Nuggets Coast Again, Have No Problem With The Bulls 112-91

With F Tyrus Thomas playing god awful, SG Ben Gordon missing every shot, Ben Wallace a light-scoring center as always, and Coach Scott Skiles going crazy on the sidelines and a couple of times on the court in the face of an official, the Chicago Bulls are in disarray and were unable to compete with or even slow down the offensive juggernaut of the Denver Nuggets. The Nuggets scored 72 points in the first half and that pretty much decided it. The Nuggets completed a 4-game sweep of their home stand and essentially led by substantial margins from start to finish in every single game. Overall, the Nuggets now head for Los Angeles to play the Clippers with a 6 game winning streak. The final score was Nuggets 112 Bulls 91.

By the end of the game, it wasn’t clear who should be starting for Chicago, though the rookie forward Joakim Noah made the best case to be a starter, with 16 points on 7/10 and 8 rebounds, 3 assists, a steal and a block. In a game where Ben Gordon’s +/- stat was as bad as it gets, -30, Noah’s was -4. So Noah was just about the only Bull who was keeping up with the Nuggets.

The Bulls had 18 offensive rebounds to a measly 7 for the Nuggets, but when you are penetrating at will, doing well with jumpers and getting most, but not all of the hack-a-Nugget calls and making most of your free throws, you can get away with missing out on some 2nd chance scores. The Nuggets were wild and competent, while the Bulls were wild and incompetent; both teams had 21 turnovers. Iverson with 3 and J.R. Smith with 4 combined for 7 steals.

Marcus Camby, otherwise known as relatively unappreciated, had yet another night of all-around great basketball. We’re talking career best, never played better stuff: 20 rebounds, 12 points on 4/8, 5 blocks, 5 assists, and a steal. Personal fouls? None. What is the bigger crime? Is it that Camby does not get enough help with rebounding, which will kill the Nuggets when they play the Jazz, Lakers, or Spurs? Or is it the fact that fans still insist that he is a terrible jump shooter, which is plainly false. In this one, Camby was 4/5 on jumpers that included 2 midrange and 1 top of the key shot. Very late in the 3rd quarter, Camby made two quick jumpers, which gave Denver an insurmountable 94-69 lead. Anyone guilty of either crime should get at least a week in the slammer, except for Melo who, with 2 rebounds, is as guilty as anyone, but has to get off with probation because he has rare jump shot and finishing skills and he’s Iverson’s sidekick and an all-star and all that.

So far this season, even more so than last, Melo is too mellow, and not aggressive enough defensively. Similarly, on offense, he does not demand enough possessions from Iverson and Smith and Wilks and so forth. It’s one of the peculiar things about the Nuggets, almost kind of funny actually, but Melo is in fact mellow, a relatively easy to please dude who could hardly care less who exactly wins the scoring title in the NBA, and whether or not he is considered the Michael Jordan of the Nuggets. Melo just wants to keep being as dependable as the clock on the wall, and leave most of the strategy and tactics to his coaches and to key teammates such as Iverson, respectively. Furthermore, he believes strongly in a share the wealth philosophy. Wherever there is talent and effort to be found on the Nuggets, Melo will be in favor of bringing it to fruition even if that means that he will get fewer touches and points.

Another way to think about this is that Melo is always available with just about the same total skills and abilities as LeBron James and Kobe Bryant but, unlike them, he doesn’t get all bent out of shape if his touches or shots are limited. And if the Nuggets are too stupid to go through Melo more when the Spurs, Suns, Jazz, Lakers, or Mavericks are the opponent, well, in Melo’s mind, it won’t be his fault, because he is nothing more and nothing less than the ultimate team player and he doesn’t have any inclination whatsoever to try his luck at coaching. And why should he? It’s not his job in the slightest and he is not trained or experienced for coaching.

So another river that the Nuggets will need to cross to be able to defeat the Spurs and their like, in other in their quest for the ring, will be the one where they learn to make sure that Carmelo Anthony gets enough touches including, obviously, touches with some good set plays attached to them.

The Nuggets do like to run, but they like to win even more. They no longer run for the sake of running, which is another huge positive development this new season. The Nuggets had far more points in the paint (44) than they had fast break points (14). Hell, for that matter, J.R. Smith no longer shoots for the sake of shooting, Najera no longer fails to shoot for the sake of failing to shoot, Diawara no longer does whatever crazy thing he was doing last year to miss almost all of his shots, and Coach Karl no longer insists that Iverson must be on the floor at all times or the arena might cave in. There have been a lot of damaging obsessions tamed recently on the Nuggets, among both players and coaches.

I am going to start using some advanced statistics that are kept up to date thanks to the wonders of computers and thanks to our friends at huge media companies such as NBA.com and ESPN. Specifically, I am going to start using an ESPN summary stat called “player rating” to give readers of this report the quickest but best way to summarize how well players played in a game. The ESPN rating stat appears to be slightly too heavily weighted in favor of scoring, but the NBA.com stat called player efficiency is clearly very heavily weighted against scorers. For now, I am going to use the ESPN formula, but I am going to keep thinking about the possibility of blending the ESPN rating with the NBA.com efficiency stat in the future. I have to do a little more research before I know for sure that the ESPN stat is biased too much in favor of scorers, it may in fact be a very good statistic which reflects the fact that basketball is the most offensive of all the big 4 professional sports of North America.

Here is the formula for the ESPN rating of a player:

Points + Rebounds + 1.4*Assists + Steals + 1.4*Blocks - .7*Turnovers + # of Field Goals Made +1/2*# of 3-pointers Made - .8*# of Missed Field Goals - .8*# of Missed Free Throws + .25 *# of Free Throws Made

So here’s how well the Nuggets and Bulls did according to this good summary stat. The first number is the player’s rating for the game and the other number with the + or – in front of it tells you how much above or below that player’s season player rating average his performance in the game was. For example, Camby had a monster game and his player rating is 49. Since his to date season player rating is 35, his game versus the Bulls was a big +14 above his season average. :

Marcus Camby 49.0 +14.0
Allen Iverson 33.8 -6.2
Carmelo Anthony 30.7 -7.6
Kenyon Martin 27.1 +9.5
J.R. Smith 22.9 +2.6
Linas Kleiza 16.8 -1.4
Eduardo Najera 12.6 -1.3
Yakhouba Diawara 9.8 -0.5
Bobby Jones 8.6 +0.0

Remember: These stats do not correct for the big differences in playing times. Players with small minutes would get a higher rating if they had more minutes.

So you can check this list for each game and very quickly determine who contributed the most, who had a great game, who had a worse game than usual, and so forth. But always keep in mind that the more minutes a player plays, the more he gets things accomplished on the court that count in the formula. Do not make the mistake of saying, for example, that since Diawara’s season average rating is rating is 10.3 and Iverson’s is 40.0, that that means that Iverson would get about 4 times as many game accomplishments if both played the same minutes. Wrong. The stat does not correct for different minutes. If Diawara plays about half as much as Iverson, which is roughly the case, the stat means that Iverson would accomplish about twice as much as Diawara, on average, if they were both out there for the same amount of time, not 4 times as much. So I am going to remind readers of the minutes factor whenever I report the player ratings.

Now while we are at it, let’s take a look at how the Nuggets are doing this year so far compared with how they did last year, according to the player rating comprehensive formula. The first number will be this year’s rating, and the second number is last season’s rating:

NUGGETS REPORT CARD
WITH 11 OUT OF 82 GAMES PLAYED IN THE 2007-08 SEASON

Allen Iverson 40.0 Last season: 39.4
Carmelo Anthony 38.3 Last season: 41.5
Marcus Camby 35.0 Last season: 32.4
J.R. Smith 20.3 Last season: 18.5
Linas Kleiza 18.2 Last season: 12.1
Kenyon Martin 17.6 Last season: injured
Eduardo Najera 14.0 Last season: 13.9
Nene: 12.6 Last season: 23.3
Yakhouba Diawara 10.3 Last season: 7.0
Bobby Jones 8.6 Last season (76’ers) 4.0

Remember: These stats do not correct for the big differences in playing times. Players with small minutes would get a higher rating if they had more minutes.

Since it’s so early in the season, I won’t comment too much on this, but I can’t resist a few observations. You can see proof here about my point that Melo is especially mellow this year. He’s the only Nugget other than Nene who isn’t playing better this year than last. He has surveyed his team and sees that everybody except for Nene is better this year than last, so he can ease back a little and the Nuggets are still better this year than last.

Najera played 18 minutes and was 3/3 and 2/2 on 3’s for 8 points, and he had 1 rebound and 1 steal. Diawara played 18 minutes and was 2/3 and ½ on 3’s for 5 points, and he had 2 assists and 1 rebound. Linas Kleiza played 26 minutes and was 4/9 and 0/3 on 3’s for 8 points, and he had 5 rebounds, 3 assists, and a steal.

Bobby Jones played 19 minutes and was 1/3, 0/1 on 3’s, and 2/2 from the line for 4 points, and he had 4 rebounds and 2 assists.

Kenyon Martin played 24 minutes and was 6/10, 0/1 on 3’s, and ½ from the line for 13 points, and he had 8 rebounds, 1 assist, 1 steal, and 1 block.

Carmelo Anthony played 31 minutes and was 8/20, 0/3 on 3’s, and 10/13 from the line for 26 points, and he had 4 assists and 2 rebounds.

Iverson played 35 minutes and was 6/13 and 10/10 from the line for 22 points, and he had 6 assists, 3 steals, and 1 rebound.

Marcus Camby played 30 minutes and was 4/6 and 4/4 from the line for 12 points, and he had 20 rebounds, 5 blocks, 5 assists, and 1 steal.

The next game will be Wednesday, November 21, in Los Angles to play the Clippers at 8:30 pm mountain time. The Nuggets will be playing on back to back nights but the Clippers will not be.