 |
| Via ruifernandes on Flickr |
At the start of the second quarter in last night's Nets vs.
Warriors game Jerry Stackhouse knocked down a corner 3. That's nothing new this season. Thirty of Stackhouse's 66 FGA so far this
season have been corner 3's and he has knocked them down at a scorching53%. As the next few possessions
indicated though, knocking down the most efficient shot in basketball outside
of a layup is not the only thing Old Man River, Stackhouse, is bringing to this team.
On the very next possession Stackhouse backed down second
year guard Charles Jenkins, and manipulated the defense with a dribble to the
baseline before firing a skip pass to a wide open Joe Johnson to knock down a
three. On the next three possessions the
Nets ignored Stackhouse on offense and the Warriors went on a brief 6-0 run
leading to a Nets timeout. Coming out of
the timeout the Nets put the ball in Stackhouse's hands at the top of the key
and set a pick with the point guard in order to force a switch. This led to consecutive possessions where
Stackhouse knocked down an 18 foot baseline jumper off the dribble and over the
smaller Jarrett Jack, followed by Stack backing Jack down, drawing the double,
and hitting C. J. Watson for another wide open three.
For this particular stretch that Stackhouse was in the game,
the Nets lead actually shrunk from 7 to 1 which is why individual game +/- can
be such a frustratingly inaccurate stat.
However, when you increase the sample size and look at +/- numbers over
the course of multiple games, the stat begins to earn credibility. For instance, the top ten players in
cumulative +/- so far this season are: Durant, Westbrook, Conley, Carmelo,
Kevin Martin, Tyson Chandler, Marc Gasol, Rudy Gay, Ray Felton, and Manu
Ginobili (via NBA.com). It's no surprise that all of
these players play for the best teams in the league. Ray Felton is probably not the tenth best
player in the league, but because he is playing so much with Carmelo and Tyson Chandler
(who both have an enormous impact on how well the Knicks have played so far this
season) his +/- is inflated. Again, +/-
is not a perfect stat, but outside of Felton it's hard to argue that any one of
those other nine players has not had a massive effect on their respective teams
playing well this season.
There are two Nets in the top twenty-five in cumulative +/-
so far this season. The first is Joe
Johnson (+87) and the second is Jerry Stackhouse (+84). Stackhouse has managed to accumulate that +/-
in less than half and sometimes less than a third of the amount of minutes as
other guys on that list. To be clear, this
is not a plea to get Stackhouse more minutes.
As we've seen with bench players young and old before, often when you
increase a player's minutes their effectiveness plummets. Rather, I'm trying to illustrate how much of
an impact Stackhouse has had on this Nets team this season.
The downside of +/- usually is that an individual's value is
often determined very much by the other four teammates he shares the floor
with. In this case, that downside is
actually a benefit. Stackhouse's veteran
leadership, being a pseudo-coach-on-the-floor has helped the Brooklyn Nets
bench be better, and that's probably not any more apparent than in the play of
Andray Blatche.
Last night Blatche was a starter because of the injury to
Brook Lopez, and he finished with 22 and 15 coming on the heels of a 19 point,
11 rebound performance against OKC. When
Brook returns, Andray will return to the bench, but that does not mean his
impact with be limited. He is averaging
11.2 ppg and 6.6 rpg with only four starts on the season.
In my mind there's no doubt that Stackhouse
has brought a level of maturity and experience to what was certainly a
questionable bench coming into the season.
As we are seeing with the impact Jason Kidd has had on J. R. Smith and
the Knicks, veteran leadership is always an undervalued asset by teams in the
NBA.
