Durant the worst player on the Thunder?

[Erick Blasco]

NBA General Managers have selected Kevin Durant as the player most likely to have a breakout season, and he's everybody's pick to be the next player to join basketball's two most exclusive clubs: Team USA and the All-Star team. It's no surprise that Durant is on billboards and the covers of video games. (A surprise of the off-season was word that the Thunder won't be on national TV much; Durant has the trappings of a player the world will crowd around television sets to watch.)

 

And yet, a shocking piece of news: The Thunder have, over the last two years, consistently performed worse than normal when Durant is on the floor. Any way you slice the +/- numbers, he's one of the Thunder's worst players.

 

You read that correctly. Kevin Durant, uniformly regarded as an out-of-this-world NBA player, has been killing his team.

 

Sometimes +/- can punish players simply for being on bad teams, but this is more than that. Mavericks' statistical expert Wayne Winston's in-depth lineup data shows that every one of Durant's key teammates -- Russell Westbrook, Jeff Green, Nenad Krstic, Nick Collison -- gets better, in many cases far better, results playing with less heralded teammates Thabo Sefolosha or Kyle Weaver while Durant sits.

 

In fact, almost nobody on the Thunder has a +/- rating as poor as Durant's. Winston rates Durant's performance "in the lowest 10% of all NBA players."

 

 

My linkhttp://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop/0-45-35/The-Kevin-Durant-Conundrum.html

Edited October 13, 2009 by Erick Blasco

[moeroadkill]

ahuh. that plus and minus is the biggest bull[expletive] ever. take away durant for this team and i would doubt they win 10 games

[Texan]

ahuh. that plus and minus is the biggest bull[expletive] ever. take away durant for this team and i would doubt they win 10 games

The thing is, there isn't really much credit to your claim that they would win less than ten games if Durant did not play for the Thunder. End of February/Early March time frame of last season, Durant had actually gotten hurt and missed like seven games in a row. During that time the Thunder actually won five of those games, and lost only two, so the stats do show that the team could win without Durant. Now that’s just a small sample size to play with, and obviously teams having to adjust to playing the Thunder without Durant would make game plans a bit different and harder. That said, I definitely think the Thunder are talented enough to win more than ten games without Durant.

 

As for the thesis of this article, I really don’t agree with it, no matter what plus or minus says. Just because the team doesn’t play as well when is on the court, does not mean that he is the worst player on the team. It just means the team doesn’t play well when he’s on the court. Durant is far and away the most talented player on the team, team output shouldn’t have any impact on who is the best and most talented player. Aside from that plus/minus doesn’t take into account that a majority of the time when Durant is on the court the other teams star players, and starters are on the court as well. When Durant leaves the court, the other team usually has their second unit backups in, and with the young talent like the Thunder have on the bench, they can do really well against other teams second units. So there is more to this story than just plus/minus, and you would figure that whoever made this accusation that Durant is the worst player on the team is a complete statistician and nothing more.

[Poe]

I'll take him and his horrendous +/- on my team any day.

[Guest N4S]

^ co-sign

[Real Deal]

I'm too lazy to do it, but someone go through the Lakers games from last season, list a few of Kobe's +/- stats, and compare them to other players on that team during those games.

 

Go ahead and do the same with Wade.

 

The +/- stats consider the players you're in the lineup with just as much as they do the player they supposedly match.

 

A lineup of Farmar, Vujacic, Bryant, Powell and Mbenga would lower Bryant's +/- statistic because they would score less than they allow...meaning, all five of them in the game at once.

 

Durant plays the bulk of the minutes with lesser talent, and the Thunder struggle, and that's reasonable. It's really that simple.

[Poe]

^ Also depends on match ups. While Durant is sitting, the Thunder's bench line up is most likely matching up and playing the opposing bench line up. Really, there are just so many situations with teammates and opposing players that can make a particular player appear like a huge + or -. It can be an unreliable statistic because of all the different circumstances in games.

Edited October 13, 2009 by Poe

[moeroadkill]

who do u think on the roster last year could have score on a nightly basis 25+ points a game and on some occasions those 30/40+ games. all those clutch shots(i dont mean game winners). im not trying to burn the team but from last season without Durant this team wouldn't have gone anywhere

[Erick Blasco]

I'm just throwing out this article for discussion. Obviously I don't think Durant is the worst player on the Thunder; he's clearly their most talented and has a bright future ahead of him.

 

However, for all the fawning done over Durant, the numbers show just how awful a defender Durant is and that, yes, no matter how good an offensive player you are, you won't be able to compensate if you're one of the worst defensive players in the league.

 

Brandon brings good common sense to the table

 

"Durant plays the bulk of the minutes with lesser talent, and the Thunder struggle, and that's reasonable. It's really that simple."

 

And yeah, Durant's numbers are deflated because of the Thunder's lack of talent. Nobody is questioning that.

 

But Abbott does counter:

 

 

 

Theory #2: Any player with those teammates would have a bad +/-.

Again, sound good, but his teammates manage to be part of many good lineups and player combinations.

 

Of particular interest here is Russell Westbrook. The Thunder are very good when Westbrook's on the court, and generally pretty bad when he's off. (Wayne Winston says this effect is so pronounced he could build a strong case that Westbrook should have been rookie of the year over Derrick Rose.)

 

How does Westbrook do it?

 

In some ways, he's the opposite of Durant. He is not a gaudy scorer -- in fact, he's a pretty bad shooter. He also has a high turnover rate, which is typically murder on team efficiency.

 

Yet Westbrook is a good defender. He draws a ridiculous number of fouls on both ends of the floor. He gets the team in the bonus, which in turn earns all of his teammates free throws. He rebounds well for his position, particularly at the offensive end, which can often lead to easy baskets.

 

 

...so I don't think it's that simple. Plus, as Abbott and Texan above have posted, the Thunder have won games without Durant. Granted, against some horrible teams, but they've played without Durant and survived.

 

Ultimately, I think the onus is on Durant to improve, not so that he isn't the Thunder's worst player, but because he's not going to become a prodigious, off-the-charts super-duper star as one of the game's worst defenders, which is exactly what he is. I doubt the Thunder come anywhere close to the playoffs this season until he makes a dramatic improvement, and some of the players he projects to defensively at this point include Tim Thomas and DerMarr Johnson.

 

There have been a few follow ups to the article from Durant on twitter, Abbott, and Basketball-reference here and here.

 

By the way, here are the best and worst on court/off court plus/minus numbers in the league. There are some anomalies (Deron Williams is not the 3rd worst defender in the league, and Lamar Odom is not the 8th best defender in the league, and Peja Stojakovic doesn't only trail Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, LeBron James, and Kobe Bryant as the best offensive player in the league, but the numbers are pretty cool.

 

Plus/Minus stuff

[Real Deal]

Coaches experiment with their lineups by centering them around their most dominant players...so it's understandable if Durant is the one playing with the worst lineups, while guys like Westbrook and Green get most of their minutes with Durant. Makes a lot of sense.

 

In addition to that, because I've watched a lot of Thunder games already, I can say that I see Westbrook on the floor defending bench players more than I see Durant, and that's because anytime Durant is in the game, the opposing team makes sure they have their best defender or best player in there as well, which crushes KD's +/- stats.

 

Nobody else on the Thunder get that attention.

[Erick Blasco]

Coaches experiment with their lineups by centering them around their most dominant players...so it's understandable if Durant is the one playing with the worst lineups, while guys like Westbrook and Green get most of their minutes with Durant. Makes a lot of sense.

 

In addition to that, because I've watched a lot of Thunder games already, I can say that I see Westbrook on the floor defending bench players more than I see Durant, and that's because anytime Durant is in the game, the opposing team makes sure they have their best defender or best player in there as well, which crushes KD's +/- stats.

 

Nobody else on the Thunder get that attention.

 

This is true. Everything you say is true....but man, those numbers aren't just bad, they're horrible. Not even Kings' players have +/- numbers that bad.

[Super Cool Beas]

Durant was one of the biggest All-Star snubs of last season...but yet he's somehow looked at (by any random yahoo) as the worst player on the Thunder!?! I think the Thunder's struggles had more to do with their coaching than anything. Once Scottie Brooks took over the team, the offense started to flow much better and the team played considerably better than they did under PJ. Brooks got more production out of Durant by moving him to SF and Westbrook excelled by being given the ability to dominate the ball more.

 

My biggest problem with this team is their size in the post and obviously defense. Jeff Green plays hard but just isn't a PF and because of a lack of personnel, Green is forced to play the position at least half the time.

[Erick Blasco]

Durant was one of the biggest All-Star snubs of last season...but yet he's somehow looked at (by any random yahoo) as the worst player on the Thunder!?! I think the Thunder's struggles had more to do with their coaching than anything. Once Scottie Brooks took over the team, the offense started to flow much better and the team played considerably better than they did under PJ. Brooks got more production out of Durant by moving him to SF and Westbrook excelled by being given the ability to dominate the ball more.

 

My biggest problem with this team is their size in the post and obviously defense. Jeff Green plays hard but just isn't a PF and because of a lack of personnel, Green is forced to play the position at least half the time.

 

Not any random yahoo, but the mathematical formulas that determine adjusted plus/minus ratios. And the random yahoo is a very respected ESPN writer, Henry Abbott of TrueHoop.

[Super Cool Beas]

Not any random yahoo, but the mathematical formulas that determine adjusted plus/minus ratios. And the random yahoo is a very respected ESPN writer, Henry Abbott of TrueHoop.

You can't base all opinions off of numbers and I've never heard of Henry Abbott.

[NomarFachix]

KD da liverwurst

[Abro]

I like KD but he really is overrated..

[AJFromTheDMV]

This shows why Stats can be misleading.

[Nitro]

For fun, took a quick glance at the OKC 08-09 stats, and the only major difference with KD on and off the floor was defense...they were about the same with him on the floor offensively, but a -8 with him on the court defensively. That makes these stats more understandable. Keep in mind, those numbers were from his first 2 years in the league, he's vastly improved in all aspects since then.

 

Besides, raw +/- is often deceiving. Adjusted +/- tends to do a much better job of supporting what really goes on over the course of a season.