Point Blank – April 13, 2017
NBA Finale – sorting the “mist of the must” (the league sure as hell didn’t give it to us, cue more J Geils)…On appreciating just how bad Edwin Encarnacion’s Tuesday was…A healthy Brett Anderson can be a good Brett Anderson...
The final night of what has been a rather ridiculous NBA season saw the Association reach a new low, so before the attention gets turned to the playoffs, which will naturally occupy the prime spot here tomorrow, there is a lot of clean-up work yet to do, in particular from the arena in which we compete each day, because there is the prospect for major misinterpretations to be made.
As detailed yesterday the jukebox will be plugged in over the next cycle for a J Geils tribute, wrapping around to next week, celebrating one of the best live bands of the Rock and Roll era. I believe one of the best ways to showcase how good they were early, and how well the music held up, is through a series of double-shots, and today the focus goes to “Give it to Me”, from Oakland in 1980 and Detroit in 2011, with the guitar work of the late John Geils in evidence, the latter show being one of his last ever on stage with the band -
Item: On the absurdity that was the Wednesday NBA (and dealing through the “mist of the must”)
I know that there will be at least a moment or two of my Thursday occupied by someone from across the counter moaning about the closing-night NBA results, despite the fact that they know such complaints will only lead to ridicule from me. But to isolate where their pain is coming from let’s get straight to a serious tracking point going forward, and how those “must win” teams fared even after some big adjustments were made –
Open Close ATS
BOSTON -13 -13.5 W
CHICAGO -9 -15 W
INDIANA -12.5 -15 W
LAC -15.5 -18 W
MIAMI -9.5 -11.5 L
UTAH -4 -4 P
Those favorites came within a hair of all cashing last night, however, with only a 6-0 closing run by Washington at Miami preventing it from being a clean ride. But you know what? Those results may have been Good News for bookmakers in the long run, having potentially encouraged a lot of improper fiscal behavior by Bettors going forward.
A concept that gets discussed here often is that “must win” only means that – a team needs to win the game to better their playoff positioning, but the margin does not matter. Hence there is often value fading the teams in such settings because the marketplace will tend to over-inflate the lines.
Want to note some real futility? Not only did the Nets play matador defense against the Bulls, but they shot a ridiculous 3-33 from 3-point range.
Hence someone that merely bet on every team that needed to win got rewarded for doing it, and may well do it again in the future. That can be a trap; in truth the favorites performing so well may have had little to do with their intentions last night, but rather that the underdogs simply did not put up any resistance at all. That is the problem that the NBA has to deal with going forward, an almost complete lack of integrity for what should have been one of the most important nights of the regular season.
The best way to lay this out is to be rather blunt, and look at the starting lineups that took the court for the non-contenders, and their number of starts prior to Wednesday:
MILWAUKEE (Top 4 scorers DNP)
Rashad Vaughn - 1
Malcom Brodgon - 27
Michael Beasley - 5
Thon Maker - 33
John Henson - 38
BROOKLYN (Top 5 scorers DNP)
Spencer Dinwiddie - 17
Randy Foye - 39
Rondae Hollis-Jefferson - 49
Caris LeVert - 25
Justin Hamilton - 6
WASHINGTON (Top 2 scoers DNP)
Thomas Satoransky - 2
Brandon Jennings - 1
Kelly Oubre - 4
Otto Porter - 79*
Marcin Gortat - 81*
(* - Porter and Gortat are legit starters, but Porter only played 14:41 and Gortat 25:21 in the game)
ATLANTA (Top 7 scorers DNP)
DeAndre’ Bembry - 0
Jose Calderon - 1
Taurean Prince - 9
Ersan Ilyasova - 11
Kris Humphries - 3
SACRAMENTO (Top 3 scorers DNP, one of them, Rudy Gay, already out with injury)
Langston Galloway - 1
Buddy Hield - 24
Arron Afflalo - 60
Skal Labissiere - 11
Willie Cauley-Stein - 20
And so it went. The favorites got their wins, and vs. the betting boards largely got the money, not so much because they played well, but because there just wasn’t much resistance at all being put up. Long-term stats trackers will have recorded the evening as being a positive for those must-win teams, which can influence market behavior, but in truth there may have been nothing to see there.
For my own tracking, “NBA Wednesday April 12, 2017” will not exist in any form, the post-mortems of such little value that they are not worth performing at all. You think the above lineups were bad? Take a quick glance across the rest of the box scores. The league got caught in a truly embarrassing clusterfuck, but that does mean the serious handicapper has to step around the mess – all of the traditional stat services will treat these games as having had an integrity, and that means mounds of gibberish getting tossed into the mix that simply don’t belong. The Chicago defense gets credit for a 70.9 PP100 performance against Brooklyn that doesn’t mean a damn thing.
Unfortunately for Edwin Encarnacion, his Tuesday outing vs. the White Sox does get recorded for posterity, although in his case it should show even worse than it does…
Baseball Being Baseball
Pitchers can have terrible games, because there are no cement floors on their basements, as Jeremy Guthrie showed on Saturday, but hitters can catch a bit of a break. Such was the case with Cleveland’s Edwin Encarnacion, who had a very, very bad game on Tuesday, but won’t necessarily have it jump out in the box score.
Encarnacion went 0-4 with a pair of strikeouts, which is plain to see. What you don’t easily notice is that the two times he put the ball in play were double plays, although if you dig across some box scores you will find GIDP in the fine print. But even that does not fully explain Encarnacion’s futility that afternoon, because each of those double plays were the worst possible outcome for his at-bat, which gave him the true honor of a “Worst Possible” 0-4.
Naturally a strikeout is the worst possible when there is no one on base – by not putting the ball in play, there isn’t even the chance for the opposing team to make an error, with only the longshot hope of a wild pitch/passed ball on the third strike (I’ll get to last night’s Dodgers/Cubs on that front here tomorrow). But note that both of Encarnacion’s GIDPs were the same thing – he was up with the bases loaded and one out, and produced the worst possible baseball result, ending the inning without a run scoring. On those two at-bats, a strikeout would have actually been better for his team.
Encarnacion likely had the worst 0-4 outing that we will track all season, but Baseball does not offer deeper individual penalties for such circumstances.
In the Sights, Thursday MLB…
Brett Anderson when healthy is a quality MLB left-hander, a guy that throws strikes (career 2.4 BB/9) and gets a lot of ground balls. How many ground-balls? If we chart all starting pitchers that have worked at least 500 innings since he came into the league in 2009, his 58.1 GB% rates #3, behind the retired Derek Lowe (58.2) and Dallas Keuchel (59.1). Anderson appears to be healthy and the Dodgers are struggling once against vs. left-handers, so with the early markets shrinking this price down from -135 to as low as -118, it will be #954 Chicago Cubs (2:20 Eastern) in play, value holding up to -120.
Anderson has worked 691.1 MLB frames with counts of 3.84 in ERA, 3.69 in FIP, 3.54 in xFIP and 3.59 SIERA, which shows what he is capable of, and in truth he has been a little better than those numbers show, since they also include a couple of stretches in which he pitched while injured. Now in working with Cubs pitching coach Chris Bosio there is a prospect that he may stay healthy –
“He’s (Bosio) not trying to re-invent the wheel. It’s more trying to limit the pressure on my back and a mild mechanical adjustment so I don’t land on my heel as much and land on the ball of my foot or my toes so it’s not such a whiplash affect. It’s small things. He’s said he likes what my pitches do. It felt kind of awkward the first couple times because I’ve thrown the same way since I could walk and talk. I feel strong and I feel more directional toward the plate than rotational. It’s been good so far.”
Anderson was solid against Milwaukee in his Chicago debut, and with a strong infield defense behind him may be a good fit with the Cubs, and in particular a good fit today. The issues for the Dodgers vs. left-handers were brought to the lead here on Monday and today they will be without Franklin Gutierrez, who was placed on the DL, and possibly Justin Turner as well. So the call will be for a healthy Anderson to control a lineup that won’t challenge him with a lot of right-handed punch, while a Chicago offense that has been slow to ignite can make enough happen vs. Hyun-Jin Ryu, who does not appear ready to stretch out deeply into a game yet.
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