Matt Zeitlin

Another post from Anton

Landry Fields is one of my favorite players in the NBA. He doesn’t jump the highest. He doesn’t dunk the hardest. He doesn’t score the most. In fact, he doesn’t score much at all.

None of these things detract from the fact that Fields had a remarkable season. He averaged around 10 points per game, which doesn’t sound impressive, but did it while shooting 50% from the field, an extremely high number for a guard. He plays solid defense and is a willing passer, averaging 2 assists per game. Fields lead the entire league in rebounds per game as a guard, clocking in at 6.4 a game. 6.4 rebounds is an outstanding total for a shooting guard. Landry outrebounded 7-foot center Brook Lopez, Shaquille O’Neal and other starting centers, even though he is only around 6 foot 6. And Landry is doing all of this as a rookie.

Landry was drafted 39^th overall in the 2010 NBA draft. Which means every single team passed over him in the draft, some doing it multiple times. And yet Landry has had a better season than almost any other rookie. ESPN’s John Hollinger has the PER stat, which is an advanced statistical formula created to measure a player’s productivity. PER has Fields as the 10^th best rookie in the league this year. The wins produced measure, created by 3 professors of economics at the Wages of Wins blog has Fields producing 13.5 wins this year. How good is that? Well it would be the 13^th best season by a record since 1977. Only the magical Blake Griffin had a better rookie season this year than Fields under this stat.

Why is Fields so good according to Wages of Wins? Well, wins are not just determined by points. Although people believe the players who score more are better players (leading to the ‘Derrick Rose for MVP’ consensus), it’s the players who score efficiently who are worth more. Shooting a higher percentage and getting the to free throw line are critical. It’s a large part of what makes a player like Lebron James so much better than Carmelo Anthony. Even though they both average 25-27 points per game, Lebron scored his points at a 51% clip, while Melo shot just 45.5%.  Lebron produced 23 wins this year, while Melo produced closer to 10. So how does this apply to Fields?

Well, as previously mentioned, Fields is a very efficient scorer, especially for a guard. Wages of wins also highly values rebounds; simply put, more rebounds mean more shots for your team and less shots for the other team. Finally, Fields performs fantastically in another category, turnovers. He averaged 1.3 per game. If you take care of the ball, your team gets more chances to shoot.

Anyway you look at it, Fields has had a great season and is certainly one of the better players on the Knicks. Certainly, it would be fair to say that he is unappreciated, most of all by his coach. Mike D’Antoni has reduced Fields’ playing time at the most critical juncture of the season, the playoffs, in lieu of more experienced players like Roger Mason and Bill Walker. These players shot a combined 1-15 in a game the Knicks lost by 3 while Fields played just 15 minutes.

Another fresh cut from Anton. If this were the AWL, I would also post our gchats about Dwight Howard’s very deserving and totally overlooked MVP candidacy. And also how Mike D’Antoni can’t call a play that anticipates a double-team on Carmelo to save his life. Enjoy – MZ

OBAMA AND CIVIL LIBERTIES – Anton

Upon Obama’s election in 2008, liberals (and many independents) expected him to be a transformational president.  We expected action on the economy, healthcare, energy policy, immigration and more. Were expectations too high? Absolutely, and anyone who knows how Washington works was not surprised that Obama signed a health care bill, but immigration and cap and trade never made it to his desk.

What I am surprised by is Obama’s lackluster record on civil liberties. While he is no Bush, who was a truly transformational president in terms of setting us back on civil liberties, Obama is much, much closer to Bush than we thought he would be, or that he ought to be. Did he end torture? Yes, by executive order in January 2009. But after this (albeit extremely important) step, he has consistently failed. The practice of rendition, the transfer of prisoners to other nations, has not been halted. New rules governing the treatment of domestic terror suspects allow them to be held longer than others without giving them a Miranda warning, even if they are American citizens. This rule flies in the face of decades old precedent.

Other expansions of executive power at the expense of civil liberties include Obama’s support for the successful extension of the Patriot Act, even though he was skeptical as a senator. Allowing the government to continue to survey individuals with no terrorist connections is plain and simple an abuse of our civil rights, as are roving wiretaps. Gitmo will remain open and indefinite detention will continue and recently the administration abandoned any attempt for a civilian trial. We have that little faith in our own justice system?

His policies have encountered very little opposition, which is the saddest part of it all. Where is the outrage? Where is the tea party? Don’t Republicans and the tea party champion limited government? What happened to all the democrats going crazy over Bush’s actions? It is a shame when a President enters us into a war intoLibyawithout a congressional vote or debate and only Rand Paul and Dennis Kucinich voice opposition. It’s sad how little outrage is sparked when the Obama administration says that the president is allowed to order the extra-judicial killing of any American citizen, regardless of location.

The erosion of civil liberties is one of the most important problems in our society that does not receive enough media attention. I don’t see Obama reversing course on many of these issues, so the onus falls elsewhere. The left and the right must come together to demand that our civil rights be respected and halt the progress of executive power. People must demand that their representatives work for their rights and not against them. Whether this happens remains to be seen.

You few remaining readers may know my friend Anton from his comments here, especially on basketball related posts. Well, he’s been turning his finely tuned mind to matters political these days, and for a school assignment, he’s writing some posts that I will be publishing here. Enjoy.

- MZ

Who Is Gary Johnson?

-Anton 

Any day now, Gary Johnson will be announcing his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. Who is Gary Johnson? Well, he was the governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003. He cut taxes and the size of government and promoted a school voucher program. He balanced the budget, leaving the state with a 1 billion dollar budget surplus. He competently handled the devastating 2000 Cerro Grande Fire and was called an excellent leader by Democratic congressmen Tom Udall. Johnson never raised taxes over his 8 years in charge and started his own construction business that made him a multi-millionaire.

So what’s the problem here? Well there are a few roadblocks to a Gary Johnson candidacy. First, he has very little name recognition and does not poll very well. He has been out of politics for a few years and will have trouble raising money.

Second, he may be way too reality-based for the current republican electorate. You don’t hear him spouting birther theories or calling Obama a socialist. He has a longstanding respect for civil rights. His skepticism towards foreign wars puts him at odds with the majority of today’s republicans. Further, support for marijuana legalization and gay marriage puts him on the wrong side of social conservatives. Johnson himself used pot for pain control after a 2005 paragliding accident nearly killed him. This brings us to the third problem: the mainstream media has essentially deemed him ‘the pot candidate’. Almost every article about Johnson prominently features his position on marijuana and/or past use.

Is there a path to victory for Gary Johnson? Doubtful. A Ron Paul endorsement would go a long way towards raising his name recognition and viability. Johnson’s record seems to be something that the supposedly libertarian tea party would love. However in reality, I suspect the tea party is just not serious enough to endorse such a responsible and credible candidate. It’s a shame.

Bill Simmons hasn’t yet said that he thinks Derrick Rose is the MVP, but he puts forward a case for it and then summarizes the opposition as arguing simply that “his plus/minus and true shooting percentage weren’t quite good enough.”

While this does capture the views of some stat-oriented basketball writers, who really do think that shot creation is a black box and that we should weight efficiency uber alles, it seems a little dubious to put things that way when you could simply state the case for Dwight Howard as: “he has an amazingly high shooting percentage and is arguably the best defender in the league, moreover, he makes his team’s defense much better.” This, of course, is what Simmons is saying to — plus/minus captures defensive contributions and true shooting is the best way to measure shooting — but it does not connote the kind of stat-fetishism that anti-stat people tend to attribute to those who like to used advanced statistics. Simmons is making the rhetorical moves of the most retrograde stat-bashers who everyone stopped listening to a long time ago.

The reason Derrick Rose is not indisputably the MVP is because defense is very, very important. And evaluating defenseive contributions in anything like a rigorous way is very complicated and requires using stats that, when talked about, have the air of numerical fetishism about them (“adjusted plus-minus”).

The thing is, everyone has always known defense is important, even the most anti-advanced statistics, intuitive basketball writers and fans all know this, but whenever I try to tell my Rose-besotted friends that Howard’s defensive contributions make him arguably the second best player in the league (behind Lebron, of course), I’m just a “stat-geek.” Simmons, who is something of a forward thinker on these issues, or who is at least open to the arguments made by stat-types, should be above this silly rhetorical flourish.