Soft Euro wrote:
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I’ve known Jay Triano for many years, having worked with him briefly at Simon Fraser University. When he became the head coach of the Toronto Raptors, he was eager to take advantage of the quantitative analysis that was becoming increasingly prevalent at the pro level.
Its Jay, not Colangelo, who brought these guys in. Not suprising to his statement about where most of his work is with the coaches and a smaller portion with the GM
If you just look at his Per 36 minute stats, you’ll see that Hedo has done almost the same things in Toronto that he was doing in Orlando – the only difference is that he’s taking fewer shots and he’s playing slightly fewer minutes.
One of the biggest differences in terms of Hedo’s role is team personnel. As you mentioned, in Orlando he was sometimes the primary ballhandler and the guy responsible for running the offense – especially when Jameer was out with injury. In Toronto, we have two quality point guards who are more than capable of running the show. Hedo plays a critical role in our team’s offense, and the offense runs very efficiently through him, but we haven’t needed to rely on him as much in those areas as a result of our depth at PG.
Yeah, I mean, individual defense is obviously one of the harder things to get a finger on. Partly because there’s basically zero publicly-available data on it. So, using our internal numbers, I would say that last year he was an above-average defender and I’ve heard people make the argument that it was largely because of Howard or because he was, kind of, hidden in the sense of they could match him up. Especially when they were playing with [Mickael] Pietrus and guys like that. They could match him up against lesser offensive players and I didn’t watch a ton of Orlando games last year, so that may well be the case. We don’t have that luxury, in Toronto obviously, to really hide guys on defense and honestly, on the defensive end, he’s been fine. He hasn’t really been a positive or a negative, if that makes sense. We definitely have defensive problems as a team but frankly, they’re not defending the small forwards.
While I absolutely agree the Raps defensive problems were many, I can't say I agree that Hedo wasn't part of that problem.
I'm glad the Raps are using more analysis. Its becoming more and more important around the NBA. But I can't say I'm going to put a ton of reliance on a guy who hides behind an iron curtain (out of necessity I understand) with a conflict of interest. Atleast not until he has a track record to prove it.
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