So obviously this was written before the Camby news. It was intended for the front page but it’s definitely only fanpost material now. I still present it, as originally written, because it remains of tangential interest. Everything wrong with Zach Randolph is right about Marcus Camby. What follows is the sort of thing my mind works on while stuck on the 405 everyday. And I'm supposed to believe cell phones are dangerous...

My mostly inane piece yesterday got me thinking more about the case of Zach Randolph and his place in basketball. He at least partially inhabits the space reserved for selfish gunners, as much as a power forward can be a gunner. I couldn’t stop thinking about those 1.2 3PA per game that he took last season and I wondered how bad they were hurting his team, and if they were also hurting his wallet. We can use him as a clear example of some ideas of efficiency and advances statistics in the NBA.

First some background into the economics of the situation for the uninitiated. Skip ahead if you are familiar with advanced statistics. Oversimplifying for time, we can say an NBA possession is worth about one point. So if an average team had 100 possessions in a game, it would be expected that team would score 100 points. Still keeping it simple, since a normal shot is worth two points and a three point shot is worth… three points, to be effective you would like to see a player hit at least 50% of his normal shots and at least 33% of his shots from beyond the arc. This can all average out across the five players on the court, so you really want your bigs north of 50% so that the perimeter players can be a little below 50%. Then there are possessions ending in turnovers or free throw attempts. A trip to the line is worth about 1.5 total points, estimating a 75% success rate.

There is a lot of math and proofs to all that, but I’m just an amateur so buy the books if you are interested in further reading.

This brings us back to Zach Randolph’s three pointers. As noted yesterday, since coming off his rookie contract, our subject has become increasingly cozy with the three-ball. Finally last season he was taking 1.2 3PA per game and only hitting them at a 0.275 pace. Again we want to see that number at 0.333, at minimum. We could go into game theory here and talk about the three as some sort of decoy to keep the defense honest, but I’m not buying. Since he is consistently below the 0.333 threshold, every time our subject shoots from deep, it is a bad decision. A mental error.

We can figure out the precise cost of that error.

From a personal perspective, we can see what would happen if he simply chose to forgo taking the shot anymore. We are just looking at the example of what would happen if he found himself in the position he would normally take that shot, and instead just passed to someone else, doing nothing more or less productive to help or hurt the team. The first thing that springs to mind is he would lose those points from his points per game total. He hits on average 0.3 per game, so at 3 points per goal, he would lose 0.9 PPG from his total, taking him from 17.6 to 16.7. That’s bad for him financially, but his team gets those 1.2 possessions back, so it’s going to be a net win for the squad overall. But our subject may be able to feel a gain to his reputation by making this "sacrifice". His FG% last season was .459. This puts him down in Kobe Bryant land, which is fine for a shooter, especially one that actually hits the three, but is very bad for a power forward. If he could see fit to just stop shooting the long ball, his FG% would jump to 0.475, putting him square in Ilgauskas territory. Still not great for a big, even Kaman hit 0.483 last season all alone out there, but definitely closer to where he needs to be.

It’s even better for him than that. If the coach can convince him to stop taking the three, but to still get his from his high percentage shots, both player and team will benefit. If we give him back those 1.2 shots and he can hit them at that 0.475 clip, that’s 1.14 points per game. So he gets back those 0.9 points and then some. Then there is the increased chance for free throws which he hits at a decent pace and all the other good things that come with taking better shots. Good for the team and good for the player.

With those 1.2 possessions per game Zach Randolph uses to huck three’s, we’d like to see his team score at least 1.2 points. Instead they only net 0.9.

In reality, the Knicks scored about 1.047 points per possession last season, so it’s slightly worse than I am crudely estimating.

Over the course of an 82 game season, that’s going to come out to about 25 points, give or take, that he is costing his team by making about one bad decision a game. By continuing to shoot from deep, he is wiping out one whole quarter of basketball.