[A John Wall t-shirt seen at the 2010 Columbia Heights Day Festival.]

There’s a reason the Sports-Reference.com family of sites was named one of Time Magazine’s 50 Best Websites for 2010. They have just about everything you’d want, sports fact and statistically speaking, and their search capabilities are always growing … well, if they only had NBA game logs that pre-dated the 1986-87 season.

Nevertheless, I recently gave an assignment to the staff of Truth About It.net, (Rashad Mobley, John Townsend, Arish Narayen and Adam McGinnis). I asked them to go to the Basketball-Reference.com database search page, come up with a creative query, and write something quick about it. I also came up with some quick example searches myself.

For instance, I went to the “Player Game Finder” and ran a simple search selecting ‘Wizards/Bullets’ as the opponent, ‘did not start’ as the role, and sorted by points. (Click here for the full results.)

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[a basketball hoop somewhere in Washington, D.C. - K. Weidie]

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Excuse the comparison to the men’s game and think of the following more as context to what the Washington Mystics have accomplished this season. Through their run, a prevailing storyline has been about someone who hasn’t played at all, all-star Alana Beard. No one expected Washington to do anything after Beard had season-ending surgery on an injured left ankle tendon in April. Instead, the Mystics finished as the first overall seed in the East.

Unfortunately for the growing Mystics fan base, their team lost its opening playoff game against the Atlanta Dream in D.C. on Wednesday night. They’ve long moved past the ‘what if we had Alana’ stage, but for context, perspective, and for the hell of it, let’s find the NBA equivalent of Beard’s statistical production for a better idea of her impact, or lack thereof.

I chose three advanced stat categories to put in the Basketball-Reference.com historical NBA database (and please excuse the refresher course via the Basketball-Reference glossary): Read more »

The return of Josh Howard is unexpected, surprising and baffling. It’s also smart. And it’s the topping on a dessert of questions … I’ll get to that in a bit. First, let’s go through some reasons why it’s an agreeable move, without protest.

First, Howard comes relatively cheap — $4 million for a year with incentives, as reported by the Washington Post’s Michael Lee. He’s a player with the potential to show above average skill in a wide range of categories. In 2006-07 he had a PER of 20.0 and the tenth lowest turnover percentage in the NBA.

Second, he needs to get his knee healthy. The team doesn’t expect him to be ready by the start of the season. Howard’s camp says he’ll be full speed in October and that he is “ahead of schedule” — of course, Howard has been saying that he’s ahead of schedule since before last season was over (Good to know he’s still on track). Nevertheless, the knee, in a sense, was a blessing … selfishly for the Wizards.

Sure, it was essentially inevitable that the team would decline to pick up Howard’s $11.8 million option for 2010-11. But was it inevitable that he would re-sign with the same team for $7.8 million less (minus incentives)? Maybe, maybe not. In speaking with him before the end of last season, it was clear Howard understood that his option would not be picked up and that he’d be willing to come back to the Wizards. Still, that’s a lot of change to swallow and to re-sign for just a single season with the team that just forced you to chew.

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[Editor's note: Below is third piece Arish Narayen has written for TAI. He first broke down the Wizards' small forward situation in early July, and then wrote about the Wizards' third summer league game against the Mavericks. -Kyle]

If you haven’t had a chance to read this study linked on TrueHoop Monday, check it out. In the piece, Neil Paine of Basketball-Reference.com analyzes how NBA players performed against above and below average defenses in 2009-10.

Paine begins by ranking each team’s defense by using a defensive version of the Simple Rating System, taking into account margin of victory, strength of schedule, and home-court effects. Taken from the article, here are the relevant bits about the Wizards:

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[Editor's note: Below is the debut guest post of Arish Narayen. Arish is 23-years old and is currently in his second year at the University of Maryland School of Law. Arish has always been a basketball fan, especially of the Terps, but became enamored with the Wizards around the time Gilbert Arenas was hitting game winning shots and stealing game five from the Bulls in Chicago in the 2005 NBA Playoffs. The Wizards have gone nowhere but downhill from since, but somehow Arish has stuck around ... and now he wants to write about the Wiz for Truth About It.net. Go figure.

Check out Arish's debut below as he analyzes the Wizards' attempts to fill their potentially open small forward/wing position. Mike Prada has a quick breakdown of several wing candidates on Bullets Forever, but check out what Arish wrote too -- he worked on this post over the course of several days and goes in-depth statistically on a handful of players the Wizards are rumored to be interested in ... although Arish does use the much too vaunted 'Win Shares' stat that I recently went on a Twitter-rant against. I won't hold that against him. After all, the stat isn't good for nothing, it's just not all what it's cracked up to be. -Kyle]

The Wizards’ Small Forward Situation

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Sebastian Pruiti, founder and editor of NBAPlaybook.com and NetsAreScorching.com, has had the opportunity to watch Yi Jianlian for the past two seasons and in a conversation with Truth About It, said:

Yi is an incredibly inconsistent player.  There are days where he looks like he finally solved the puzzle and will turn into a pretty solid offensive player and then the next game he will go 2-15 from the field.  Something he has always been ripped for was [his] lack of aggression, and last year he tried really hard to dispel those thoughts…maybe too hard.  Most times he made the catch he wouldn’t even look for the shot and he’d put the ball on the floor, but teams started to pick up on it.  If he can find a happy medium he might do pretty well offensively.

On the defensive end though, he is absolutely lost.  That is part of the reason I think the Nets traded him besides the cap relief.  I don’t think he would have got much minutes this upcoming year, just because Avery wouldn’t allow his terrible defense to hurt the Nets.

That isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the 22 (or is it 24?) year old stretch four.  To sort out any misconceptions and better determine Yi’s worth, it’s time for another installment of CHECK MY STATS, unofficially sponsored by Synergy Sports Technology. Read more »

The Pick and Roll is a staple of many NBA offenses. The Wizards, in particular, starved when it came to defending P&Rs in 2009-10.

Once again turning to Synergy Sports Technology, we learn that as a team, the Wizards defended the P&R ball handler 1,128 times in plays that ended with a FGA, TO or FTA. This accounted for 12.6% of the team’s defensive plays. Defending these plays, the Wizards gave up 0.89 points-per-possession (PPP), which is tied for the most allowed in the NBA.

Against the Wizards, the P&R ball handler shot 43.2% on field goals and scored 42.9% of the time, which is the second highest scoring rate allowed in the league.

Conversely, the Wizards had to defend the P&R roll man 406 times and fared slightly better in the PPP department.

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Ok, so we’ve scanned JaVale McGee’s barcode tat and concluded that on offense, when he tries to do things himself, he fares poorly. But when he plays with teammates, he excels. I’m slightly simplifying … yet combining both stats and my personal observations from watching him all year and coming to a more than reasonable conclusion.

Now, let’s scan again to see what we come up with for McGee from a defensive perspective.

It’s no secret that JaVale needs to gain strength. Some of that will come if he puts in the work. Some of that will come naturally as he fills into his long frame. He also needs to learn more discipline in realizing that he can play better defense AND still be an intimidating shot blocker while not being so ready to leave his feet.

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What would be the readout from scanning JaVale McGee’s new barcode tattoo? I know the numbers on it represent his January 19, 1988 birthday. But if you ran him down a very long grocery store conveyor belt, what would be the output of the parallel lines of data on his back?

To find out, I transferred the barcode onto paper and printed it out. I fashioned and folded the paper, put a penny in it, and then threw the airplane out the window. A guy on a bike ran over it. I then went back to the computer and dialed up Synergy Sports Technology for some stats.

On Offense, JaVale’s catch phrase is “Drive, baby, drive” (somewhat akin to Sarah Palin’s “Drill, baby, drill.”) and occasionally, “Shoot it like a hot potato.” So, the barcode readout might be all of JaVale’s 2009-10 offensive possessions that ended in a shot attempt, a turnover or a free-throw attempt.

One of his strongest suits is offensive rebounding. Seems natural. McGee has shown the ability to get after the boards when he applies himself. Also, his endurance and consistency seemed to improve once he and the team found out he had asthma late in the season and were able to properly treat it.

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Okay, so Ted Leonsis already has one quality that’s in high demand from sports fans … transparency. How many other professional sports team owners have a personal blog where they actually share candid opinion and not boring, patronizing fluff?

Now, more and more, Leonsis is expressing interest in other areas of concern for educated sports fans, especially Wizards fans … advanced statistics.

If you’ll recall, Leonsis proclaimed his belief in basketball analytics on The Mike Wise Show on 106.7 FM in early April. More recently, he reiterated his belief in statistical analysis in an interview with CSN Washington’s Russ Thaler.

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