Overrated Coach

Usually when the adjective overrated is used in the realm of athletics, it is describing an athlete. This time around, I would like to use it to discuss the newest head coach of the University of Virginia men's basketball team: former Washington State head coach Tony Bennett. Almost two years ago, I wrote about my reasoning for why I disagreed with Bennett winning Coach of the Year. Since then, Bennett's Washington State teams have done nothing to change my conclusion about his coaching acumen and in fact, I am more sure than ever that I was right in thinking Bennett might just be a good coach and not a program-changing one. That spells trouble for the University of Virginia if they think that is the kind of coach they are getting.

As I laid out in my first post about Tony Bennett, he did do an admirable job at Washington State in his first year, helped along by the fact he was working with a roster stability of .85. He coached his team to a 26-8 record and on the way, the Cougars outscored their opponents by 12.1 points per 100 possessions.

His second year was even better even though his team lost one more game that season (26-9). The Cougars made it all the way to the third round of the NCAA tournament by having a positive margin over their opponents of 18.0 points per 100 possessions. Then again, he was working with the extreme advantage of coaching a team with a roster stability of .98, meaning he had almost the exact same team from the previous season. It is a well-documented fact that a team's performance will improve the longer said team plays together. Bennett was just reaping that benefit.

Not until this past season, Bennett's third as head coach at Washington State, was Bennett facing a position where all the cards were not stacked in his favor. The first obstacle Bennett had to overcome was his lowest roster stability as a head coach (.63); that roster stability is the equivalent of losing two position players from a team. Bennett failed to do so, with his team only garnering a 17-16 record and a margin of 5.7 points per 100 possessions. A truly excellent coach would not have allowed losing a few players to turn his team into a mediocre one.

Take Bill Self, for example, who I consider to be one of the great active college basketball head coaches. His 2007-08 Kansas Jayhawks won the national championship and then he had to sit and watch as his starting five either graduated or left early to go into the NBA. Yet, this season, he still managed to take a team with a roster stability of .45 comprised nearly completely of new parts to the third round of the NCAA tournament, where they bowed out to a Michigan State team that is now in the Final Four.

Until Tony Bennett can show he can reload his team, even after losing key parts, and still lead them to great heights in the college basketball world, he will never be more than a good coach, who will be able to put together a couple of outstanding years if his players stick around.

Cooling Off On John Beck

Two years ago, during the 2006 college football season and before the 2007 NFL draft, I was the driver of the John Beck bandwagon. I told anyone who would listen to me that John Beck was an excellent NFL prospect and that teams should be looking to draft him ahead of more famous quarterbacks like Brady Quinn. Now, two years later, I have to admit that I may have been too hasty with my effusive praise for John Beck and that I have begun to cool on him as an NFL player. This is not to say that he was not a very good college quarterback, but the fact is with the way his successor, Max Hall, has played is keeping John Beck from being a special college quarterback.

The years I will be using to compare John Beck and Max Hall to each other are the last two years of Beck's college career and then Hall's two years as a starting quarterback. I only chose the last two years of Beck's career because 2005 was the year Bronco Mendenhall took over the reins as head coach and brought over Robert Anae from Texas Tech to be the offensive coordinator. It was in that season that Anae's system turned Beck from a quarterback whose completion percentage was hovering between 52%-55% to a 64.5% passer.

Hall did not have as great a year in his first year as starting quarterback under Anae as Beck did, only completing 60.1% and 7.8 yards per pass attempt to Beck's 64.5% and 7.2 yards per pass attempt. However, comparison of the two quarterback's two years under Anae shows the competition is basically a wash. Beck has slightly superior passing statistics (66.7% completion percentage/8.2 yards per pass attempt to 64.5% completion percentage/8.0 yards per pass attempt) than Hall, but they are not statistically significantly better, which reiterates the fact Beck was a product of the offensive scheme in which he was playing.

Anytime there are successive college quarterbacks who play under the same offensive coordinator and combine a large number of pass attempts per game with a high completion percentage with seemingly no drop-off no matter who the quarterback, it should scream to the observer that these are quarterbacks who are made by the system and probably would not have as much success if they play for someone else. The fact there is no drop-off in production from BYU quarterbacks demonstrates John Beck was probably not worthy of all the accolades with which I wanted to anoint him.

Quarterback Drafters Beware

A warning must be issued and restraint must be exercised. There are NFL draft pundits and experts who would have you believe that Matthew Stafford, Mark Sanchez, and Josh Freeman are all quarterback prospects who are worthy of first-round draft selections and first-round contracts. Ignore their words at all cost for they are sorely mistook. No quarterback this year deserves to be drafted in the first round because they have deficiencies that make investing so much money in them more risk than reward.

During this past college football season, every time I heard someone say Matthew Stafford of Georgia was a future first-round selection, I kept wondering who this other Matthew Stafford was who was so great since it was definitely not the one I saw suiting up for the Georgia Bulldogs. The one I saw was a mediocre college quarterback and to expect him to suddenly improve drastically and be a player a franchise can build around is ludicrous. For his career, he completed 57.1% of his passes in meaningful games (where he either attempted the most passes for his team or threw for the most amount of yardage). I have well documented how college completion percentages translate to the NFL stage and there is simply no place for a quarterback with such a low completion percentage. Even at Stafford's best, he will be a below average NFL quarterback, powerful arm strength or not. It does not matter if he can make all the throws if he will miss all the throws almost as often.

When it comes to Mark Sanchez, formerly of the USC Trojans, his is the story that is most tragic because he probably could have been a good NFL quarterback if he had just listened to head coach Pete Carroll who told him he is not ready for the NFL. Sanchez only attempted 476 meaningful passes in college with only one season as a full-time starter. While that may still be more than Vick threw during his years at Virginia Tech, it is not enough to determine what kind of quarterback a player will be at the highest level; his resume is lacking valuable experience and the NFL is not in the business of allowing first-round quarterbacks time to develop. Most likely, Sanchez will never get the repetitions he needs to be successful. Another year of completing 65.8% of his passes and Sanchez would have been worthy to be selected in the first round. As it stands now, he is unfortunately not.

Former Kansas State junior Josh Freeman's declaration for the draft is a head-scratcher by itself. The fact people are actually contemplating picking him in the first round is like a person taking a poison ivy bath followed by drying off with a poison oak towel. After one strips away his physical gifts and looks only at his quarterbacking numbers, what is left is someone with a 59.5% completion percentage, but with a completion percentage standard deviation of .130 so he is not a very consistent quarterback, either; to be inconsistent on top of being an erratic passer is the quarterback version of adding insult to injury. Consider Freeman another quarterback no franchise can depend upon to lead them anywhere but deep into mediocrity.

For Stafford and Freeman, the problem is their paltry completion percentages. For qualified NFL quarterbacks in 2008 (according to nfl.com), the median completion percentage was 61.3%. The league is moving in the direction where a quarterback needs to be incredibly accurate to carry an offense. Neither Stafford nor Freeman is a quarterback like that. Sanchez, on the other hand, simply lacks the experience necessary to make the transition to the NFL unless he is given three or fours years in the same system to improve himself as a quarterback. The pressure of being a first-round selection will not afford him that opportunity. Even though the reasons might be different, none of these quarterbacks should be taken with the first thirty-two picks of the NFL draft come April 25th.

Reality Check for Pat Summitt

The effects of a bruised ego are a terrible thing to behold and probably no one's ego is suffering more internal bleeding than Pat Summitt's. Summitt, who has the most victories of any active basketball coach in the NCAA, lost for the first time ever in the first round of an NCAA women's tournament, prompting her to force her team to practice when their season is undeniably over. What she hopes to accomplish is anyone's guess besides becoming a real life example of what happens when a person makes an assumption. The assumption in this case is that Tennessee should have won their game against Ball State. Reality says Ball State was the better team when the two colleges faced off.

Taking the season in its entirety, Tennessee possessed the better cumulative statistics. In the thirty-two games Tennessee played before facing Ball State, Tennessee was outscoring opponents by 9.2 points per 100 possessions. Ball State was only outscoring their foes by 5.8 points per 100 possessions. Perhaps that is why Summitt was so angry after losing by sixteen points to what she saw as an inferior opponent.

However, Ball State got off to a mediocre start at the beginning of their season, going 7-6 in their first thirteen games, before really kicking their play into high gear once conference play began where they went 17-2 over the last nineteen games. Tennessee was a respectable 11-2 in their first thirteen games before they entered their conference schedule. Then they faltered down the home stretch and into the tournament, going 11-8.

Once one compares the two teams after they got into the heart of their respective schedules, one finds out Ball State was playing better basketball than Tennessee. During Ball State's last nineteen games, they were beating their opponents by 13.5 points per 100 possessions, much higher than Tennessee's positive margin of 2.8 points per 100 possessions. Ball State was also shooting much better than the field from Tennessee (55.7 TS& to 49.4 TS%); so in actuality, before the game even began, it had all the markings of a victory for Ball State. They were quite simply playing a better brand of basketball and perhaps with a greater degree of confidence despite the fact they were only a twelve seed squaring off against a five seed.

The time for Pat Summitt to put her team through the paces is not now when there are no more opponents left on the schedule just because she chose not to give her opponent any credit. Instead, she should trust in the fact that her young team will improve next year due to roster stability. That, more than any sort of wind sprints or suicides she makes her team run, will ensure they do not suffer the same slump during the part of their schedule where they play teams from the SEC conference.

Chris Wallace's Plan

Memphis Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace formally petitioned the NBA to allow the Grizzlies to play with two basketballs at the same time on offense. The request was a direct result of Wallace's mishandling of the Grizzlies' roster, moves that have resulted in the Grizzlies having four unproven backcourt players who all need to dominate the ball to succeed while having at most one viable low-post scoring threat to balance out the team's offense.

"To be honest," Wallace wrote in his petition, "I'm not even really equipped to be a general manager; there are just way too many players to keep up with. When I traded the franchise's best player away for less than equal value in a deal that gave us rookie point guard Javaris Crittenton, it wasn't until my friends called and asked me had I lost my mind and didn't I realize I already had enough young point guards [Kyle Lowry and Mike Conley, Jr.] without adding another [Crittenton] to the mix that I remembered they were right and I was reproducing the same player over and over. Apparently, that's a bad idea so I tried to get the NBA to give me a trade mulligan. Turns out there is no such thing."

"Well, after that little incident I promised to really stay on top of just which players were on my roster," Wallace continued. "However, almost five months is a long time to do that, which is why on draft day I traded away Kevin Love, the second-best big man in the draft, for O.J. Mayo, another young guard who probably won't be as consistent a scorer as a low-post player. So that is why I think the NBA should allow us to play with two basketballs on offense. That way all my many guards can dribble and shoot all they want and need to and the franchise won't suffer so badly against teams that are actually run by competent general managers."

After reading Chris Wallace's proposal, NBA commissioner David Stern subsequently fell to the floor where he commenced to roll on the floor while laughing for approximately thirty minutes before recovering sufficiently enough to speak. "Outside of the draft lottery, the NBA is not in the business of rewarding incompetence," Stern said. "Nor are we about to start for the likes of Chris Wallace who doesn't even have the sense to recognize he shouldn't have four of the same player on his team. Proposal denied."

Where In The World?

The Learning Company has announced plans to release an NBA version of their Carmen Sandiego series entitled "Where in the World are Lamar Odom and Pau Gasol: NBA Playoff Edition." Players of the game will be required to track down Odom and Gasol after the players inexplicably disappear from Los Angeles Lakers after performing well for the team throughout the regular season.

"Breaking out into the sports world with our Carmen Sandiego franchise is something we have wanted to do for quite some time," stated Tony Lucki, CEO of the Houghton Mifflin Riverdeep group that owns the Learning Company. "While Carmen Sandiego is still relatively recognizable, she won't stay relevant forever and who better to carry this game forward into its next phase than these two NBA players who vanish so well and so inexplicably from their games. I really think we hit the mother lode by deciding to cast Odom and Gasol in this game and challenging people to try to find out where they go during the playoffs."

Levi Buchanan, game reviewer for IGN.com, cited the game's realistic nature as its strongest attribute. "It really was just like being at a Lakers playoff game. As soon as the score is close and the team needs the two the most, they were nowhere to be found, but you don't immediately recognize it because the characters you think are Odom and Gasol are actually decoys. But if you look closely, you'll see that the decoy Odom is wearing a Los Angeles Clippers uniform and the decoy Gasol is really only six feet tall instead of the seven feet he is supposed to be playing at."

As the computer game concerns the playoffs, neither Lamar Odom nor Pau Gasol were available for comment.

The Delicate Genius

Mike Mussina, especially during his tenure with the New York Yankees, has earned the classification of a delicate genius. The origins of the moniker no doubt arise from the fact that he is such a creature of habit and routine that any deviation from it decreases his effectiveness on the mound. One popular anecdote regarding how much Mussina hates any sort of change is how he handled the Yankees' trip to Japan to start the regular season in 2004. Instead of trying to experience a new culture, Mussina spent the duration of the trip in his hotel room. In addition, rain delays are his kryptonite because they ruin his precious schedule and throw him off his game and when Mussina's fielders commit an error behind him, he reacts as if they did it on purpose in order to aggravate him. Perhaps, though, Mussina's reputation as a delicate genius is undeserved.

A poorly kept secret in baseball is that the same pitchers who are good at preventing earned runs are equally as adept at preventing unearned runs. Following that logic, it would stand to reason that if Mussina really was affected by everything not going as he had so carefully planned it, he would be a considerably worse pitcher when his defense allowed a baserunner to reach base on an error.

Before Mussina became a Yankee, he pitched ten seasons for the Baltimore Orioles. In those ten seasons, no baserunner reached base on an error in 228 of his starts while there was an error committed while he was pitching in sixty starts. During the starts with an error, Mussina's fielding independent ERA (3.99 to 3.71), gross product average allowed (.238 GPA to .227 GPA), and home runs allowed per nine innings (1.12 to .89) increased slightly, but none of the increases were statistically significant. Actually, Mussina had a statistically significantly better walk rate when there was an error committed; in those games his walks per nine innings was 1.85 and when there was no error, Mussina's walk rate was 2.16.

As a Yankee pitcher, the story is similar to his tenure with the Orioles. There were 167 error-free starts for Mussina and forty-seven starts where there was at least one error. Again, Mussina's fielding independent ERA (3.83 to 3.62) and home runs allowed per nine innings (1.05 to 0.98) increased, but not to any level that was statistically significant. Overall, Mussina is the same pitcher whether or not there is an error committed behind him.

Whether it be Mussina's anal retentiveness or the fact he can't throw a fastball in the upper 90s, he has become one of the more popular baseball players to degrade and demean. The only problem is that his inability to cope with change does not make the fact he has been a very good pitcher for a very long time, and as a result of his success in professional baseball, he deserves a little more respect.

Devin Harris, Jason Kidd, and Defense

Trading Devin Harris to the New Jersey Nets for Jason Kidd was a colossal mistake for the Dallas Mavericks and the criticisms for the trade when it happened were as true then as they are now when the results of the trade are there for anyone to see. In making this trade, the Mavericks mortgaged the future for a point guard that is entering the twilight of his career and does not possess the capability to push the Mavericks into the elite of the Western Conference. If the Mavericks had kept Harris, they would have been keeping a player who had a better start to his career than Kidd and was only going to get better. Both Harris and Kidd entered the NBA at the age of twenty-one and Harris in his first four seasons has already shown that he is a much more offensively efficient player than Kidd ever was. Although Harris does not have the gaudy assist totals of Kidd, he is a much better shooter, which makes up for that deficiency.

One criticism of the trade, though, that was undeserved was to state that due to Kidd's age and having lost a step, he could no longer defend the younger, quicker point guards in the NBA. If the Mavericks defense did indeed suffer, then we could expect to see the starting point guards faced by the Mavericks to have an increase in their shooting percentages and assist rate and a decrease in their turnover rate as they experienced fewer obstacles in running their teams' offenses. Although this method is not as accurate as some defensive metrics since in some games the back-up point guard played more than the starter, or in a couple of cases where teams did not start a point guard I used the statistics of the starting player who most resembled a point guard, it does a good job of answering the question I posed.

Devin Harris played thirty-nine games for the Mavericks, but one of those games was an injury-shortened one so I discarded it and used only the thirty-eight. In those games, the starting point guards amassed a 51.0 true shooting percentage, 25.4 assist rate to 10.4 turnover rate, and 5.5 rebound rate. When Jason Kidd was in the starting line-up for his twenty-nine contests wearing the Mavericks uniform, opposing point guards had a 47.9 true shooting percentage, 25.3 assist rate to 9.8 turnover rate, and 5.6 rebound rate so point guards actually had slightly worse offensive numbers when playing against Kidd than they did against Harris.

It should also be understood that the two players, Harris and Kidd, faced almost identically offensive-minded point guards. When Harris was playing, starting point guards took 12.4 field goal attempts per game and when Kidd was playing for the Mavericks, they attempted 12.6 field goals per game. Therefore, the decline in shooting numbers against Kidd is not due to the starting point guards taking an exorbitant number of shots and clanking most of them. The point guards also played a similar amount of time whether Harris or Kidd was in the starting line-up; they played 32.9 minutes per game against a Harris-led Mavericks team and 32.7 minutes per game against a Kidd-led Mavericks team.

Whether or not Kidd and Harris actually played man-to-man defense against the starting point guards for all thirty-three minutes per game does not change the fact the point guards were not significantly better against Kidd. Therefore, a lack of defensive prowess on Kidd's part is certainly not a reason to lambaste this trade. Then again, it is not as if there are not a lot of other criticisms to choose from.

The Issue With Pitch Counts

As past baseball research discovered the connection between high pitch counts and increase in injuries to pitchers and loss of effectiveness, more and more attention has been paid to tracking the pitch counts of pitchers across all levels of baseball. Any baseball fan, casual or hardcore, would be hard pressed to watch a baseball game being telecast without some mention being made of how many pitches have been thrown by a particular player with one hundred pitches being the benchmark for when many people think the manager should start thinking about taking the pitcher out of the game. While tracking pitch counts does represent some progress in following the game of baseball, no longer is it enough and it is time for everyone, who considers himself or herself to be a baseball aficionado, to start paying more attention to how many pitches are thrown per inning.

Total pitch counts, like other counting statistics, are set up to deceive. Simply knowing that a pitcher threw 112 pitches tells nothing. We still need to know how the pitcher arrived at that number of pitches. Did the pitcher throw a complete game or did his manager foolishly allow him to throw 112 pitches in only five innings? Furthermore, we are unable to make any sort of educated guess at how well the pitcher pitched. However, if we had known how many pitches per inning had been thrown, no chapters would be missing from the story we could tell.

In order to illustrate how much more important pitches per inning are than total pitch counts, I took, for the 2007 season, the five pitchers with the most starts from each of the thirty baseball franchises and ran correlations that allowed me to discover how closely tied pitchers per inning and total pitch counts are to batting average, on-base percentage, slugging average, gross product average (OBP*1.8+SLG/4), fielding independent ERA, strikeouts per nine innings, walks per nine innings, and home runs per nine innings. When there were two pitchers for a team that had the same number of starts, I used the statistics for the pitcher with more innings as a starter.

Overall, the correlations were overwhelmingly stronger for pitches per inning pitched to the aforementioned eight statistics than they were for total pitch counts. Of the eight baseball statistics I used for comparison, total pitch counts only had a stronger correlation for the category of home runs per nine innings (.187 to .148); that was also the closest any of the correlations were to each other. Decisively would be the operative word to describe the victory pitches per inning had over total pitch counts.

Individually, it was much of the same story. Of the 150 pitchers I looked at, only ten (Randy Wolf, Jorge Sosa, Miguel Batista, Justin Germano, Kyle Kendrick, Vicente Padilla, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Gil Meche, Brian Bannister, Nate Robertson, and Matt Garza) had five or more of the eight statistics that were more strongly correlated with pitch counts than pitches per inning.

As the average of 16.1 pitches thrown per inning for the 150 pitchers demonstrates and any pitcher will also tell you, pitchers are only conditioned to throw a certain number of pitches in a row. That number is usually somewhere between 13-16 pitches and with each successive pitch thrown, the pitcher will lose effectiveness and will most likely be more prone to injury. Since all of the correlations for pitches per inning are positive, the more pitches thrown per inning, the worse the pitcher becomes.

Armed with this knowledge, a baseball enthusiast will be able to predict how well, or poorly as the case may be, a pitcher is going to do when he throws a high number of pitches (17 and above) inning after inning. Also, if a pitcher inexplicably suffers a decline in performance, look first at his pitches per inning to see if he is struggling more to get runners out. More than likely, he is. Total pitch counts have had their day and now it is time to make room for pitches per inning.

Correlations are as follows with pitches per inning first and total pitches second: batting average (.579 to -.417); on-base percentage (.671 to -.372); slugging percentage (.517 to -.407); gross product average (.631 to -.416); fielding independent ERA (.609 to -.363); strikeouts per nine innings (.148 to .187); walks per nine innings (.756 to -.217); home runs per nine innings (.419 to -.282).

NBA Finals

Yes, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics played each other twice during the regular season, and yes, the Celtics won both contests handily to the tune of an average victory margin of sixteen points, but one should exercise caution before using those two games to try to predict how the two teams will fare against each other. In fact, the Lakers and Celtics have almost played an entire regular season since last squaring off against each other. Including regular season and playoff contests, the Lakers have played sixty-six games without facing the Celtics and the Celtics have played seventy-three games without having to deal with the other most storied franchise in the NBA. Furthermore, the Lakers had not yet pulled off the trade heist for Pau Gasol nor had the Celtics signed a back-up point guard saboteur extraordinaire in Sam Cassell so the player rotations are not the same now as they were then. Basically, the two teams will have to re-learn how to play each other during the series.

Also, in order to predict the outcome of the series intelligently, it is important that we also know where the two teams stand since they last played. Both experienced great amounts of success in their successive games, but since they played last the Celtics have been slightly more dominant in their games. The Celtics outscored their competition by 8.5 points per 100 possessions. As impressive as that is, the Lakers were not far behind, outscoring their opponents 8.2 points per 100 possessions. There really is very little difference between how good these two teams were against their foes.

However, once we strip away from the two teams' schedules those NBA franchises that did not make the playoffs, we see that the Lakers and Celtics switch places in terms of their prowess on the court. Under those conditions, the Lakers outscored their opponents by 5.5 points per 100 possessions, but the Celtics decreased even further than that to 4.7 points per 100 possessions, meaning that against the cream of the crop, the Lakers are always a full point per 100 possessions better than the Celtics.

These numbers suggest that this will not be a blowout series by any stretch of the imagination. It will be closely contested, but the Lakers should prevail in the end thanks to the fact their level of play does not decline as much when playing against the best NBA teams, of which the Boston Celtics is one. Therefore, the Boston area should be prepared to watch another one of their professional franchises come up short in a championship format.

Josh Howard Missing His Best Friend

Team chemistry, inasmuch as making it imperative that teammates not only get along on the court or field but also off of it, is largely overrated, but this is not to say that there are no instances where certain players are better when they play with their friends. One such example of times where friends should be kept together for the sake of the team's success is Josh Howard and Devin Harris. Howard, who did have an off year this season by his standards, has been the recipient of too much criticism during this off-season. No matter how poorly he played during the Dallas Mavericks' playoff series against the New Orleans Hornets, he was still one of the three most valuable Maverick players during the regular season and would have had a better season except for one simple reason. Howard had to play more than half of his season without his best friend, Devin Harris, in the lineup and a little more than a third of his season without Harris being on the same team or in the same city.

It was not until I was watching the Dallas Mavericks square off against the New Orleans Hornets and listened to the interview of Devin Harris, who had been invited to the game at the behest of Josh Howard, that I even knew they were good friends. That is when it all came together for me. Surely a player of Josh Howard's caliber would not have a down year without a very good reason, and when I checked out the statistical data everything came together beautifully. Howard was not the same player when he was not playing with Harris.

When Harris was in the lineup alongside Josh Howard, Howard was vintage Howard. He had a 53.3% true shooting percentage on 20.6 points per game and was also rebounding at a respectable clip (12.4 rebound rate). Playing without his amigo, Harris, Howard limped his way to a true shooting percentage of 51.8% on 19.3 points per game. Furthermore, he couldn't even rebound as proficiently with only a 10.2 rebound rate. That decline alone speaks to the fact Howard had to have missed Harris, but the decline in his level of play becomes even steeper when Howard's season is split between the games before Harris was traded to the New Jersey Nets and after.

Before Harris was foolishly given to the Nets in exchange for an over-the-hill point guard, Harris was on fire for a perimeter-oriented player, having a 55.1 TS% and scoring 20.3 points per game in addition to a rebound rate of 11.9. Then Harris left and the bottom really fell out of Howard's game. He only shot 50.6 TS% to get his 19.2 points per game. Plus he forgot how to rebound as his post-Harris rebound rate of 9.9 demonstrates.

Let what happened to Josh Howard be a lesson to other franchises. While team chemistry is a volatile entity, hard to control or predict, when it comes to separating friends who are valuable to the team, avoid it at all costs. Right now, the best thing that could happen for Josh Howard is to be traded to the New Jersey Nets in exchange for Richard Jefferson. In that way, Howard can be reunited with his favorite teammate and the Nets can get a star who can be offensively efficient while taking a larger share of the offensive load than Jefferson could handle.

Amare and Shaq

Superstars, even over-the-hill veteran ones, routinely get too much credit for making the players around them better simply with their august presences. It makes for good stories to tell about how young players benefit by being around players who have been there and done that. Although it may be the case that the players do learn from veterans, usually the players who seemingly get better under these circumstances already had the potential to be stars on their own. It is very convenient how the veterans usually get credit for grooming the star young players when they do not receive any criticism for their other young teammates who are quite simply never going to be great, no matter who they play with, not improving and maintaining a sub-par level of play.

After Shaquille O'Neal was traded from the Miami Heat to the Phoenix Suns, it became convenient to erroneously report how O'Neal somehow made Amare Stoudemire a better player or freed him up to play to his strengths. The fact that such a claim is incredibly easy to discount is obviously of no importance; the incorrect account must make for better copy where facts would be viewers, readers, and listeners to sleep.

For those who pointed to Amare's increase in scoring output after Shaq arrived in Phoenix as evidence to how Amare benefited from playing along with Shaq, thank you for trying to mislead me. In actuality, the real reason Stoudemire scored more points playing with Shaq is being he took more shots, 2.8 more field goal attempts per game and 2.4 more field goal attempts per game. Usually, when a player of Stoudemire's capabilities takes more shots per game, he is going to score more points per game. That is exactly what happened.

How I can safely conclude Stoudemire did not improve under Shaq's tutelage is by looking at his rate statistics. With Shaq not in the lineup, Amare had a true shooting percentage of 65.8% on 1.32 points per shot attempt. Before Shaq arrived to play with the Suns and in the contests where he was not healthy enough to play, Amare had a true shooting percentage 65.9% on 1.32 points per shot attempt. Any great improvement in Amare's shooting is invisible to my eyes. One category in which Amare did vastly improve was his assist rate; without Shaq, the assist rate was 6.0 and with Shaq, the assist rate was 7.6. Perhaps because he was taking more shots he was less likely to turn the ball over.

The simple truth is Amare Stoudemire would have played at the same superstar level if anyone, including me and maybe you, was his teammate. Shaq certainly should not receive any credit for what Amare is able to do on the court.

Oklahoma's Bowl Woes

The recipe for being an elite college football team is a simple one, which belies the fact that it is a difficult task to execute. First, a team wishing for the distinction of being called elite is helped immensely by having a tradition of winning or at least a reputation for getting a lot of national television coverage so that the cream of the crop of recruits is likely to attend there. Then the college will need to mix in actually developing their recruits in order to avoid a downward trend in play that can come about by the attrition of players who graduate or leave early. After that, the college must add a dash of demolishing those cupcake teams that fill up their win column without giving any nutritional value to their record and also dominate their conference opponents. Lastly, the wannabe elite college football squad must win their bowl games against the country's best other teams.

Unfortunately for Oklahoma and Bob Stoops in their quest to be taken seriously for both the regular and post-seasons and not become the butt of jokes, the school has failed in this last step of the recipe. Despite the fact that college football gives teams what seems like years to prepare for their bowl game, an advantage that one would think with Oklahoma's regular-season success and Big 12 supremacy would lead victories. Instead, Oklahoma has managed only four wins in nine bowl games.

What makes the losses troubling for a program headed up by the second-highest paid head football coach in the nation is how much of a precipitous drop the Oklahoma offense takes against its bowl opponents' defenses. For anyone who has ever done confidence testing, the fact that Oklahoma's offense has been statistically significantly inferior in bowl games versus other games when there have only been nine Oklahoma bowl games against one hundred ten other games demonstrates just how inept Oklahoma has been offensively in bowl games compared to how consistently great the Sooners are on other occasions.

In their nine bowl games, Oklahoma quarterbacks and wide receivers have combined for a 62.4% completion percentage on 6.4 yards per pass attempt while in the other one hundred ten contests, the passing battery is responsible for 61.9% completion percentage on 7.5 yards per pass attempt. Although there is a slight increase in the completion percentage, it is no match for the decline in yards per pass attempt, which correlates most highly with points scored. Alone, the inability to string together a passing attack would be enough to undo any team, but the Sooners add to that struggle an anemic running game, too. Carriers of the pigskin for the Sooners only get 3.0 yards per attempt in bowl games; compare that to 4.3 yards per carry in the other games and you will recognize why Oklahoma will never be able to be an elite team.

Stoops, as the head coach, will get the blame for Oklahoma's struggles and unless he does something to change his teams' fortunes in bowl games, there will come a day when it will not be enough for Sooner fans to win the Big 12 title. Sooner or later they will want Oklahoma football to be truly elite instead of just dominant in one area and that will all start with being able to perform better in bowl games.

The Celtics' Big Three

Originally this post was designed to advocate that Kevin Garnett is hurting the Boston Celtics with his unselfish play and that against certain teams, it is up for him to take over the game, take upwards of twenty shots, and dominate the competition the way his physical attributes indicate that he could. On the other hand, simply because it looks to the naked eye that a player should be performing in certain ways does not necessarily mean it would help the team. Of the Celtics' Big Three, Kevin Garnett is the most offensively efficient player as well the most consistent shooter, but he is neither the most important nor is he the player the Celtics should be depending on when it comes down to picking one of the three players to take over a game.

By running correlations between various shooting statistics, I took steps towards determining the Big Three's true places in the Celtics offense. Of the three Celtics players, Kevin Garnett has the lowest correlation coefficient in terms of the number of field goal and free throw attempts he takes to the team's offensive efficiency (-.210); the more attempts he took in the regular season, the less likely it was the team would benefit from such offensive usage. It is as if Garnett will take more shots, but he will only wait until every last possible recourse has been exhausted and by then there is no benefit to the Celtics. Paul Pierce was the only one of the three players who did not have a negative correlation coefficient in this category (.060) even if it is a non-existent linkage, meaning Pierce does not hurt the team when he takes more shots.

Paul Pierce is also the least affected (-.047) when it comes to how his true shooting percentage fluctuates as a result of his attempting more field goals and free throws. No matter if he took 12 field goal and free throw attempts or he took 25, it would have little to do with his final shooting percentages. Not so for Ray Allen, who has the lowest correlation coefficient (-.170) of the Big Three. Therefore, Allen would most likely benefit from cutting off a few attempts from his game. Kevin Garnett comes in second with a correlation coefficient of (-.113).

Most importantly is determining whose true shooting percentage has the highest positive correlation coefficient with the team's offensive efficiency for that player is the most valuable offensive player of the three. There again, Paul Pierce comes out of the Big Three smelling the rosiest. As his .470 correlation coefficient shows, as Pierce goes so go the Celtics. When he is having a great shooting night, as he did in game 7 of the Eastern Conference semi-finals, the Celtics assured of having a great shooting night. The same goes for Ray Allen, albeit to a lesser extent (.439). His true shooting percentage is the second most valuable barometer of the Celtics' offensive success. Kevin Garnett, though, by virtue of being a more consistent shooter than the other two perimeter-orientated players does not have as much influence on the Celtics offensive efficiency. His steadiness means the game will rarely if ever depend on how he shoots the ball.

When it comes to needing a player to take over a game, the Celtics will do best to put their faith in Paul Pierce. Not only is he more willing to take a large number of shots when the need arises, but his greater number of shots will, if not help the team a great deal, at least not adversely affect the team's of his offensive statistics. Garnett is the team's most important defensive player, but Pierce is the Celtics' most important offensive player.