by December 21, four days until Christmas and fourth night of Hanukkah. Scottie Barnes shoots 1:10 from the field and is on the bench for most of the fourth quarter of the Toronto Raptors’ win over the New York Knicks. It’s warm outside. December 23, two days until Christmas and sixth night of Hanukkah. Scottie Barnes makes the first six shots from the field and scores 11 points in the first quarter. Storm, wind crushing the chimney, Matt Devlin and Jack Armstrong drown.
If a raptor deserves a Rorschach journal dedicated to his joys and disasters, it’s Scottie Barnes. He is what you make of him. Difficult to say why he can look like Sonny Weems one night and Magic Johnson the next.
The explanation for the triumphant return of this formerly weekly column at Raptors Republic The black box report, is pretty easy. We explain what has been under scrutiny and explain what was going on, is going on and maybe even will be going on under the hood. The black box is the vessel in which all information is stored and is known for its opaqueness. Hopefully this column can provide some transparency as to what actually brings the points to the board.
There is nothing more opaque in the NBA than effort. It’s a stick that lazy or ignorant writers use to bash players in cold gunfights, and it’s the first tool fans pull out of the box to pillory their former favorite players. But while using “effort” as a description sucks, it’s also real. player to do have better or worse games, seasons or even careers.
So what to do with effort? Should you ignore it as incomprehensible? Should you dive in and join the mob of the ignoble and use effort as a whip? Or maybe something else.
Zatzman – Intelligent Effort
In my last article on James Harden weaponizing slowness, I came across an interesting statistic: Of the 10 least likely to move fast on an NBA court, nine are stars. Of the 10 players who move fast on an NBA court the most are zero.
There’s a boatload of causal or correlative explanations out there, but one of the most unlikely possibilities is that James Wiseman and Chris Duarte are simply trying harder than Luka Doncic and Nikola Jokic. It’s always possible, but it’s doubtful. And even if they are trying harder is clearly not helping them much; Doncic and Jokic are the absolute highlights of their profession.
Fast running might not be the only component to exerting yourself, but it’s a pretty good indicator. And so many of the players who fly around the NBA court every night are on the fringes of the league. It’s not that Wiseman is any less athletic or any less skilled than some of the better centers in the league, for example. And if fast running is any indication, it also offers less effort.
Scottie Barnes is among the hardest-working players in the NBA by most fitness-based metrics. As in the previous season, he is one of the leaders in the league based on the distance covered. (His fitness measurements like average speed or acceleration or deceleration are all slightly down from last year, but by tiny percentages.) He’s among the leaders (and tops the list among Raptors) when it comes to most shots and to contest the conclusion most about the place. He tries.
So what actually happens when Barnes gives up Blowbys at the perimeter? And yes, he gives up a lot of them. Why does he sometimes become invisible on offense?
The first 10 or 20 moves of top-level chess games are a contest of memorization. And most of those “book” games played 50 or 150 years ago and studied to death by players and their teams have forced ties at certain points in the game. So when chess players need a win, they have to ignore that Correctly Movements and making deliberate inaccuracies unwind the book and force both players into a game of tactics rather than memory.
The Raptors make defensive mistakes on purpose. They will rotate voluntarily, not in response to events, just to put the ball in play and see what happens from there. It is a means of defenestrating the book, pushing the game from memory, executing it, and turning it into a tactical competition. They think they have better chances there.
Not to say that Barnes correctly chooses when to stop the ball and when to spin behind it, or that he’s good at tossing the book out the window while still maintaining defensive principles, but there’s method to his madness . Or at least he’s not completely insane as a freelancer.
And offensively, Barnes has done a lot more for the Raptors than he did in his rookie season. He drives almost twice as many pick-and-rolls. He posts more. The Raptors let him do more with the ball. When the shot goes up, he’s often 30 feet from the rim instead of four, meaning he’s had a harder time racking up offensive rebounds this season. Reductions start in different areas of the square. Shots come from different places, with different leads before the catch. It takes time to adapt to change, especially for a player who hasn’t seen it all at the NBA level. How does effort show when you throw more passes from the pick and roll? (Often in no-looks for Barnes.)
All this to say: effort was not the problem. (Perhaps it was for some of his critics.) The adaptation wasn’t ideal, and he didn’t fit perfectly into a new role. He wasn’t consistent in his decision-making and execution, of course, but what 21-year-old — in whatever area of life — is consistent? There are problems, sure. Not that of effort.
Folk – Invisible Effort:
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of ultimate practice player. It can of course mean many different things. Some players are really great at acting as facsimiles of stars in practice so defense can set up game plans, rotations and all that. Some undoubtedly hit a crippling number of shots, wielding offensive possessions and blasting them on the other end. Really disturbing, really great presences on the floor. And then hardly carry over. How confusing would it be for a coach to continue having to make rotation decisions that go against their practice but yield positive results on the pitch? Or the other way around? Maybe Patrick McCaw’s conclusion?
When we (the media) enter a training session to talk to players, it’s almost always at the end. All the hustle and bustle has stopped, players sort themselves into treatment and development/maintenance. For example, while we wait to interview Nick Nurse, Khem Birch often works on the shots he usually takes from the short roll and then extends to the 3-point line. OG Anunoby usually shares that basket (although not always at the same time) and goes through form shooting, pull-ups, free throws – all the basic stuff.
What I’m saying is that, as far as I can tell, we’re seeing very little. The little media guy like me? I hear very little and that’s just me. I couldn’t possibly speak for others. A black box report of the effort? The most opaque of the opaque. There’s a reason people accept the hodgepodge effort as a diagnosis or prognosis of failure or success in the world of sport. Heck, even the economy with bootstraps, hustle, etc. It seems like a variable you can control—and you can to a certain extent—but it doesn’t guarantee results. It’s doing its best to go some of sorts, but it needs to be coupled with…literally everything else that goes with winning at the smallest aspects of things. Everyone understands what effort is, and so the conversation becomes accessible and fruitful.
When Nick Nurse talks about basketball in public the way he talks about it privately, 98 percent of the audience is left behind. Players and coaches understand optics, so they play the hits. The quotes? Effort. The stories? Effort. If you win, you’ve made an effort. If you lost, you didn’t. And you know what? This is completely right. It only gets murky when you try to backtrack a lack of progress or results (of the desired variety) into this effort problem, perhaps to draw conclusions based on character. It’s a tough line to walk.
The film is of course the film. passivity in film is at least a kind of passivity. But if Jayson Tatum says the game plans have changed for Scottie Barnes, they have. When Louis outlines how much has changed for him on the Raptors’ side, they have. Some of this passivity has to be accepted Processing. Sometimes it’s a lack of preparation and conviction not to attack the lane with a stampede cut. Sometimes defense will float defenders into your lanes to play goaltenders and zone the other spots. If you’re a player who isn’t used to seeing a super engaged second level and all the different machinations of defense stopping you more purposefully, then passivity can kick in.
Most works are invisible. So let’s observe and see what can be. Sources have alluded to a lack of work, and there has been much talk of effort. It could be true But as movie nerds and statistics nerds, Louis and I had to reflect on what we know about Barnes’ game and try to make sense of it from our perspective. And we don’t mind increasing the complexity in this case. Because when it comes to how a player progresses and improves, there is never anything one Answers.
Have a blessed day.
#Scottie #Barnes #Effort #Black #Box #Report #Raptors #Republic
