An Update! But not much of one.

This makes me feel like I wasted my time in highschool. Ok, they probably didn't do it in the back of class, but still...

I know I should drop a post about the Ducks, but I am too drained after yestday's game.  I don't even know what I would do if there was another season like Joey's with the 5 comebacks. I don't think my heart could take it.

As for what I have been up to, not much really. I built a new parking place in my back yard. Now I have a nice flat place to park my car, which is nice. I have been doing some yardwork and watching football. That is about it. Work is good, but not particularly exciting. 

I suppose that is it for now. I am going to go eat some cereal. 

The light always seems to change a bit at this time of year. Summer has clearly faded and autumn is here. Today was certainly a warm one in the valley, but it didn't have the teeth of a true summer day. It is my favorite season of the year and it is not really even close. The breeze turns a cooler, and the light turns a little softer then that of summer. It is less the changing leaves than the changing light and breeze that marks the demise of summer for me.

And of course, with fall comes football. Games at Autzen in the long late afternoon, the changing colors of the hillside in the distance. I know the U of O is best regarded in the spring, but I always preferred it in that sweet slice of season when the leaves were changing, but the real rains were still a few weeks off. And not to sound horribly chauvanistic but I love how women look in jeans and a sweatshirt. Simple, but kind of elegant as well.

That is all I have to say for now. I should have an actual update as to what I have been upto shortly, and maybe some thoughts on the Ducks.

Trial Time

So at least one reader has asked to be kept abreast of how my trials go etc. So, to the extent I am comfortable putting that type of information on the internet (and I know I have mentioned it in at least one other post) here is a report from my most recent trial.

I wasn't sure which, if any of the three trials I had scheduled would actually happen last week. It turned out to be the DUII. I won't say I was disappointed, I wanted to try this case. But there was another case set last week I also wanted to get my teeth into. That case has been re-set until September, so I tried the DUII instead.

To me this was a pretty clear-cut case, but most of the other people I have talked to seemed to think otherwise. Although part of that was the defense attorney. He comes with a reputation as a heck of DUII defense attorney (and he lived up to it). Anyway, the evidence was fairly clear cut from my seat: Some pretty bad weaving, observations from a state trooper that the defendant was under the influence of a narcotic analgesic. The trooper was trained through the DRE (drug recognition evaluator/expert) program, so his testimony was a bit better then a guess. There was also a video showing the defendant's condition (not great) and a urine test positive for a prescption narcotic analgesic. Well, there really weren't any suprises during the actual trial. The suprise was how long the jury took. They got the case at about 4:10 in the afternoon. I didn't get a verdict until almost 8:00 that night. But, I can't complain too much, I did get a guilty verdict.

That is about all there is really. As much as I love my job, it is never as exciting as it seems to sound to other people. Anyway, I am out for now, I need to listen to some Billie.

Some news, some links

Time to get you all caught up on some of my doings lately. As a couple of you know I took a good bit of time off last week, and did a little traveling around the state and caught up with some good friends.

On Friday 7/11, I hooked up for lunch with Eric in downtown Portland. I really think I have been in living in Astoria too long. I didn't have too much trouble driving around downtown, but I got confused trying to walk around. All those damn tall buildings look the same. It probably didn't help that the landmarks I was looking for weren't there anymore. Once I actually made it to the rendezvous point, it was a good time.

Then that night I met up with these two questionable characters for dinner. Also a great time. Good food, some pretty good beer, and we learned that I am horrible at Boom Blox. I am pretty sure an epileptic in the midst of a full seizure would be better.

After Portland I took off for Lincoln City to hang with P and J for a few days. That is about all the travel news. I have few other things to mention though.

Work: I was pretty excited for a couple of trials this week. Unfortunately, one of them has already been bumped, and there is a good chance my other one will as well. Suck.

Cool things:

http://www.drhorrible.com/ I know most of you read Penny Arcade, so you probably saw the link to this there. If not, I guess you suck. Seriously, what is wrong with you? It is a musical super-hero movie. Joss Whedon is involved, and NPH is the star. You can watch the trailer, but it isn't as awesome as what was up over the last weekend. So hopefully, you saw what it was they had up.

http://triplea.sourceforge.net/mywiki If you were looking for a way to mess around with Axis and Allies, you could do a lot worse then this. The AI isn't great, but it isn't too bad. You can also set up email games, or online games. Not to shabby...

That is about all I have for now.

New Family Member

So Sam and I have added a new member to our family out here on the coast. A little over a week ago I was alerted to a new litter of kittens that had been born in the basement of a local landmark (the Flavel House). Since they would face grim chances otherwise, Sam and I decided to adopt one. We brought her home last Saturday after luring into our grasp with some tuna. She looks to be about 6-8 weeks old, and according to the vet is in perfect health. There are couple of pictures below. Oh, her name is Misha (Sam named her).

Evil

It wasn't my idea. I want that on the record at the start. But there is no denying it now. No stopping it. Evil has come to roost in my house again and I am powerless to expel it. It started when Blizzard announced Diablo III. I started to prepare myself. I knew that in 12-18 months I would be fighting that old addiction again. What I didn't expect, what I couldn't anticipate, was Sam diving into Diablo II. I though I had time to prepare, to fortify against the attack. I was wrong. The old pull is still strong. I find myself thinking about barbarian builds. I am saved only by the inability of this laptop to install the game. I have never been more thankful that my CD drive is finicky and rarely works.

Last Blazers Post for a While

Alright, I was sitting down to drop a short draft preview and I saw something so wrong, so incongruous with my world view I had to mention it here. I just saw Bill O'Reilly, avowed conservative arguing for more regulation of a certain business. I'm still not sure what to say.

Anyway, draft day is tomorrow, and the 3rd annual pritch-slapping of the NBA has already begun. In case you haven't heard, the Blazers bought the 27th pick from New Orleans for cash consideration. This is the same kind of move that netted Portland the rights to supposed sensation Rudy Fernandez. I have a had few comments asking what I would like to see Portland do, and what I think is likely. Well, for all my thoughts are worth, here you go:

I still see Pritchard trying to move the 13th pick. I really don't see there being a player available that will be ready to step in and contribute in the way Portland really needs. Moreover, given the working plan (AKA the Cap-Space for 2009-10 Plan), Portland likely needs to move one or more of Frye, J Jack, and Webster. (For more detail see this site.) Based on that I think Pritchard is most likely to either trade up from 13, or trade for a player that fits Portland's needs.

What I would like to see: Of the three players mentioned I would prefer to see them keep Webster. I think at worst he is a legit 3-point threat that can open the floor a-la James Jones or Kyle Korver. If he continues to develop to his true potential, his ceiling is much much higher. That isn't to say I don't like Jack or Frye, I just think Webster is the more rare of the commodities. I am not as convinced as some that SF is a big need for Portland. I think Outlaw and Webster both have big potential at the 3. I am much more convinced that we need an improvement at the point. So, I guess I'm looking for Pritchard to try and pick up a quality point, but one that is comfortable without the ball. A good shooter, and a good defender with a good handle under pressure.

Other then that, given Pritchard's general MO of stocking talent, I expect to see a lot of BPA tommorrow. (And at least 2 more trades... but I am not plugged in enough to really speculate with who/for who.) I do like Heinrich a lot, but I am not a fan of contract, and that rumor seems to have died out.

Advanced Statistics and the Portland Trailblazers Pt. II

I was going to start writing this post a couple of days ago, but I had a little bit of trouble coming by the numbers that I needed. Pace and efficiency stats aren't too tough to come by, but the other numbers are. Well, they are in the form I wanted them in. 82games.com (which is awesome for other reasons...) has the rebounding numbers, but only to 2 decimal places. To really compare across the whole league, the third decimal is important. So, I wound up building a spreadsheet and calculating the numbers by hand. That was before I found the table I was looking for on basketball-reference. I got lazy when it came to calculating league averages for pace and efficiency. I am sure you will cope. Well, with that out of the way, here are the numbers.

	Portland	League Rank	League Leader	League Worst	League Average
Pace	89.7	29	99.7 (Denver)	87.3 (Detroit)	Not Available
Offensive Efficiency	107.3	14	113.8 (Utah)	100.5 (Seattle)	Not Available
Defensive Efficiency	108.4	17	98.9 (Boston	112.8 (Milwaukee)	Not Available
eFG%	49.00%	16	55.2% (Phoenix)	44.3% (Miami)	49.30%
oReb%	26.70%	15	31.8% (Philadelphia)	22.1% (Miami)	26.70%
dReb%	71.80%	24	.783 (LA Clippers)	70.3% (Golden State)	73.40%
TO%	13.40%	7	11.4% (Toronto & Detroit)	16.5% (Boston)	13.00%
FT Rate	22.80%	21	27.6% (Sacramento)	18.3% (Minnesota)	23.20%

Alright, so there are the numbers. What do they mean? That is a good question. And it is a question that doesn't have an easy answer.

First, looking at pace we see something that I think we knew intuitively. Specifically Portland plays slow, deliberate basketball. Moreover, I don't see that changing a whole lot as long as B. Roy is around. But we also see that Portland is pretty efficient on the offensive end. And efficiency is the important thing.

The defensive end is another story. And, to further illustrate why pace independent statistics are important, if we look solely at opp points/game, Portland is 8^th in the league. But once we take Portland snail like pace into account, we see that rather than in the top 1/3 of the league, the Blazers are really in the bottom half. I also think it is important to note that although Portland is near the middle of the league in Defensive Efficiency ranking wise, the distance between Portland and Milwaukee is pretty small.

The other two numbers that really jump out are defensive rebounding and FT Rate. I think most people recognized that Portland struggled on the defensive glass this year. This is an area Portland should look to improve on. With the addition of Oden in the middle, I am expecting some strong improvement here. A better dReb% should also help improve Defensive Efficiency. It is pretty easy to see the strength of keeping an opponent of the offensive glass.

I am less sure what to make the FT Rate numbers. Of the Four Factors, this one is generally regarded as the least important. Also, although ranked quite low, it appears there is a big bunch near the midpoint, and Portland isn't far from it. Looking at the numbers behind Portland's FT Rate, the Blazes made their foul shots at a good clip (about 76.6%), but really didn't get to the line that often. If Portland had gotten to the line as often as the league average, they would have scored almost 1.34 more points per game. Is that much of a difference? It is worth about 4 wins under the basketball Pythagorean formula*. I would say that is fairly significant.

So, did any of this really communicate information that wasn't clear to somebody just watching the season? I am sure some of it was clear. But if you didn't dig into these numbers, you may think that Portland didn't have much trouble on defense, or that the lack of defensive rebounding wasn't particularly crucial. Either of those beliefs could lead to bad moves as it comes time to build the team for next year.

*In case you are not familiar with it, one of the first big advances in sports statistical research was the so called Pythagorean Theorem of Baseball, or Pythagorean Records. It seems almost a truism to say that your win/lose record is going to be determined by the number of runs(or points) you score and the number you give up. However, a little research showed that a teams winning percentage in baseball is closely tied to: runs scored^2/(runs scored^2 + runs allowed^2). It turns out if we tweak the exponent a little we get an even better fit. The same can be said for NBA Basketball. The generally agreed upon formula for basketball is: Pythagorean Expectation % = Tm pts^14/(Tm pts^14+Opp pts^14).

It should be noted that Portland exceeded it's Pythagorean Expectation this year by about 3 wins. Anecdotally it would seem this would be due to performing better then expected in close games, and losing a few more blow-outs then they won. I haven't taken the time to examine this, and I won't now as this post is getting a bit long.

Modern Basketball Statistics and the Portland Trailblazers (Part 1)

So, those of you that have had more than a beer or two with me lately know that for the last year or so I have become intrigued with the so called sabremetrics (or statistical) approach to looking at baseball performances. My interest in this topic has been fired by the Seattle Mariners blog community. It turns out that the two biggest blogs covering the Mariners both take a decidedly statistical approach to analyzing baseball performances. From there I started thinking about and looking into what work has been done in this realm for other sports. This post is a discussion of the new thinking as it applies to the Portland Trailblazers.

Before discussing where the Blazers are and where they could be going, it would be helpful to give a basic description of what new statistics I am talking about and why things like points per game should become obsolete in the near future much as ERA has.

Some of the my favorite work to date has been done looking at offensive and defensive efficiency. The concept is this: Basic statistics measure how many points a team scores and how many points a team gives up. But, these numbers doesn't exist in a vacuum, and teams that score fewer points don't necessarily have worse offenses. If a team is more deliberate in it's offense, if it uses more of the shot clock each trip down the floor, that team will have fewer overall possessions then a team that shots quickly (like the Suns of the last couple of years). Even a team that is efficient in terms of how it uses it's possessions may score fewer points in a game than a less efficient, but faster team.

Since a game is of a defined length (48 minutes in the NBA) it isn't too difficult to calculate the number of possessions per game a team gets (See here: http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html for the formula)* Once we know how many possessions a team has in an average game we can look at how many points per possession a team generates. Although this could be a useful measure, most sites extrapolate out to points scored per 100 possessions to compare across teams. This is useful not just to see how efficient an offense is, but it can also be used as a measure of team defense. Looking at offensive and defensive efficiency will give you a basic measure of a teams health.

Although there are other advanced statistics that bear discussion, today I am going to talk about The Four Factors. This is a concept advanced by Dean Oliver in his book Basketball on Paper. Now, this discussion should come with the caveat that I haven't read that book yet. As such, this discussion will be somewhat cursory. The idea is that a basketball game can be broken down into (shocked face) Four Factors:

1. Shooting

2. Rebounding

3. Ball handling

4. Getting to the free throw line.

This may sound a little simplistic, but it should be noted his work was good enough to get him a job with the Seattle Supersonics and the Denver Nuggets as a full time statistical analyst. Since I am starting to run out of time, tonight I will cover the basics of the four factors and the simple, but more useful statistic.

1) Shooting

When talking about shooting, normal FG% isn't enough. Specifically it fails to account for the added importance of a 3 point field goal. Since a three is worth 50% more than a two, we need to use a waited percentage. This number is generally referred to as “effective field goal percentage” or eFG%. Simply put eFG = (fgm + .5*3fgm)/fga.

2) Rebounding

Once again per game stats are insufficient to measure how well a team does. Per game stats don't account for the number of rebounds that are available in a given game. The better measure is offensive and defensive rebounding percentage. These numbers are fairly self explanatory.

OReb% = OReb / (OReb + Opp DReb)

DReb% = DReb / (DReb + Opp OReb)

3) Ball Handling

Rather then just looking at pure turnovers per game, we can use a possession based statistic: Turnover % = Turnovers / Possession.

4) Free Throws

This one is a little more strange. Although we could just look at FTA or FTM, its always better to take into account the pace of the team you are talking about. Most researchers look at FTM/FGA and dub this “free throw rate”.

None of these stats is the be all end all, and all statistics can be effected by factors that aren't necessarily what we are trying to measure. Alright, it is getting late tonight. Sometime tomorrow or later this week I will drop a post discussing what these numbers say about Portland and where they need to improve.

*Basketball reference is an awesome site. If you like basketball and/or statistics, it is a site you can lose a lot of time at. Their formula is quite good, but also a bit complex. If you need a short version FGA + TO + ~.5 FTA – ORB will get you close, but it isn't particularly exact.

Shooting Fish in a Barrel?

I am aware that some journalists and newspaper publishers argue that a columnist's job is to stir the pot, provoke discussion and sell papers. And if the columnists at the Oregonian did that, I don't think I would have nearly as many complaints. Now, the Oregonian is not widely known as a home for brilliant, erudite columnists and I don't expect that to change any time soon. But damn it, the Oregonian is the State's biggest daily newspaper. The fact that I see better reasoned argument in the Daily Astorian is frightening.

Here is the column that has me irked this evening. (Lucky for me I don't have a big enough readership to worry about driving up Mr. Duin's statistics by linking him.)

I want to make two things clear at the outset. First, as just about everyone reading this knows, I am a Duck Sports fan. I own season football tickets. Second, I agree the U of O needs to significantly renovate it's residence halls. But the basis of Duin's column isn't research, or reasoned argument. He throws out short, sound-bite style paragraphs, tosses cheesy innuendo at the University and chooses to blame a popular scape-goat in the academic realm: athletics.

It seems that about 800 incoming freshman at the U of O have been told there will not be space for them in the "residence halls" (as I no longer work for Campus Housing, I will be calling them "dorms" from here on out). He then points out the recent spending on the U of O's new basketball arena. It's clear that he sees these two as not just happening at the same time but as a cause and effect, though he won't come right out and say it.

Perhaps most galling to me is the lack of context of the current housing issue on campus. My freshman year (that would be 1999-2000) there were so few students (not just freshman) in the dorms that an entire hall in Bean was closed after the first month of the year (it had briefly housed freshman that were waiting to rush and then moved into a frat/sorority house). My sophomore year, there was talk that there wouldn't be enough students living on campus to keep Earl Hall open. An entire hall. There were open rooms in the UI (now Barnhardt hall). It was easy to buy a double room and use it as a single. A large number of incoming freshman were choosing to live off-campus because, they told me, it was cheaper. Duin makes no effort to discuss what the living situation has been in years passed or how it has changed recently.

On top of failing to discuss the recent changes in housing demand (or investigating a root cause), Duin fails to mention that the U of O opened a new dorm this past year. Presumably such information would get in the way of laying the blame for this on the stoop of the "pampered athletes and boosters." This doesn't even take effort to discover. It is a huge new building, right there on campus. They took out the outdoor tennis courts to build it. Instead he leaves the impression that the U of O is spending all of its resources on new arenas and leaving these freshmen to freeze.

On the other side of the issue, Duin neglects to discuss or mention the baseball stadium that is scheduled to break ground this winter. Frankly, I can think of no explanation other then shear sloth and shoddy reporting (columnizing?). A ready-made bolster to his argument is left rotting in the dustbin. Did he consider his argument too airtight to need a supporting point?

I know it is easy to Monday-morning quarterback these things. I'll admit I haven't dug in and researched the issue. But I am also not paid to do so. This is Duin's job, his chosen profession. If I took a case to trial with this little research and preparation I would deserve to be disbarred.

I can't speak to Duin's qualities as a human, or even the majority of his other writing, but this column is crap. It adds nothing to the important discussion of the needs of higher education in this state and the spending priorities of this "state run" school. This is an important issue that deserves well researched and well reasoned positions. Duin adds nothing to the pot.