Thanks to John Hollinger at ESPN (insider) for pointing out that isolation offenses aren’t as effective in the playoffs, where preparation is much easier than it is in the regular season:

I wrote an article recently about playoff myths — things people think change in the playoffs, but in fact don’t.

However, there’s another piece to that puzzle. Perhaps there are things people don’t think change in the playoffs, but in fact do.

I may have accidentally stumbled upon one in observing my two “home” teams, Atlanta and Portland, compete in the playoffs over the past two seasons. Watching the Hawks in particular, nearly every commentator has been shocked by how little ball movement their offense generates and how many times they end up isolating Joe Johnson while everybody else stands around and watches.

This complaint might sound familiar to folks in the Northwest, because it’s not altogether different from what the Blazers do with Brandon Roy. Both teams’ fan bases constantly complain about the lack of originality and shameless predictably inherent in such an attack.

And:

In other words, theirs is a volume strategy. The Hawks and Blazers might not take better shots than other teams, but they take a lot more of them. Over time, that gives them enough of an advantage to make them potent offensive squads overall.

So what’s the problem?

Apparently, there isn’t one … until Game 83. Remember when I was talking about things that change in the playoffs? One change is that these iso-heavy offenses apparently have a lot more trouble when opponents have time to game plan against them in a playoff series.

Take a look at the playoff results from these teams the past two seasons, and the conclusion is hard to ignore. If this happened in any one playoff series, we might be able to dismiss it as a short-term fluke. But the fact that it’s happened six times in six series tells us that maybe something about isolation-heavy offenses doesn’t function well in an environment in which opponents have several days to scout, game-plan and match up for this specific tactic.

I guess we all love it when we find others who agree with us. I think I take special delight when it’s someone I particularly respect. Hollinger — along with Henry Abbott and his True Hoop — are two guys, by themselves, worth the few cents a year that ESPN Insider costs. They know what they’re talking about.

And man, how long have we all been saying this about Nate McMillan’s “Here Brandon, take the ball one-on-three and score” offense?

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My old friend John Hollinger of ESPN.com was at the Rose Garden last weekend when Oden went down with the broken kneecap. And he wrote some pretty good stuff about that game and also about the Trail Blazers, including this:

While broken bones are rarely career-altering, this injury is franchise-altering in the sense that it seems a pipe dream for the Blazers to count on Oden going forward. They can take his contributions as gravy if he’s healthy, but they can’t build a team around him

I don’t take issue with what he said, but I’d add this: The big problem this season is that they weren’t building the team around him. Remember, it was “Brandon Roy’s team.” That’s the way the coach wanted it and the way Roy wanted it. Now, with 20/20 hindsight so common, people will say that was the right thing for the Blazers to do.

Perhaps, in hindsight, it was — but that’s a huge second guess. But basketball-wise, it was not the right thing at the time.

And that was the disturbing thing that was developing this season before Oden’s kneecap exploded. And now, with all the injuries, it will be overshadowed. But remember, in the four minutes-plus that Oden had run up and down the floor Saturday night against that tiny Houston frontline prior to his injury, he hadn’t touched the ball even once at the offensive end — even though he was one of the most efficient offensive players in the NBA.

Yes, that was just one game. But it was very typical of how he was being used this season.

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It’s Insider Only content but the link is here. Yes, Oden is No. 20 — in the entire league. Among all players. PER is an efficiency rating system that’s accepted by many as the best way to rate players’ all-around contribution to their teams. No. 1 is Chris Paul, by the way.

Next highest Trail Blazer in the rankings is Brandon Roy at No. 44. The only true center ahead of Oden is Dwight Howard at No. 14. Oden’s usage rate (the number of possessions he uses per 40 minutes) is appreciably lower than anyone higher than him on the list.

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I first got hooked on John Hollinger stuff back in the mid-1990s when he was writing for a Website he had created called alleyoop.com. It’s still there, if you want to go check out his earlier work. It helped that he was living in Portland at the time — a city he’d visited on vacation from New Jersey and fell in love with — and he loved the NBA.

I was always a Bill James-Rob Neyer disciple who loves fresh ways to look at old numbers so I started following his work. Soon, Hollinger junked his day job in market research and became the sports editor of Oregonlive.com and then went from there to ESPN.com — where’s become a guru with his player and team ratings, based on statistics.

Hollinger still loves Portland even though he moved to Atlanta in 2001. He loves it so much he’s bought a condo and spends part of his year here. He was in the Rose Garden Tuesday night and I got a chance to sit down with him and ask him some questions about his PER, his ratings and other stuff that has been gnawing at me. Here’s some of that conversation:

Q: John, you’ve had the Trail Blazers ranked in your top four for quite a while now, but we’re just a little more than a fourth of the way through the season. Is there a big enough sample size here to say these teams will stay pretty close to where they are or is it too soon. How many games does it take to make up a reasonable statistical sample?

A: Good question. I’m not sure. Last year, by the second or third week of the season, the Lakers and Hornets were in the top three and people were saying, “Are you an idiot?” But they never petered out. Is 20 games representative of what teams really are? That’s a legitimate question.

Q: But the thing about your team and player ratings is that they’re based on numbers. You don’t sit back like some people who do power rankings and just make this stuff up, right?

A: If I have the Trail Blazers in the fourth spot, it doesn’t necessarily mean I think they’re the fourth-best team in the league. It means they’ve played the fourth-best basketball. I get this question all the time about PER. Someone will find a player listed ahead of Paul Pierce and they’ll say, “That guy isn’t better than Paul Pierce.” Well, the numbers say he’s played better than Paul Pierce.

Q: It seems to me, John, that turning stats upside down and finding new ways to evaluate teams and players is so much easier in baseball. I mean, baseball is basically a one-on-one game and you can isolate individual performances so much easier, right?

A: Totally. There is so much yet to do in basketball and it’s difficult. I mean, there’s nothing out there about transition right now — we know possessions ending in turnovers result in more points, but we don’t know a lot yet about the transition game.

Q: Where is basketball in regard to “Sabremetrics” compared to baseball?

A: (With a laugh) In about 1985. Actually, more like ’82 or ’83. But this difference is that in basketball we have met with much less resistance than baseball. There is an openness to the work we’re doing that you still don’t find in baseball.

Q: I know you watch a lot of games . . . what happens when you see things with your eyes that differ from your numbers?

A: It’s inevitable that’s going to happen. But a lot of times, seeing things helps you understand the numbers better. You can better see why certain things happen.

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They used to say that in boxing — that contrasting styles are what make a fight interesting.

Tonight’s matchup between the Blazers and Warriors will be intriguing because you have one team in a real hurry to get to the other end of the floor to hoist up a shot. And the other team that is carefully strolling, step by step, to the other end to take as much time as possible to get off its shot.

It’s the turtle and the rabbit, with the Blazers wearing the shell.

John Hollinger works so hard for ESPN crunching numbers that it’s a shame not to use them. Of course, I can’t directly link to them because they’re “Insider” — which really is a royal pain in the butt. Anyway, John — who is the closest thing basketball has to baseball’s Bill James — has unique team stats that can give you a useful picture of what’s going on in the NBA. I love his “pace factor” stats, which tell you how quickly teams play, based on the number of possessions they get per game.

The Warriors rank second in the league in pace factor, behind the Knicks, at 99.6. The Blazers? Last in the league by a good margin, at 87.5. That’s a huge difference, by the way — and one would have to think the real story of tonight’s game is which team will impose its will on the other. Can the Warriors get the Blazers to run with them? If the Blazers can slow the tempo down, will it be a big advantage?

I don’t know, but I see this as the kind of game the Blazers should win if they wish to establish themselves as a playoff team.

It will be interesting to see if Greg Oden’s regular appearance in Portland’s lineup changes its pace. You would assume Oden’s shot blocking might lead to a few more fast-break points. But on the other hand, teams with strong low-post centers tend to slow the game down so that their big man can get to the block and have a chance to influence the game.

There are a couple of other interesting things to be learned from Hollinger’s stats. I’d always thought of Nate McMillan as a defense-oriented coach. It’s the kind of player he was, certainly. But his impact on this year’s Portland team is much more at the offensive end. The Blazers rank third in the NBA in offensive efficiency, which is based on points per 100 possessions. Portland averages 107.7 points per 100 possessions, behind only Cleveland and Atlanta in that department. That surprised me.

But what didn’t shock me is that on defense, the Blazers rank ahead of only three other teams (New Jersey, Washington and Sacramento) in defensive efficiency, allowing 108.1 points per 100 possessions. That’s pretty awful but the real point is, the numbers say they are more inefficient on defense than they are efficient on offense. They give up more points than they score, which in the long run will get you a lot of losses.

But perhaps Oden will have an impact in that department, too. If Portland is to reach its goal of postseason play, that defensive number surely must improve. By quite a bit.

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