FanPost

2013-14 Pistons Offense sans Josh Smith

Guess what! I'm bored again. Guess what that means! More hypothetical situations with fuzzy math at it's core.

This offseason has included many changes:

I, as well as many others, are excitedly waiting (barring the Monroe situation) for next season to start as it should be quite different from recent years. We're likely to have a more efficient offense, a probably better schemed defense, more team cohesion, and hopefully a better record. After reading Sean's great article on the shooting that Van Gundy has brought in, it really made me wonder what last year would have been like without Josh Smith, at least offensively.

Yes, Josh Smith played out of position some times. Blame that on whomever you want whether it be Joe D, Coach Cheeks or Coach Loyer. He was brought in to create a big lineup and it didn't work. Regardless of who's fault it is, he had a bad offensive year (even compared to himself). He shot 0.419/0.264/0.532 playing 2700+ minutes. Using basketball-reference.com, I first did a search to see who had ever shot less than .425/.275/.550 and played over 2500 minutes. Only one other player showed up: Ben Wallace in 2003-04. Wallace had 10.2 Win Shares that year, Smith only had 1.1 Win Shares in 2013-14. Expanding that search, I changed it to anyone who played over 2000 minutes. This time, four other seasons were returned: Ben Wallace (2003-04, 2007-08), Chris Dudley (1994-95), and Sidney Wicks (1979-80 - the only player with fewer WS than Smith). In short, and as has been expressed before, Josh Smith had a historically atrocious offensive season. But again, you can blame that on whomever you want to.

So what if we took his offense (in terms of shots) and equally divided it out among the other players on the team? Would the team have been that much better, or did it not really matter? You could also do a comparison of how well the team would have performed if you would have evenly divided his minutes up among the other SF on the team, but I wanted to look at even distribution. Smith had a propensity to stop the ball at him and just jack up shots, they weren't always plays ran for him. Because of that, this way MAY be a more accurate picture.

Player FGA% +FGA +FGM 3PA% +3PA +3PM FTA% +FTA +FTM
Brandon Jennings 19.27% 238 88 40.26% 96 32 17.73% 53 40
Greg Monroe 17.23% 212 105 0.10% 0 0 20.28% 61 40
Andre Drummond 13.05% 161 101 0.26% 0 0 18.12% 55 23
Kyle Singler 10.22% 126 56 40.86% 51 19 10.17% 31 16
Rodney Stuckey 14.48% 179 78 10.32% 18 5 16.13% 49 41
Kentavious Caldwell-Pope 7.81% 96 37 40.22% 39 12 3.37% 10 8
Will Bynum 7.30% 90 38 14.42% 13 4 6.69% 20 16
Jonas Jerebko 3.53% 44 21 35.58% 16 7 3.26% 10 7
Josh Harrellson 1.39% 17 8 37.80% 6 2 0.39% 1 1
Chauncey Billups 1.34% 17 5 60.76% 10 3 0.66% 2 2
Luigi Datome 1.65% 20 7 40.21% 8 1 0.55% 2 2
Peyton Siva 0.97% 12 3 43.86% 5 1 0.83% 2 1
Charlie Villanueva 1.56% 19 7 60.87% 12 3 0.77% 2 1
Tony Mitchell 0.20% 3 1 8.33% 0 0 1.05% 3 2
TOTALS 1234 555 274 89 301 210

NOTE: Please hover over column headings to get definition of column, they may not mean what you think they mean.

Josh Smith had 1233 FGA last year, this shows 1234 as I used the rounding function. Smith shot 301 FT last year, this matched that. Smith made 517 FG, this shows that the team likely would have made 555 (+38). Smith attempted 265 3's last year, but by using each player's percentage of 3PA compared to their overall FGA, this would have created 274 (+9) 3's. Smith made 160 FT last year, the team would have likely made 210 (+50). So, to calculate total points...

(FGM-3PM)*2+3PM*3+FTM=TP
(555-89)*2+89*3+210=1409

Smith had 1294 points last year, so the team could have likely scored 115 more points. The Pistons were outscored by 300+ points last year, so that wouldn't have put us on the positive side, but could have resulted in a few more wins. Using this distribution, the Pistons would have shot .452/.331/.694 as compared to .447/.321/.670. The move from 0.447 to 0.452 FG% would have put us closer to the league average of 0.454 and moved us from tied for 18th to 14th in team rankings. The move from 0.321 to 0.331 3P% would not have done a thing in terms of team rankings - still second to last. The move from 0.670 to 0.694 FT% also would have done nothing - still dead last. We still would have been behind the 0.710 of the 76ers.

Now again, this is all hypothetical. Without Josh Smith, a lot of things would/could have been different. Defense could have been worse or better. Maybe instead of the ball sticking at Smith, maybe Jennings shoots more...or maybe he gets more assists because of better ball movement. But if all things stayed the same, last season would have still sucked without Josh Smith's historically bad offensive season.

CAVEATS: Obviously, there are some players that weren't with the team or didn't play for certain games either due to injuries, being in the D-League, or DNP-CD. The best math would have been to calculate these percentages for distribution when that player was actually on the court (but then again, you don't know who would have been on the court in place of Smith). I don't have that time nor the resources. But this is why I called it fuzzy logic. There are plenty of mitigating factors that I can't account for when using Excel.

FanPosts are user-created posts from the Detroit Bad Boys community and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of all fans or the staff at DBB. The DBB staff reserves the right at any time to edit the contents of FanPosts as they reasonably see fit.