial question, people tend to latch onto style points. Who is funnest to watch, who would be the funnest to play with. Who scores points ethically and unethically.

People who think that Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (SGA) shouldn't be the MVP derisively call him FTA, implying he gets awarded more free throws than he deserves, or is otherwise a free throw merchant -- someone who baits defenders into fouling him.

Shai is currently currently the leader in FTAs this year, so the FTA nickname is accurate in one sense. Here are the 10 players with the most free throw attempts this season, plus Jokić (15th place.)

Shai's FTr+ of 164 indicates he gets 1.64x more free throws per shot attempt than the average player.

In a vacuum, that seems high, but everybody on this list has an FTr+ of over 100. They're all good at drawing fouls. Most high volume scorers are. They score a lot and get fouled a lot for the same reason, they're hard to guard. Jimmy Butler is the king, though -- the only player on the list averaging under 20 points a game, and the only one with an FTr over .600.

Jimmy's getting 2 free throws per every 3 shots he attempts. Since he makes 80% of them, that's a free half point Butler gets every time he attempts a shot. As far as free throw merchants go, he's Giovanni de' Medici.

Compared to his peers, SGA's free throw rate is pretty tame. It's 7th on this list -- lower than Luka Dončić, Deni Avdija, James Harden, Franz Wagner, Giannis, and Jimmy Butler.

It's a little higher than Jokić's, but I don't know how you decide that an FTr+ of 139 is ethical, but an FTr+ of 164 is unethical (or a sign that the refs are in the tank for SGA). Where's the line? Why do other MVP candidates like Luka and Giannis escape criticism, when they draw more fouls per shot than SGA does?

I'll take a deeper dive into the topic some other time, but the fact that Luka's free throw rate took a jump when he got traded to the Lakers is another example of why the NBA stands for Not Beating Allegations.

Mathletix Bajillion, week 4

As usual: one team picks randomly, one team uses a simple algorithm.

Both the mathletix teams have losing records now, but so do all 5 Ringer teams, so it's still anyone's game. We're still saving a lot of (imaginary) money by shopping for lines, instead of taking them at -110. Even though I got lazy with shopping, I still managed to find all 10 bets at reduced juice.

Lines as of Friday morning.

The Neil McAul-Stars

last week: 1-4, -323
Overall: 7-8, -120
line shopping: +60

• MIA -5.5 -104 (prophetX)
• HOU +3.5 -107 (prophetX)
• WAS +6 -108 (prophetX)
• CAR +10 -108 (prophetX)
• NE -7 +100 (prophetX)

The Vincent Hand-Eggs

last week: 3-2, +97
Overall: 6-8-1, -247
line shopping: +33

• LV +9.5 -104 (lowvig)
• CLE +5 -104 (prophetX)
• PHI -7 -108 (prophetX)
• PIT +3 +100 (lowvig)
• WAS +6 -108 (prophetX)

Sources

All data sourced from basketball-reference.com

Home of Elvis and the Ancient Greeks

Song: Talking Heads, "Cities", live at Montreaux Jazz Festival, 1982

What's going on with the Grizzlies?

The easiest answer is they're miserably bad on offense. It's also the oddest thing about this team to me, since they scored effortlessly last year. The Grizzlies had found something that worked last season. They had the 6th best Offensive Rating, and 10th best Defensive Rating. Considering the Indiana Pacers made it within one game of winning the NBA Championship with the 9th best Offensive Rating and 13th best Defensive Rating, the Grizzlies were definitely a borderline contender.

This year, they're 27th in Offensive Rating, 21 positions worse than last year. (The falloff on defense is a little more understandable, since they have several very good defensive players injured right now.)

eFG+ is a measure of effective FG%, normalized so that 100 is league average. Here are the top 8 Grizzlies players by minutes played the last two seasons:

Except for rookie Cedric Coward, every single slot is a downgrade. Wells and Aldama have been significantly worse than last season, but the most dramatic is Ja Morant. The only player with around as many minutes played and a lower eFG+ are Ben Sheppard and Jarace Walker of the Indiana Pacers, young players who have been forced into playing a lot of minutes due to injuries.

Where have all the backup PGs gone?

A big problem for the Grizzlies is that they don't really have a backup point guard. They're far from the only team with a lack of PGs on the roster this season.

The Dallas Mavericks have been playing rookie forward Cooper Flagg as PG even though they knew their starting PG, Kyrie Irving, was injured coming into the season. The Nuggets have been experimenting with having forward Peyton Watson as backup PG. The Houston Rockets have no true PG in their "oops, all bigs" starting lineup, though Reed Sheppard is playing more and more off the bench, and looking pretty good.

It's an odd trend to me. Backup point guards have traditionally been cheap and easy to find -- guys like Ish Smith and D.J Augustin. They're like small, functional trucks. They made a ton of them back in the day, but they kinda don't exist anymore, despite how useful and reasonably priced they were. Does that make Yuki Kawamura the Kei truck of this analogy? Yes, yes it does.

The Rockets and Nuggets are doing fine so far without playing a backup PG, but the Grizzlies' situation is just baffling to me. Ja Morant is one of the more injury prone players in the league. You didn't think you needed to find a real backup for him? (Wouldn't Russell Westbrook look good in a Grizzlies uniform?)

The Grizzlies have a stretch of easier opponents coming up, so I think they'll start looking a little better for that reason alone. Maybe they'll get some mojo back. But I'm always about process, rather than outcomes, and I just don't get the Grizzlies' process right now. They had something pretty cool going last year, and now they don't.

Teams can't control a lot of factors. Injuries, who they play on a given night, the bounce of the ball on the rim on a last second shot. There's a lot of luck. But the Grizzlies' problems seem to come down to things the coaching staff and front office can control: vision, planning, vibes, communication, style of play.

Mathletix Bajillion, week 3

One of these teams is random, one is chosen by an algorithm put together by me, a non-football guy. Can you guess which one is which?

All lines are as of Thursday morning.

The Neil McAul-Stars

last week: 1-4, -301
Overall: 6-4, +203
line shopping: +43

• PIT +2.5 -105 (lowvig)
• GB -6.5 +100 (lowvig)
• NO -2 -108 (prophetx)
• TB +6.5 +101 (prophetx)
• PHI -3 -110 (hard rock)

The Vincent Hand-Eggs

last week: 2-2-1, -10
Overall: 3-6-1, -344
line shopping: +16

• CIN +6.5 -107 (rivers)
• CHI -2.5 -105 (lowvig)
• ATL +2 -102 (prophetx)
• BUF -5.5 -101 (prophetx)
• DET -10.5 -102 (prophetx)