Fast Break: Renaldo Balkman's Style and Why the Nuggets are Overdosing On It

Renaldo Balkman is the perfect example of a player who has an appealing style to the kinds of basketball fans who think style is more important than things that the scorekeepers keep track of. He is a minor factor offensively to put it nicely, a net negative offensively to put it more bluntly. But on defense he is a clawing tiger who creates disruption and confusion within the offense of the other team. Once Balkman has disrupted things enough, either he himself or a teammate is much more likely than otherwise to get a steal, a block, or both in the same possession. Balkman type players also force some shot clock violations from time to time.

And following direct or indirect Balkman steals of course, a fast break can result in an easy dunk. So technically, it is oversimplified to call a player such as Balkman as defense only, since he indirectly generates some offense.

But you have to be very, very careful on this subject to avoid being fooled. An offensively limited player who plays great defense and who can generate indirect offense is less valuable than a player who plays "merely" good defense and who can generate a good amount of direct offense. Because it is going way to far to say that defense in general and players such as Balkman in particular can shut down a good offense to the point where games against good teams can be reliably won by a core group of players like that.

Good offenses can be slowed down but not stopped. You might, for example, be able to prevent 10 points of scoring with a bunch of players such as Balkman. But if the good offense team is starting from a base of 115 points, they can still beat you with 105 points while playing good defense, because all they need is just reasonably good defense against your offensively challenged team to keep you below 100 points. In other words, when you have a poor offense, you make it too easy for the other team defensively. A team that is just putting in an ordinary, ho hum defensive effort can look like a defensive power against a poor offensive team.

Have you ever heard basketball game announcers say, when they are trying to explain why one team has not scored well in a game, something like: "I wouldn't blame the offense (or bad shooting) all that much; it's more that (the other team) is playing some great defense in this game." And in reality the other team has only been playing decent, ordinary defense, because they didn't need any big defensive effort to beat your offensively challenged team. The 2008-09 Nuggets are that team with the underperforming offense that makes other defenses look better than they are.

Unfortunately, the Nuggets have gone in the space of a few months from being a team with massive offensive potential to a team with little. They have made the same huge mistake as the Suns have made, though on a smaller scale in the sense that the old Suns were better than the old Nuggets and, sure enough, the new Suns are probably better than the new Nuggets.

Along with Balkman, the Nuggets have brought two other hustling, defensive wildcats onto their team: Chris Anderson and Dahntay Jones. Of course, Coach Karl loves giving all three of these players plenty of playing time. Although you will sometimes get surprising mileage from this strategy in the regular season, by overdosing on these mostly defensive players, you have unfortunately left your offense unqualified to compete in the playoffs. Making offensive potential even more dismal, Carmelo Anthony has been explicity told by Karl to "not worry about scoring" very much! Were it not for the fact that Nene is a substantial upgrade offensively over Camby, the Nuggets' offense would be currently one of the worst in the League instead of just being well below average.

Chauncey Billups will improve the Nuggets offense as the season goes along, but the Nuggets' overall offensive potential is too limited for them to become a great offensive team. The main problems are thin offensive talent and even thinner offensive coaching quality.

But at least the Nuggets seem to know that they no longer have the right personnel to be a great offensive team, and so they are not wasting much time practicing offensively. Instead, they are spending a big majority of their practice time on defense, and so I guess that they are making the best of an overall bad situation by maximizing their defensive potential. Had the Nuggets not dramatically shifted from being offensively focused to being defensively focused, they almost certainly would not have had the chance of being a winning team this year. And while the Nuggets no longer have enough offensive potential to be qualified to possibly win a playoff series, they do have enough defensive potential to be qualified to win a couple of playoff games or so.

But overall, the prognosis for the Nuggets for the next few years is not good. Aside from making a damaging sudden lurch from one extreme to the other financially, the Nuggets have elected to try to capture the consolation prize for failing at the Iverson game. They have elected to try to please their fans by bringing in a bunch of players with appealing "styles." But fans who put style above actual impact on the score of games are actually dangerous to teams in my opinion, because to the extent that front offices put style above substance (impact on game scores) and bring in the relatively inexpensive players who are big on style and not so big on substance, they are working against their own best interests. There is a reason why players with "impressive styles" such as Renaldo Balkman come with relatively small price tags and do not have very many teams demanding their services.

In my view, objective number one is always going to be winning as many games as possible. So to me, you should avoid ending up with more than one or two players who hustle and scrap and are appealing to those who like players who hustle and scrap, but are not true offensive weapons.

Sorry, but this is the reality that means you must be very careful about falling in love with a player's style: basketball is a statistical game made up of stuff like scores and blocks and steals and turnovers. The score determines who wins, and the score, in turn, is determined mostly by things that you can keep track of with statistics. If you want your team to win a Championship, you better hope they are able to get the things that the scorekeepers keep track of, because you sure as heck are not going to win a Championship with a core of players who scrap, hustle, and aggressively defend, but who can not excel in producing what the scorekeepers keep track of.

Editorial Note:
A "Fast Break" is a short and quick preview of some of the topics that will be explored and proved in more detail in upcoming regular reports. Fast Breaks will often reappear in full reports with only minor reediting, but there will be more important details, more evidence, and more implications and explanations in the full reports. Moreover, there will be topics that never appear in any Fast Break in a full Report.

Fast Breaks are especially useful for the first few days after major news breaks. They are also very useful for people who will seldom or never have enough time to read a full Game/Team/League Report. Fast Breaks are the type of article that more typical web logs feature almost all or all of the time.