Jason Quick "Rants" on Charting Greg Oden's Touches

Quick was probably right that too much was made out of the first game overall and regarding Greg in particular, but I didn’t get the sense that your post did much more than provide the data that inspected a few different ways of looking at the game.

I really like Jason Quick, his articles and his podcasts. I’ve been active in threads defending him.

However, this is the second time that on his podcasts he has sounded like he might need a vacation. Last year I remember a similar podcast where he went off on how much he hates trade speculation.

When I listened to him saying:

“And, boy, I don’t… that just doesn’t sound very fun to me… or what kind of outlook do you have on life if you’re sitting there going ‘nitpick, nitpick, nitpick, nitpick.’ I don’t know, that’s not very fun to me.”

My immediate thought as I heard him say it was that he didn’t seem like he was having fun. He seemed to be a downer. Depressed and angry.

This is the second time I’ve wondered if he still enjoys his job. I’d really hate to lose him because I like his coverage, and I think his relationships give us insights that we otherwise wouldn’t have access to.

But something in his voice during rants like this and the one last year make me wonder if he isn’t burnt out on this beat.

Quick was probably more critical of the team than anyone during the series against Houston. Nitpicking isn’t fun, I guess. Hypocrisy isn’t that fun either, actually.

I think Quick gets irritated when he realizes he’s not the sole source of information on the Blazers. Combine that with his deep love for the team and you get a rant like this. (His love for Blake is really infuriating and led to the whole Andre-Miller-isn’t-happy thing.)

Good response, Ben.

Jason Quick is like som kind of eccentric genius. But does anybody else find it ironic how he was so hard on Oden last season, and now he is ranting against perceived criticism? I guess it kind of makes sense because Quick is more defending Nate than Oden. Quick seems really emotionally vested in his favorites. But if you get on his bad side, ohhhhh, look out!

Is that it was such a polar opposite from the preseason games. The Blazers went to Oden a lot in those games and saw flashes of potential, so when they didn’t do the same in the first game, it was a shock that a lot of us (me included) weren’t ready for.

Is how ineffective those 5 plays were.
What a joke. Its Nates offense I guess pass the ball counts as a play.

the 5 needs to be some kind of offensive threat or this team is going to underachieve

This is truly Quick speaking? He sounds like he works for the Blazers. Relax man.
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Ben I salute you first for the dicipline to really go charting a game. It sounds to me like Blazersedge is gaining enough noteriety that maybe JQ is feeling the heat. Nothing wrong with that. The analysis here is well reasoned, and there is consistantly new copy to read. And there are no pop ups like on OL.
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In terms of touches for Oden, I stand by my assertion that his touches don’t matter as much as some of the disturbing trends in the gameplan. Nate complains about ball movement but his play calling involves most of the team standing around. Last nights game is just in my craw. Stats don’t tell the whole story, but if you believe in Points Per Possession as an important statistic you’d be disturbed by the Nuggets .95ppp to the Blazers paltry.81ppp.
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Since the percentage of possessions lost figures are nearly equal, it points to us taking a lot of bad shots and an offense supposed to be loaded is right now sucking wind. The Nuggets on the other hand appear to have spent their pre-season getting ready for the regular season. We spent our pre-season saying “it’s only preseason”. It shows.

A touch does not equal a play being called for you. Most possessions are going to have multiple touches by multiple players (unless its Roy or LA isolated). LaMarcus may have only had 3 plays called for him, but I guarantee he had many more touches than that.

What? You didn’t ask for his name?

Blazers – 94 Nuggets – 97
Shots For: 81 → Points: 61 Shots For: 61 → Points 59
FT Attempts: 41 → Points: 33 FT Attempts 49 → Points 38
Total Points: 94 Total Points: 97
Turn Overs: 7 Turn Overs: 8
Total Possessions = Shots+FTA’s – TO’s
TPoss = 115 TPoss = 102
Points Per Possession (PPP) = Total Points/ Total Possessions
Percent Loss of Ball (PLB) = TO’s / Total Possessions

PPP .81 PPP .95
PLB 6% PLB 7%
RBS 44 RBS 36

You could claim the Nuggest played better defense then us, but the low low PLB says otherwise. Fact is they just ran a better offense then us. So much better they were able to overcome the rebounding advantage that didn’t result in many easy put backs considering our paltry .81 PPP.

What does it mean to be a fan? In my book fan is short for fanatic. It makes sense to me that people who are fanatic about the blazers would analyze everything. Also, he shouldn’t forget that this wasn’t just one game. They played 7 preseason games which most of us couldn’t see unless we bought tickets. All indications were that Greg had a new confidence on offense and developed some moves. Is it sow wrong that the fans were dissapointed to watch a game that gave the appearance that his teamates never see him? Come on, if he was going to dominate a team it should of been Houston with their short players. What ever Quick.

seemed designed to do one thing and one thing only: breed controversy.

So the ploy worked.

Good job.

But numbers only go so far. You can’t take the game of basketball to the extremity of how many touches each players gets per quarter.

Looking at statistics is fun, but not so much essential to defining a great team. We have played two games… tell me which one we lost.

Game 1 - 26 turnovers
Game 2 - 7 turnovers

Seasons underway and it’s all hands on deck.

Most everyone is throwing in their .02 cents to help give the Blazers an edge,
not put them on edge.

Where the line of objective critique crosses over to impatient rant is in the
mind of the poster/reader.

Keep the constructive observations & ideas flowing = the best is yet to come!

oh thanks Ben and of course Dave – you guys are getting it DONE!

Sure, I love getting an inside scoop on the team, and he’s a solid writer. But he stokes flames a lot, routinely attributes motives and intentions to people based on his assumptions (he thinks he can read anyone), and quite frankly, is exceptionally reactionary.

Jason is awfully quick (no pun intended) to dole out judgment based on an exceptionally flawed reading of the facts. I’m with you Ben. You provided interesting statistics. You interpretation of those statistics was brief, fair, and balanced. I have no clue what Quick is smoking, but he’s attributing motives and intentions to you that are all in his head.

apparently, in setting the terms of the conversation.

I guess this should not be a surprise to me, the internet has really arrived! It makes the title of Ben’s regular feature, “Media Row Report,” all the more clever.

How does that power feel, Ben? Are you a little nervous about crossing the line in to BEdger partisanship? How much do you owe to the Blazers’ organization for your access? Are you minding your career?

I think it’s an awesome kind of democratic media process if you are able to get the bigwigs to respond directly to our concerns. If nothing else, we can be educated by people in the organization about why we are so far off.

Along those lines, Antonio Harvey lent a pretty cogent player’s perspective to the question last night on the “5th Quarter” when he pointed out that when Oden is ready, when he has the chops to score with ease, he will get the touches. It becomes undeniable. And from a coaches perspective, a player demands the ball when the confidence to score is there.

This raises the more broad question of how much the players determine the offensive flow and how much the coaches determine it. I think as a fan, there is a tendency to assume that how things are is largely due to conscious choices the coaching staff is making. That said, it does seem like a good coach can gently steer the ship towards something that should work long term even if it is not so great right now.

Last year at this time, the team seemed intent to make Oden step up regardless of how ready he was. A year later, their approach has changed.

I think this could very well be his make or break year. Though his offensive plan was “efficient” from last season, I always thought the jumpshooting was fool’s gold. I wasn’t surprised the team played tight in the playoffs.

Chart, whatever. A sample size of 1 or 2 tells you naythin. Anybody with any background in social science knows that. Not that one shouldn’t “shed light on a hot topic”, but let’s not pretend that we’re going to glean any meaningful information based on one game. Jason Quick does have more access to the team and can therefore interview players and coaches and get better qualitative information on its inner workings. Not to say that Ben shouldn’t have the same access…

Being into basketball, being a fan, is supposed to be fun. BEdgers, including myself sometimes, do get to a point in their criticisms where it just doesn’t seem like they’re having fun. It’s definitely not fun for Quick and the players when everybody is hollering up and down for them to get fired or traded. Everybody wants to see the PTBs win a championship, but there seems like there’s an inferiority complex among fans that makes them want it too much at the expense of enjoying a very good NBA basketball team.

From what I saw, it seemed pretty clear that he wasn’t getting the ball inside because he was often in poor position. Chuck Hayes either did a phenomenal job considering his size or Oden just isn’t that skilled at getting deep position and sealing off his man yet. That, and he turns the ball over too much. He’ll get better and he’ll get more touches when that happens. He has to prove it in games by making plays in the post, not just looking good in practice. You can’t keep giving him the ball if it isn’t the most effective way of winning a ballgame.

“Painting the act of shot/touch charting as “scrutiny” of a player or of the coaching staff injects a perspective or motive into a simple data collection process. A process that is conducted by scouts for every team in the NBA and by services like Synergy to provide objective information regarding player and team tendencies."

It’s your job to get interested in this stuff, to come up with things to say. But, man, come on, you already stated your assumptions before you did the charts. You had to have them to even bother testing something. Quick was a bit whiny about how he reproached you, but you totally deserved it. You jumped off a logical cliff and screamed the whole way down. Just the idea of charting one players touches denotes a serious critical standpoint toward the team’s stance (we’ve also seen you refer to Roy as selfish with increasing frequency eg, last night’s media row). We’re not talking critical as in reconstructing and argument, we’re talking critical as in “you’re wrong, I’m right.”

Dude, you’re a great writer and you’re getting better. But, your POV (on this particular issue) is so parochial it merits outright neglect. The narrative you created clearly implies that Roy’s growing more selfish, Nate favors Roy in isos instead of playing team ball and getting the rock to Oden. Quick clearly rebuffed that by explaining that Oden had more plays called for than anyone else on the team. That directly contradicts the intent of your chart.

Your thesis point of this whole enterprise was to demonstrate that the Blazers don’t trust, get the ball to Oden enough and don’t want to (desire and intent were major components of your implied theme). It’s been argued that they tried to do so more than your chart reflects. The intent of the Blazers, then, directly contradicts your concerns. Basically, not only was Quick saying your sample size was too small, he said based on intent, you were flat out wrong. It’s no concern.

This discussion is on crack, big time.

I don’t really think we need to give Oden a bunch of post-up opportunities, especially if he is being guarded by a good defender. Oden has been way too turnover prone in that sort of situation and hasn’t really proved that the team should try to run it’s offense through him that way.

What we do need is to generate more of the easy “catch and dunk” type plays for Oden. If you watch LAL play, they create a huge number of easy baskets like this for Bynum. Oden is a better athlete and more explosive leaper than Bynum (so in theory he should be a better finisher and it should be easier to get him dunks), yet the Blazers don’t get Oden nearly as many easy baskets as the Lakers get for Bynum. We don’t need to try to build the offense around Oden, instead just set it up so when the defense tries to stop our other guys it leaves Oden open and in scoring position.