And as it so happens, Matt just did a mammoth post looking at PER and “usage rates” for every team in the league. I wasn’t planning to get into the advanced stat stuff for our “VORP Series” until later in the week, but we may as well fold his yeoman’s work into this whole talk. I’ll still bust out the rest of the advanced stuff and show the Pacers players vs. the league average in a future post that may speak more to the “VORPiness” of the team, but Matt has some even cooler and more colorful charts than I will, and this stuff all dovetails with what we’ll be talking about later, so let’s just run with this, too, eh.

(See also Looking at VORP, Vol. 1: Offensive Production and Looking at VORP, Vol. 2: Shooting Percentages for past breakdowns if you care to be caught up to speed on the whole VORP concept I keep rambling on about.)

For the uninitiated, PER and usage rate are two of the more useful advanced stats we have, with the former being the John Hollinger-created “player efficiency rating” and the latter being a less-contentious measure of the percentage of possessions a player “uses” while they are on the court. Guys like LeBron, Kobe and Dwyane who take a lot of shots, get to the line a lot and turn the ball over a lot typically have the highest usage rates, naturally, but how the stat often proves more insightful is by revealing which players who get less playing time tend to dominate the ball/shoot a lot.

That’s exactly what it shows us about this year’s Indiana Pacers.

Danny leads the team by using 29.0% of the team’s possessions when he’s on the floor. For reference/perspective, Dwyane Wade leads the league at 35.2% and guys like Kobe, LeBron and Carmelo all come in around 33%. On this team, 29% is probably about right for Granger, although it would be nice if he would use a few less of those possessions to chuck threes. (But that’s a discussion for a different post.)

The more interesting thing is that the next two biggest “ball hogs” on the team are both rookies, with Tyler Hansbrough and AJ Price gobbling up 25.2% and 23.5% of the team’s possessions when they’re out there, respectively.

The rest of the curve isn’t too unsurprising, but three things do stand out:

• Roy Hibbert probably deserves more looks at the hoop given his (relatively) high FG%.
• Brandon Rush never shoots.
• Troy Murphy, the team’s most accurate shooter (and second most efficient player), doesn’t use many possessions.

Here is Matt’s assessment of Indy’s usage curve:

Price’s confidence is admirable, and he’s playing well. Granger should be the top, Tyler should probably not be that high, but who else, really? Uh… free Jeff Foster?

Step 2 in the Hardwood Paroxysm analysis was to look at whether or not those players “deserve” to be using as many possessions as they do. PER is a highly contentious stat among many NBA fans (again, a different discussion for a different day), but — at worst — it is a good crude measure of general statistical production, so it should help illustrate some stuff we might not otherwise notice.

So what Matt did was overlay each player’s PER on top of the usage curve.

Here is what he came up with for the Pacers:

While those of us unfortunate enough to have suffered through every Pacer game this year may have some more nuanced things to infer from this chart, it’s safe to say that Matt’s quick assessment is pretty much exactly what anyone familiar with these stats would see:

SIMMER DOWN, ROOKIES

For perspective’s sake, it might help to look at the PER/usage overlay charts for all the teams, but basically what we’re seeing here is that Tyler and AJ both have used a boatload of possessions, but haven’t used them particularly efficiently. Both have very high usage/middling PER. The spots where the interior yellow blob-thing (PER) juts out closer to the edge of the blue seashell-looking mass (usage rate) illustrate the players whose PER is more closely aligned with their usage. These are the guys whose shots are more “just” or “deserved.” (See, Troy Murphy, or to lesser degrees, Hibbert, Watson and Danny.)

Thus, Tyler and AJ’s low productivity calls into question whether they should be taking so many shots.

Should somebody (whether it is the coach or the other players on the floor) reign in the rookies? Or is what we’re seeing here — like it seemed to be with Jarrett Jack last year or Dahntay in November — a situation where the two rookies are simply the two guys more willing to attack while everyone else stands around passively?

And regardless of the answer to either of those questions, is it ultimately a good thing that these young guys are getting so many more reps than projected, even if they aren’t really using those reps to help the team score (given that, ya know, Tyler is shooting an embarrassing 36.0% from the field and AJ is shooting a not-all-that-much-better 40.8%)? (This last question obviously also needs to be prefaced by the fact that both players’ “high reps” have come in curtailed minutes — Tyler due to his ongoing and more-worrisome-by-the-day injuries and AJ due to only making his way into the rotation recently.)

A few other observations:

• Troy Murphy has the best-looking PER/usage distribution on the team and his “high PER/low usage” suggests he deserves more looks.
• Roy Hibbert’s overlay looks pretty good for a second-year center who was expected to develop slowly.
• Mike Dunleavy has not bounced back to pre-injury production rates and, since he is still such a big part of the offense, that fact is really not helping the offense.
• Luther Head has shot a lot more often than he probably should.
• Ditto Dahntay Jones.
• TJ Ford’s benching wasn’t statistically unwarranted.
• Brandon Rush has been reluctant to do much on offense so far this year — and with good reason.
• Earl Watson looks to be filling his role as he should.

Interesting stuff. Thanks to Matt for his serendipitous timing on this and helping further color our analysis. (Get it? Color … whatever … your mom’s not funny either.)

In case you missed “Looking at VORP With Colorful Charts Vol. 1: Individual Offensive Production,” you might want to read the intro there to find out what this little project is all about. But the cliff notes version is that we’re looking at how all the Pacers players are performing statistically against the league average. Are they putting up numbers better, worse or on-par with any other run-of-the-mill NBA player? (Spoiler alert: They are almost all shooting really poorly.)

Today, we look at shooting percentages. Pretty self-explanatory.

The only difference as far as process goes is that this time we only have three categories for players to fall into instead of five: Above Average (green), Average (uncolored) or Below Average (red). (Above Average is assigned to those with 105% or better of the league average shooting rate while Below Average is for those with 95% or worse.)

And for those of you who don’t know, “eFG%” (or “effective field goal percentage) is regular FG% but adjusted to account for the fact that three-point attempts have a higher risk/reward factor. It just uses a little simple math that acknowledges that a three-pointer counts for three points. And “TS%” (or “true shooting percentage”) takes eFG% and adjusts it to also count FT%. If you’re a bad FT shooter, your TS% will be affected negatively where as if you’re good from the line, it will push it up.

Got it? Good.

Here is the colorful chart:

Once again, I’ll let you come to your own conclusions, but here are some observations:

• Troy Murphy was literally one made FT away from being Above Average in all 5 categories. Instead he is Above Average in 4 out of 5
• No other Pacer is Above Average in even 2 categories
• The Pacers attempt 22.2 three-pointers per game (which is 6th highest among NBA teams), yet they only have two players (Troy Murphy and Brandon Rush) who make threes at an Above Average rate, and only have four players who don’t make threes at a Below Average rate (Troy Murphy, Brandon Rush, Danny Granger and — just barely — Mike Dunleavy)
• A stunning six Pacers shoot below 42% from the field
• Only two Pacers have TS% better than the exact league average of 54.1%, and Troy Murphy is the only guy above 55.0%
• There are 280 total squares in this chart (14 players x 5 categories). 10 squares are green. 4 of the green squares belong to Troy Murphy. 1 green square belongs to Danny Granger. And 33 squares are red.

Obviously, one thing we have to remember is that red squares in the 3P% category for big guys like Roy, Solomon, Jeff and Tyler are inconsequential. Those four have attempted a combined 9 threes this year and we know none of those shots came by design.

Along those same lines, Hoopdata also allows us to see where players are actually shooting from. And because it’s such a phenomenal site, it also gives us league averages from each location.

Traditionally, on a leaguewide basis, the worst shots to take in an NBA game are two-pointers from beyond 10 feet. Most players can’t consistently make shots between 10 feet and three-point territory at better than 40% — not during games, that is. That doesn’t mean that all shots from those locations are bad shots — indeed, a guy like Dwyane Wade, Kobe or Tony Parker can be often get himself a great shot by pulling up from 18 feet after creating space with a dribble or two. But a lot of other midrange jumpers tend to be closely contested, rushed or off-balance shots off the dribble. More than “bad” shots, they just tend to be “well-defended” shots — which is something that makes sense when you factor in the quick-rotating, long-armed defenders that prowl the modern NBA.

My only point here is that some guys take more of these “bad” shots while other guys take less. And that goes for all locations. Thus, on the “shooting percentage by shot location” chart below, I have left the attempts and makes (“A” and “M”) so you can have some context for how significant each shooting percentage is.

AJ Price, for example, shoots 44.4% from 10-15 feet, which is a rather good rate. But if you look to the left of that impressive number, you’ll see he only shoots 0.4 times per game from that location. So what that really means is that “for every 10 games he plays, AJ takes 4 shots from between 10-15 feet — and he makes about 2 of them.” Four shots in 10 games is not exactly relevant to the Pacers overall offensive success — let alone their record — no matter what the percentage, and his mid-rookie season stats in this category are probably only slightly more relevant to what we can expect AJ to shoot from that location throughout the rest of his career. So keep that stuff in mind.

OK … enough prologue.

On to the colorful chart:

Some observations:

• Aside from “At Rim,” Troy Murphy shots not just Above Average, but WAAAAY Above Average from every location.
• Danny Granger shoots Average or Below Average from every location.
• AJ Price is the only Pacer who finishes notably well at the rim, and he finishes so well there that he is actually 57th overall in the whole league in this category — ahead of guys like Rajon Rondo, Josh Smith, Brandon Roy, Amar’e Stoudamire, Tim Duncan and Carlos Boozer. (It’s important to note that he takes only half as many — or in some cases four times as few — shots from that close as all of these other players do.)
• When any of Brandon Rush (50.0%), Tyler Hansbrough (51.4%) or Danny Granger (52.7%) take an At Rim shot (defined as “a dunks, lay-ups and tip ins”), it is roughly a 50/50 proposition. That seems hard to believe.
• Tyler Hansbrough hasn’t shot well from anywhere this year.
• 6 Pacer players shoot Above Average from <10 feet (a category that excludes “At Rim” shots) and everyone on the team aside from Tyler Hansborough, Solomon Jones and AJ Price are capable shooters from this distance.
• As we saw in the Shooting Percentages chart above, no one shoots well from three aside from Troy Murphy and Brandon Rush, with Danny Granger and Mike Dunleavy coming in right around Average.
• Troy Murphy and Luther Head are the only two Pacers that have taken and made a lot a high percentage from mid-range (16-23 feet) with Solomon and Josh being Above Average, but in very few attempts. TJ Ford and Brandon Rush hit from here at a league average rate as well, but everyone else is by and large not helping the offense with their mid-range game.

[Editor's Note: I perhaps could have done this one in "per 40 minutes" mode instead of "per game" mode, but honestly didn't really even think about that distinction before going in. Per game is probably better anyway now that I think about it since most of us aren't all that familiar with attempts per game by location anyway. You can sort it that way at Hoopdata if you prefer and want to see things like how many shots "At Rim" a guy like AJ would extrapolate to in 40 minutes (3.6) or how many treys Danny would launch if he played 4 extra minutes per night (9.0). Just click on the "TM" listing and it will group all the Pacers together for easy comparison.]

Stats cannot tell us everything.

We use them a lot here on 8p9s mainly because they can be good shorthand to explain stuff, but we’re fully aware of their limitations and their inability to capture the nuances of the game of basketball. There are so many things on offense like screens, ball-reversals, positioning, spacing, making the extra pass, “hockey assists,” ball-handling, driving-and-kicking, running the pinch-post, slashing, the ability to run the break, chemistry, timing, knowing when to call your own number and dozens of other skills that go unrecorded. And when it comes to defense, essentially everything that happens other than rebounding is not measured by normal stats.

That said, we can glean a lot of stuff from the numbers that do get tallied — particularly on offense. How much a player produces particularly in relation to the other people on his team and the other players in the league says something about the guy. Do they score? Do they get to the line? Do they turn the ball over too much? Do they shoot a lot?

That’s what we’re about to look at.

In particular, we’re trying to look at something about how the players on the Pacers roster compare to the average player in the league. It is increasingly my belief that this team is full of players who are entirely average and interchangeable. More and more, it seems like the roster features one guy who is in the upper echelon of NBA players (Danny), a few useful and solid but inconsistent players who would get time on most NBA teams (Dunleavy, Murphy, Hibbert, Foster, perhaps Tyler), and then a bunch guys who look great on occasion and show a lot of promise but then, a second later, just as often look like they barely belong on an NBA court.

Don’t get me wrong — this is the NBA so everyone here is a tremendous basketball player and can have flashes of greatness. And they all have their specialized skillsets. But this roster seems to consist of Granger, a couple of role players and a couple of unreliables. Depending on the individual’s age and what they’re expected to do, it’s not necessarily an indictment on them that they are only a “role player” or even an “unreliable,” but for lack of a better way to articulate this, it is what it is. They’re not getting it down night-in and night-out and that’s what the Pacers badly need if they are going to start winning any games this year.

And, to me — in addition to Jim O’Brien’s bordering-on-schizophrenic inability to find any lineup combination — this is sort of what helps explain why we have seen so many starting combinations this season and might help speak to some of the stuff that Tim was talking about yesterday.

In baseball, there is an advanced statistic called VORP, which stands for Value Over Replacement Player. It’s a pretty complicated formula and I don’t really understand it. But it essentially looks at players to see how much better they are than any run-of-the-mill prospect who could be called up from AAA or picked off the free agent scrap heap and given their job.

This has also been used somewhat for NBA stuff and has it’s own complicated formulas.

I don’t care about such advanced calculations or making you readers learn anything new here, however. I basically just want to look at all the players on the roster and see how they compare to the average NBA player. So, this is probably more a “Value Over Average Player” analysis than anything. But VORP sounds better and has some pre-established context, so I’m stealing the acronym and repurposing it for my own devices.

When I think “average player,” I’m talking about guys like Flip Murray, Nenad Krstic, Dorrell Wright, Sheldon Williams, Boobie Gibson or Maurice Evans: players who belong in this league and can be in the rotation for even a decent team, but they are limited, inconsistent and easily attainable in a trade. Often, they might just be filler. What I’m trying to see is how the production of the players on the Pacers compare to these types of guys. Who on the roster is putting up better numbers than guys like that?

I’ll break down a few other stat categories in the days and weeks to come, but let’s start out looking at general offensive production. We’re looking at offensive production per 40 minutes, specifically. A lot of people balk at the per-40 stats because, hey, if a guy was capable of playing that much than he would be playing that much. Well, OK. That’s not a ludicrous counter-argument.

But there are two reasons, we’re doing it this way: (1) historically, most guys can keep things up once they are given extra minutes, and (2) if we’re going to look at all the guys on the roster and gauge their production versus one another, we need to equalize the minutes per game.

The chart below shows the stats, which I have assigned the following colors based upon how well the player produces in that category versus the average NBA player:

• Green = well above league average production (125% or more of the league avg player’s production)
• Red = well below average (75% or less of the league avg)
• Gatorade Lemon-Lime = above average (110% – 124% of league avg)
• Light Orange = below average (76% – 90% or less of league avg)
• Uncolored Sections = average (91%-109% of league avg)

Not a perfect system, I know, but it is at least pretty clear-cut.

Here’s what it looks like:

Offensive Production Per 40 Minutes

Well Below Avg.  |  Below Avg.  |  Above Avg.  |  Well Above Avg.
[Uncolored = Avg.]

I’ll let you come to your own conclusions, but here what seems interesting to me:

• Danny, Dunleavy, Tyler and AJ are the only guys who are well above average in four or more categories
• Troy is the only guy with no well-below-average ratings
• Only 5 players (Danny, MDJ, Roy, Tyler and AJ) put points on the board at a well-above-average level
• Only 2 players (Danny and Roy) make a lot of FGs
• Exactly 6 guys cannot get to the line at even an NBA average rate
• Troy and Luther both take a lot of shots for guys who can’t get to the line
• Dahntay and TJ are the only two non-big men that don’t shoot — and make — a ton of threes
• No one on the team has impressive assist numbers, and Granger, MDJ and Rush are all below average
• Jeff doesn’t do anything but rebound and him, Solomon and Josh are the only 3 players with only one above average category
• Troy is the team’s most efficient scorer (we’ll look at this more when we do a shooting percentage chart)

That’s all I’m really seeing here aside from a general reinforcement that the team seems to be full of guys who don’t produce at a high clip, particularly when you consider that the Pacers play at the 2nd highest pace in the entire NBA and should thus have inflated stats here compared to a league average player who is in a slower system. If you scaled back these Pacer players production levels to an average pace, things would look even less impressive.

And there are not a lot of guys who’s per-minute numbers suggest they “deserve” a ton of extra minutes, aside from Tyler, AJ and Roy (presuming he can handle them physically and from a foul standpoint) — which is something I imagine we’ll be seeing going forward. As for Watson, Solomon and McRoberts, however, there isn’t a lot that suggests that their production alone makes them much more qualified to play than anyone else. They each bring some intangibles and things that others on the roster might not be able to do offensively, but they have not been putting numbers on the board while they have been on the court.

Not even Patches O’Houlihan could turn the Average Joes into champions if he had to work with these five Ds: Danny, Dunleavy, Dahntay, Diener and … Danny.