12 games last night, and no Behind the Box Score to document them. So why not turn a 2500-word column into a 2500-word chat?
Click on the jump at 3:30 Eastern for a Thursday chat discussing last night's work, and possibly the MVP discussion.
(Comments are moderated, be patient.)
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Their concerns are understandable, of course. Returning kicks is part of how they make their living, and anyone is prone to freak out a little bit when the circumstances of their job change. Devin Hester is talking about putting up the Arena Football nets. Josh Cribbs is talking about kick returners becoming completely obsolete.
Again, I understand: It's their jobs at stake, not mine.� But is it possible that we've overstated things a bit here? Are we maybe going a little too far in drawing conclusions about obsolescence?
It's not like kickoff returners will no longer have a place in the game. It's not like no one is ever going to return a kick for a touchdown again. There are still going to be games that are broken open by kick returns, and the slight increase in touchbacks that we'll see (and that's what we're talking about here, a slight increase -- Rich McKay expects we'll see 5-15 percent more touchbacks this year), could even be offset by the fact that the kick coverage team is now allowed to get less of a head-start (down from 10 yards to 5).
The average kickoff last year landed at the 6.5-yard line, so if we end up having a season, the average kickoff will still end up in play. I'm not denying that we'll see more touchbacks, of course, just pointing out that kickoff return opportunities won't be vanishing from the earth entirely.
And if you're a team that employs a weapon like Devin Hester or Josh Cribbs, and you want to get the most out of your guy, then maybe you'll have to take more risks in deciding which kicks you want to return and which ones you want to kneel on. It's another strategic decision for teams to make. If Devin Hester's on your team, maybe you give him the green light from 6 yards deep in the end zone. If Danny Amendola's your guy, maybe you ask him to pump the brakes a little.
It's March, we're in the midst of a lockout, and there's something actually football-related to talk about, so I embrace the conversation. When the season actually starts, though, around Week 8, I'll be really surprised if anyone's talking about how the game was drastically affected by this rule change.
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12 games last night, and no Behind the Box Score to document them. So why not turn a 2500-word column into a 2500-word chat?
Click on the jump at 3:30 Eastern for a Thursday chat discussing last night's work, and possibly the MVP discussion.
(Comments are moderated, be patient.)
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? Typecasting. Persa is exactly the kind of "not that big, not that fast, he just gets it done" scrapper for whom the term "gym rat" was invented. Besides a litany of all-state, all-star and player of the year honors in football, he was a four-year letterman and a sprinter on his high school track team in Bethlehem, Pa., in the wake of the final collapse of the local steel giant. Penn State and other Big Ten heavies weren't that interested. If he wasn't bound for a top college based on his grades, anyway, somebody would have had to make a movie about him.
The All-Big Ten accolades that followed his first season as a starter last fall came largely in response to his record-breaking completion percentage and efficiency as a passer (see below), but as a quarterback, Persa still qualifies as more of an "athlete" than a pocket-bound gunner. He initially committed to run a zone read-based attack under spread innovator Randy Walker —�he committed to Northwestern about a week before Walker's sudden death of an apparent hear attack in 2006 —�and earned a reputation as the Wildcats' resident "workout warrior" long before he made his first start as a fourth-year junior. Persa's elusiveness served him well last year, both as the team's most frequent rusher and in buying time behind one of the league's most porous lines, and his status as the best quarterback in the conference hinges on a full recovery from the season-ending Achilles tendon injury he suffered in the process of throwing the game-winning touchdown pass to beat Iowa.
? At his best... The thing that stands out on paper is the accuracy: Persa led the nation in 2010 by completing a ridiculous 73.5 percent of his passes, a Big Ten record; he also set the school record with a 159.0 efficiency rating, ninth-best in the country. In ten starts before the injury, he connected on multiple touchdown passes in six of them, went over 300 yards passing in four and finished with at least a 140 efficiency rating — far above the national average — in eight. Kid doesn't miss.
Watching him play, though, you're more struck by the instinctive, improvisational "It" factor that makes Persa such an asset for his ability to extend plays and conjure something out of nothing. Which pretty well describes what Northwestern has without him: Nothing. By the time he was knocked out in late November, Persa had personally accounted for a little over 75 percent of the team's total offense, including 300 more yards on the ground (not including sacks) than the next-leading rusher. In his absence, the Wildcats dropped their last three by an average of three touchdowns per game.
? At his worst... The flip side of the sky-high completion percentage is that no one is ever going to confuse Dan Persa's arm for Dan Marino's: The Wildcats kept the passing game deliberately simple, safe and short. Half of Persa's completions (111 of 222) came up shy of a first down, far below the Big Ten average, and he had the league's lowest touchdown percentage. Passes that traveled more than 25 or 30 yards downfield tended to float and turn into jump balls (some of which his receivers occasionally won). He is not going to stretch a secondary vertically.
And frankly, he doesn't have time. Even with his escapability, Persa was one of the most abused quarterbacks in America last year, enduring eight sacks at the hands of Michigan State, five by Minnesota, four apiece by Penn State and Iowa and three apiece by Vanderbilt, Rice and Central Michigan. No other regular Big Ten starter was hit that often, and with Persa also occupying a central role in the actual running game, it's a pain regimen he can't be expected to endure again.
? ROBERT GRIFFIN, Baylor
? JAKE HEAPS, BYU
? AARON MURRAY, Georgia
? Fun Fact. Persa was born in 1988 and clearly internalized his musical taste in the womb or shortly after —�according to his official bio, five of his favorite songs on his iPod include Bulls On Parade, Stairway to Heaven, Master of Puppets, Smells Like Teen Spirit and Touch, Peel, Stand. (What, no Smashing Pumpkins?) If you're interested in advancing your interest in hard yet accessible rock into the 21st Century, Dan, I recommend the Black Angels.
? What to expect in the fall. Persa is sitting out the spring to continue rehab on his Achilles, allegedly out of a greater sense of caution than necessity. At full speed, behind a more seasoned line and with favorite target Jeremy Ebert en tow, Persa's creativity can lift the 'Cats back over the seven-win hump and into another bowl game. Terrelle Pryor will be on the bench for the first month of the season; Denard Robinson will be transitioning to an offense that may or may not suit his talents as well as the one he commandeered in 2010. If Persa doesn't start the season as an All-Big Ten pick, for the injury or any other reason, he's probably still the odds-on favorite to wind up there.
If not, he could find himself a target in the pocket who lacks both the arm to make defenses respect him deep and now the wheels that they did respect. Let's hope not: Minus the creativity Persa flashed last year, Northwestern will be a much less fun team to watch, and an even less fun one to play for.
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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.
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(Ed. Note: Welcome to Stat Nerd Sunday, where we occasionally obsess over hockey numbers like a Dungeon Master obsessing over the level of his warrior elf. Here's Matt Barr, formerly of LCS: Guide To Hockey and Trolleytracks and now blogging hockey at Kertwang.me.)
If you draw the Bruins in the first round, shoot and crash the net. If you draw the Kings, you may want to be more circumspect about your shot selection.
Before we get to strategy in the 2010-11 playoffs, let me say a word about rebounds. To me, rebounds are, if not the Holy Grail, then at least at least the Life of Brian of hockey stats. I'm a Save Percentage skeptic for a number of reasons, and one of them is that if you want to judge how well a goalie is doing his job, you have to look beyond the two broad outcomes of a shot on goal -- that is, goal scored, or save made. I want to know whether a save resulted in a rebound or not.
Consider a save where the puck is either directed harmlessly away from the attacking team's possession, or remains in the control of the goalie. The defending team is out of immediate danger, and has a chance to begin an orderly breakout and transition up ice.
On the other hand, a dozen bad things can happen when a goalie coughs up a rebound, foremost (and easiest to record and measure) a goal against. Ken Krzywicki demonstrated that in 2009-10 shooting percentage for shots off rebounds was 32.8%, orders of magnitude higher than the overall 8.9% shooting percentage for all shots.
With comprehensive data on saves that do and don't result in rebounds, we would know in the first place which goalies control their saves the best. The ones who do are doing their job better, don't you think?� We would also start to learn which teams, and which defenders and goalies, are best and worst at cleaning up after a rebound save. We could even start to recognize the forwards who score rebound goals the most. We could give them the Phil Esposito Trophy at the awards thing in Las Vegas, or something.
Even with NHL GameCenter Live, a league-wide Rebound Adjusted Save Percentage is beyond the scope of a weekly(ish) blog post. But we can take some incremental steps that might tell us something more immediately interesting or useful.
I wanted to look at every goal scored against the likeliest playoff teams since the All Star break, and count which ones were scored off rebounds.
Two caveats: I only looked at goalies who have played at least 500 minutes for those teams since the break. And "likeliest playoff teams" means I didn't look at the teams currently fighting it out for the last spot in each conference. That still gave us a collection of 17 goalies and (exactly!) 700 goals against to work with. (All stats through games of Friday, March 25.)
This wasn't an examination of every save, just every goal. Looking only at rebound goals won't tell us which teams react most effectively to rebounds given up by their goaltender, nor will it tell us how often a goalie gives up a rebound and then keeps the puck out of the net. But the data on Rebound Goal Percentage is interesting in its own right, because it does give us an idea of how much a failure to control saves could be contributing to a goalie's goals against. And if there's ever a time to know that, it's on the cusp of the playoffs.
Let's start by looking at each goalie's percentage of goals that were scored off rebounds; that is, rebound goals divided by total goals against. Of the 700 goals total, 118, or 16.86%, were rebound goals.
Three of the goalies at 25 percent or over are in the Vezina conversation. Maybe they're all world class preventers of non-rebound goals, or maybe percentage of goals scored by one method or another doesn't tell us anything about a goalie's overall level of play. However, a team facing the Boston Bruins, Pittsburgh Penguins or Vancouver Canucks (or Chicago Blackhawks) in the playoffs might profitably exploit the fact that a large fraction of the goals it'll score against them will be by forwards in position to take advantage of rebounds.
I think we get baby steps closer to learning something about a goalie's overall performance by looking at his Rebound Goals Against Average. Like GAA, it's rebound goals against per 60 minutes:
These goalies' efficiency in controlling rebounds varies a lot more widely than their overall GAAs do. Tim Thomas, presumptive two-time Vezina honoree, gives up twice as many rebound goals as Carey Price does. There are very few things Brian Boucher does better than Roberto Luongo, but allowing 40 percent fewer rebound goals is one of them.
To start to understand how rebound goals fit into a goalie's overall performance, I calculated the difference between each goalie's GAA and RGAA. That's the rightmost column above, "non-rebound" GAA. The difference between the best and worst GAA and the best and worst NRGAA are almost exactly the same. Different goalies just seem to get to where they are in different ways when it comes to rebound control.
(I note that since the All Star break, Tim Thomas and Pekka Rinne have been the exact same goalie, except that Thomas will allow an extra rebound goal every other game over what Rinne will.)
How well a goalie controls his saves is one (large) factor in how many rebound goals he allows, but his teammates' ability to clean up after a rebound is a factor, as is the attacking team's ability to get stick on puck. If we can start keeping comprehensive data on saves with rebounds and saves without, and what happens next after a rebound, we'll all be a lot better informed as to how well and poorly hockey players play hockey.
In the meantime, we can guess from the rebound goal data above whose first-round opponents will be extra aggressive throwing the puck at and crashing the net.
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Miami Heat coach Erik Spoelstra has one big regret.
It doesn't have to do with his team's offense, and the way he might be mitigating his own creative instincts by being forced to ape Pat Riley's 2006-era playbook. It doesn't have to do with his team's rotation, or the clutch missteps that have forced the Heat into the third spot in the Eastern Conference.
No, Spoelstra wishes he wouldn't have brought up the crying jag that followed his team's loss to the Chicago Bulls last month. And he said as much to Dan LeBatard on Thursday, on the radio.
Sports Radio Interviews has the transcript:
What is one thing you would go back and do over this season? Was it the crying comment to the media after the game?
"I wouldn't have said it [the players were crying after the Chicago Bulls lose]. I mean the players…we don't have a problem with it because everybody has been in a situation where their words have been taken out of context. In a strange way we've all been through this together and everybody in something where they have tried to say something to the team that has been taken out of context and it strengthened us.
"I brought it up to the team the next day and there wasn't any broken trust. You know you're in front of the media three times a day eventually something you're going to say is probably not going to have the meaning you would have expected. I wouldn't have said it if I had a do over just so I would eliminate one more distraction, but my point about it was the guys do care. I think it is great that we have some incredible, incredibly competitive, self-willed guys in this locker room, but this means a lot more to them, their profession."
A couple of things, Erik …
The quote wasn't taken "out of context." There were players crying in the locker room following that loss.
And to anyone that was paying attention? This wasn't a bad thing. You lose another crushingly close game on another nationally televised stage? A killer loss that could have been avoided by mere inches? Overwrought emotions should result. People cry when they have nowhere else to turn, when words fail them, and when all other actions meant to calm don't suffice. That loss -- another close loss to another great team? That was worth crying over. It was that frustrating.
The quick take from this is that Erik Spoelstra is still learning on the job, with his regrets and missteps on public record. The better take on this is that no coach in NBA history has had a gig like this. The combination of hype, talent, weakness, and Pat Riley's looming presence make this an unprecedented turn.
And the story isn't over.
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Last night saw the season premiere of ABC's Dancing With the Stars, and with it, Hines Ward's first chance to dance his way into America's heart. How'd he do? See for yourself.
Each of the three judges gave Hines a 7, for a total score of 21 out of 30. From what I understand, that's pretty good. Only Ralph Macchio and Kirstie Alley got better scores, which is fine with me, because I'm in total agreement with that third judge: I've always felt like Hines's hips needed to be more piston-like.
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