Defense Wins Championships, But...

by Jeff Clark on Feb 22, 2012 5:47 AM EST in Boston Celtics News & Links

Scoring needed. (Rebounding too - turn around and box out rook)

Defense may win Championships, but if your offense is pitiful, there's only so much you can do. Take these stats that Ben Rohrbach put together.

Irish Coffee: 5 awful Celtics statistics, 1 good one

Dropping to 26th among 30 NBA teams in points scored, the Celtics haven’t scored more than 95 points in eight straight games. In the shot clock era (since the 1954-55 season), the Celtics have had only three other streaks of such woeful offense: From Dec. 30, 2000 to Jan. 12, 2001 (8 games), from Jan. 21 to Feb. 4, 2006 (9 games) and from Oct. 31 to Nov. 26, 2003 (13 games). Two of those teams failed to make the playoffs, and the other got swept in the first round of the 2003 NBA playoffs.

Ouch. Can this team turn things around and become at least more respectable on offense? Sure. But it would help a lot if they could rebound.

The good news? The 2003-04 Pistons owned the league's best defense, ranked 24th in points scored and won the NBA championship. Of course, that team ranked in the top half of the league in rebounding.

Did I mention that the Celtics are dead last in rebounding? (Facepalm)

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Comments

Both those rankings (points per game and rebounds per game) are pretty suspect.

I’m not saying we don’t have scoring and rebounding issues, but using per-game counts is not useful for comparison because teams play at vastly different paces. Rebound totals are further suspect for additional reasons.

A better measure of our scoring woes is to use the Offensive Rating of points scored per 100 possessions. By that measure we are ranked 24th. Still bad, but not as bad.

It is illuminating to note that when we have all of our ‘Big 4’ on the floor (regardless of who plays the extra big is) that our ORtg has been 103.7 – which would be good enough to jump all the way to 13th. It’s been even more impressive when combined with any of Wilcox, JJ or Stiemsma.

The killer for our overall offense has been our bench. Our offense just stalls out when our bench guards and wings come on the floor.

Our defensive rebound rating is slightly below average at 72.4% (23rd). That needs to improve, but it’s not really ‘dead last’.

NBA Officiating - Corrupt? Incompetent? Which is worse? Does it matter? It sucks.

by mmmmm on Feb 22, 2012 10:45 AM EST reply actions

I haven’t bothered checking, but if you’re going to isolate the offensive ratings of the big four then you kinda have to do that with all other starting lineups/best lineups and then see how we rank.

by muckduck on Feb 22, 2012 9:36 PM EST up reply actions