Jeff Green, Celtics MVP

[mmmmm]

Does MVP mean most vanishing player?

That wouldn't be Green, though, given that he logged almost 16 games' worth of minutes more than anybody else on this crappy team.   And he's the only one who appeared in all 82 games.   Bass is the only other player to appear in over 58 games!

It would seem to me that he's the only one who didn't _vanish_.

It's become just absurd the criticisms that get leveled toward Green on this forum.   Is he a perfect player?  Of course not.  But he was almost certainly this particular team's most valuable player.

[PhoSita]

  Is he a perfect player?  Of course not.  But he was almost certainly this particular team's most valuable player.

I just haven't seen any convincing argument for this being true.  Is there any evidence to suggest that the team actually performed better -- offensively OR defensively -- with Jeff Green than without him, for example?

Just taking a look at ESPN's real plus minus rankings, for example, Jeff Green ranks behind most of the regular rotation players on the team this season, including Phil Pressey and Gerald Wallace.

Jeff Green did play in all of the team's games.  He has that over Sullinger and Bradley.  He also led the team in scoring.  He hit that nice shot against Miami, which was probably the high point of the season for many fans.  He has that going for him too. 

I'm just not sure how much of what he did on a nightly basis actually made the team any better than it would have been without him.

[mmmmm]

  Is he a perfect player?  Of course not.  But he was almost certainly this particular team's most valuable player.

I just haven't seen any convincing argument for this being true.  Is there any evidence to suggest that the team actually performed better -- offensively OR defensively -- with Jeff Green than without him, for example?

Just taking a look at ESPN's real plus minus rankings, for example, Jeff Green ranks behind most of the regular rotation players on the team this season, including Phil Pressey and Gerald Wallace.

Jeff Green did play in all of the team's games.  He has that over Sullinger and Bradley.  He also led the team in scoring.  He hit that nice shot against Miami, which was probably the high point of the season for many fans.  He has that going for him too. 

I'm just not sure how much of what he did on a nightly basis actually made the team any better than it would have been without him.

See, lets see if we can walk through some logic here.

a) This team sucked.   However one might argue the merits or flaws of individual players, and whether it was through talent or organizational intent (coaching & personnel decisions) or a mix of both, there should be no argument that this team sucked.   It had a W-L record of 25-57.   It scored a miserable 7892 points and gave up 8258.

b) Based on point (a), it is likely that during the vast majority of floor minutes of this season, the team was negative.

c) Green played 2805 of those minutes  (16th most minutes in the NBA).    Far, far more than anyone else on this crappy team, but nevertheless, sharing the floor with various crappy combinations of this crappy team executing a gawd-awful crappy offense and trying to play defense without a real center.

So ... we should hold it against Green that his floor time +/- is negative?

 

The facts are, when Green was allowed to actually _touch_ the ball, we were more likely to generate _points_ than when anyone _else_ on this team touched the ball.

But for whatever reasons, we did not allow Green to touch the ball very much.

[Donoghus]

Herein lies the problem, the Celtics suck because Jeff Green most likely is their MVP.

He shouldn't be because, if he's their best player, the team is most likely going to be living in lottery land.  He's a complementary player not an alpha dog.  In a supporting cast role, Jeff Green is a fine fit.  As the go-to guy on a team, he is not. 

Depends on what your expectations are for the guy.  If you thought that he was going to be Paul Pierce, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.  If you think he's a nice role player to have around, then he's most likely being much closer to living up to your expectations. 

[mgent]

Does MVP mean most vanishing player?

That wouldn't be Green, though, given that he logged almost 16 games' worth of minutes more than anybody else on this crappy team.   And he's the only one who appeared in all 82 games.   Bass is the only other player to appear in over 58 games!

It would seem to me that he's the only one who didn't _vanish_.

It's become just absurd the criticisms that get leveled toward Green on this forum.   Is he a perfect player?  Of course not.  But he was almost certainly this particular team's most valuable player.

Um, you do know you have to appear in a game in order to vanish from it?

What are you trying to say, only the players that were injured/traded vanished?  What does missing games or playing in all the games have to do with it?  Green probably drove hard and dunked it in the first half of all those 82, but he definitely never did anything when he needed him most.  And he definitely never came to play for 4 straight quarters.

[mmmmm]

Herein lies the problem, the Celtics suck because Jeff Green is most likely is their MVP.

He shouldn't be because, if he's their best player, the team is most likely going to be living in lottery land.  He's a complementary player not an alpha dog.  In a supporting cast role, Jeff Green is a fine fit.  As the go-to guy on a team, he is not. 

Depends on what your expectations are for the guy.  If you thought that he was going to be Paul Pierce, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.  If you think he's a nice role player to have around, then he's most likely being much closer to living up to your expectations.

This^ pretty much sums things up.

[Vox_Populi]

So ... we should hold it against Green that his floor time +/- is negative?

For what it's worth, in theory, RPM is supposed to mitigate the effect of a player's teammates on their +/-.

Drawing on advanced statistical modeling techniques (and the analytical wizardry of RPM developer Jeremias Engelmann, formerly of the Phoenix Suns), the metric isolates the unique plus-minus impact of each NBA player by adjusting for the effects of each teammate and opposing player.

RPM estimates how many points each player adds or subtracts, on average, to his team's net scoring margin for each 100 possessions played. The RPM model also yields separate ratings for the player's impact on both ends of the court: offensive RPM (ORPM) and defensive RPM (DRPM).

ESPN

So...yes, we should hold Green accountable for his sub-par RPM.

[pokeKingCurtis]

Herein lies the problem, the Celtics suck because Jeff Green most likely is their MVP.

He shouldn't be because, if he's their best player, the team is most likely going to be living in lottery land.  He's a complementary player not an alpha dog.  In a supporting cast role, Jeff Green is a fine fit.  As the go-to guy on a team, he is not. 

Depends on what your expectations are for the guy.  If you thought that he was going to be Paul Pierce, then you're going to be sorely disappointed.  If you think he's a nice role player to have around, then he's most likely being much closer to living up to your expectations.

I was hoping he would be somewhere in between. Still disappointed.

But it's a weird season and Green deserves a pass, I guess.

[BballTim]

Sullinger did more things to help the team play better when he was on the floor this season than Green did, in my opinion. 

  I'd tend to agree with this.

[PhoSita]

c) Green played 2805 of those minutes  (16th most minutes in the NBA).    Far, far more than anyone else on this crappy team, but nevertheless, sharing the floor with various crappy combinations of this crappy team executing a gawd-awful crappy offense and trying to play defense without a real center.

So ... we should hold it against Green that his floor time +/- is negative?

I don't think this is how Real Plus Minus works.  If I understand the stat correctly, it accounts for what you're talking about.

You didn't actually address what I mentioned -- did the team perform better on either end with Green on the floor versus when he wasn't on the floor?  I've yet to see any evidence that such is the case.

[LooseCannon]

ESPN doesn't seem to have a way to see the RPM of all the players on the team on a single page, but if you like the stat, it looks like Avery Bradley (2.00), Jared Sullinger (1/33), and Gerald Wallace (0.38) were the only Celtics players with a positive number.

A metric that says that Bradley was the team's best player passes the smell test for me, but I am sure there are people who will scoff at a stat that has Bradley and Wallace as two of the top three on the team.

[Roy H.]

ESPN doesn't seem to have a way to see the RPM of all the players on the team on a single page, but if you like the stat, it looks like Avery Bradley (2.00), Jared Sullinger (1/33), and Gerald Wallace (0.38) were the only Celtics players with a positive number.

A metric that says that Bradley was the team's best player passes the smell test for me, but I am sure there are people who will scoff at a stat that has Bradley and Wallace as two of the top three on the team.

RPM also says that Andre Iguodala is better than Kevin Durant, and has Channing Frye and Nick Collison as top-8 players.

It's not a great system for a straight ranking of players.

[pearljammer10]

ESPN doesn't seem to have a way to see the RPM of all the players on the team on a single page, but if you like the stat, it looks like Avery Bradley (2.00), Jared Sullinger (1/33), and Gerald Wallace (0.38) were the only Celtics players with a positive number.

A metric that says that Bradley was the team's best player passes the smell test for me, but I am sure there are people who will scoff at a stat that has Bradley and Wallace as two of the top three on the team.

RPM also says that Andre Iguodala is better than Kevin Durant, and has Channing Frye and Nick Collison as top-8 players.

It's not a great system for a straight ranking of players.

Yikes. I say a big nay to this ranking system.

[hwangjini_1]

  Is he a perfect player?  Of course not.  But he was almost certainly this particular team's most valuable player.

I just haven't seen any convincing argument for this being true.  Is there any evidence to suggest that the team actually performed better -- offensively OR defensively -- with Jeff Green than without him, for example?
...

See, lets see if we can walk through some logic here.

a) This team sucked.   However one might argue the merits or flaws of individual players, and whether it was through talent or organizational intent (coaching & personnel decisions) or a mix of both, there should be no argument that this team sucked.   It had a W-L record of 25-57.   It scored a miserable 7892 points and gave up 8258.

b) Based on point (a), it is likely that during the vast majority of floor minutes of this season, the team was negative.

c) Green played 2805 of those minutes  (16th most minutes in the NBA).    Far, far more than anyone else on this crappy team, but nevertheless, sharing the floor with various crappy combinations of this crappy team executing a gawd-awful crappy offense and trying to play defense without a real center.

So ... we should hold it against Green that his floor time +/- is negative?

 

The facts are, when Green was allowed to actually _touch_ the ball, we were more likely to generate _points_ than when anyone _else_ on this team touched the ball.

But for whatever reasons, we did not allow Green to touch the ball very much.

How dare you...!! 

[BballTim]

c) Green played 2805 of those minutes  (16th most minutes in the NBA).    Far, far more than anyone else on this crappy team, but nevertheless, sharing the floor with various crappy combinations of this crappy team executing a gawd-awful crappy offense and trying to play defense without a real center.

So ... we should hold it against Green that his floor time +/- is negative?

I don't think this is how Real Plus Minus works.  If I understand the stat correctly, it accounts for what you're talking about.

You didn't actually address what I mentioned -- did the team perform better on either end with Green on the floor versus when he wasn't on the floor?  I've yet to see any evidence that such is the case.

  I thought the team played better when Green was in the game early in the season (when they were relatively competitive or, if you prefer, other teams were in disarray). In general RPM is very noisy, but when you couple that with the fact that the team had large turnovers in rotation players both from 2013 to 2014 and were basically playing out their string from early January on  you can't draw any useful conclusions from the data.