Last post I looked at some evidence of the effect of spatially challenged front courts, with an eye towards the Rockets erstwhile starting front court of Omer Asik and Dwight Howard. In that post I looked at the performance of some similar non-spacing front courts over the last two years and found no degradation in offensive performance.
On the other hand, the Rockets have performed poorly thus far with that line up. Part of the issue is that Asik/Howard are clearly clogging the middle, through the first six games, Harden, Chandler, and Lin were all shooting a lower percentage of their shots at the rim than without the tandem on the court., via NBAwowy. And, the Rockets as a whole were getting fewer shots at the rim with the twin towers in than out.
One answer maybe that the Asik/Howard front line is more spacing challenged than most of the other eight line ups I found. Last year Asik took 88% of his shots in the restricted area and Howard took 75% according to NBA.com/Stats. Here is the visual of the shot distribution for each this year.
First Asik:
Open court means don't bother guarding him if he stands out there.
Howard Shot Distribution:
That's a lot of pretty court.
As I repeat always, shots at the rim are a good thing, which both Asik and Howard do . But, any scouting report is going to scream sag off and discount the jumper. And, thus far the net effect has been to reduce the shots at the rim for their team.
The only true comparable last year I found with significant minutes was the combo of Amare Stoudemire and Tyson Chandler in 2011-2012. Stoudemire shot 75% of his shot at the rim last year, while Chandler took 90%. Chandler and Stoudemire were featured in two of the under performing five man man line ups with two Negative Spacers, which is somewhat suggestive, but nothing more than that. In 2012, the first year we have NBAwowy data, Stoudemire/Chandler did not have the same negative effect on their teammates getting to the rim for the most part. Carmelo Anthony and Raymond Felton had the same percentage of their shots at the rim, while JR Smith showed an 8% drop off.
Another answer may Net Spacing, which is a measure I have played around with that essentially penalizes line ups for Negative spacing front court members and adds for Stretch players. In the analysis Net Stretch showed a positive independent contribution to team ORTG. But the measure is still a bit conceptually muddled, for example, it was unclear whether the under performance was being driven by the stretch players or the negative effect of Negative Spacers. Other than it is probably not an ideal line up to have two bigs that need to hug the basket and a back court that relies on drives to the basket to score, but we knew that right?
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