Better Experts Needed

How the Sixers turned it around ... sort of

by E. James Beale

Michael T. Regan TRADE GREAT: It's quite possible that trading Allen Iverson for Andre Miller (left, driving against Lebron James) made the Sixers better. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

seventh place! huzzah!

As Samuel Dalembert readies himself for a recent game, a look of gloom passes over the normally cheery 6'11" center. He has just been asked if early this year he had thought his team, the Philadelphia 76ers, would be fighting for playoff seeding. The question forces him to look back on the unfortunate first few months of the season. Dalembert, never one to hide his emotions, takes a deep breath to think before answering candidly: "Based on practice? Maybe. Based on the games?" He pauses again before finishing. "No."

If the predictions were harsh, the explanations were even worse: Jon Barry called the team "just brutal." Chris Broussard said "the Sixers will be bad. Real bad." Chad Ford couldn't see Philly "making a serious run at 30 wins, let alone the playoffs," and John Hollinger, ESPN's stat-geek — the one supposedly immune to trendy picks — pegged the Sixers for only 21 wins, good for last place in the conference.

It wasn't just ESPN, either. Sports Illustrated wrote: "it will take a superlative effort from [all the players] for Philly to avoid spending the season at the bottom of the division." Its annual preview placed the Sixers 15th out of 15 teams in the Eastern Conference. So did Yahoo's sports section. And CBS Sportsline. And Slam magazine. Even NBA TV, which has a vested interest in promoting its product, was not kind to our Sixers. "Can they be a winning team? Not yet," said Frank Isola. Peter Vecsey was more blunt: "This team is going nowhere."

Philadelphians seemed to agree. Without Iverson to draw fans, attendance slipped to its lowest level in the team's Wachovia Center history. And in fact, as the season started, the Sixers were not pretty. They won only five of their first 17 games, then unceremoniously fired longtime general manager Billy King and replaced him with Philly native and former Nets GM Ed Stefanski. The move, like most management changes, was not expected to yield a quick turnaround, and Stefanski's first act seemed to indicate that Philly was indeed moving into a "rebuilding" phase: He traded sharpshooter Kyle Korver to the Utah Jazz for Gordon Giricek and a first-round draft pick, then promptly cut Giricek. It was a textbook talent dump. "I mean, I didn't know what to think," Andre Miller said recently. "The team was pretty much in limbo."

Then a strange thing happened: The team started winning. A 4-11 January was followed by an 8-5 February, then an 11-4 March and a strong finish in April. All in all, the Sixers won 22 of 30. When the NBA Playoffs start this weekend, for the first time since 2005, they will include a basketball team from Philadelphia.

So what changed? Second-year forward Rodney Carney offers one theory: "We didn't really have an identity. The coaching staff and Stefanski decided to change some things by going young and becoming a running team." He's right about the running — in recent home games against the Nuggets, Hawks and Pistons, the first thing on each opponent's defensive scout board was "stop their transition game." But there's a chicken-and-egg question here: Did the Sixers play better because they started running, or did they get more fast-break points because they started playing better?

Andre Iguodala, the closest thing the 76ers have to a marquee name, hazards another guess: "The team started to learn the game. We're more confident." It's true that rookies like Thaddeus Young and Jason Smith have thrived with more playing time. But this theory has a hole, too — it's been veterans like Andre Miller and Reggie Evans who have stepped up in the second half of the season.

Other players have other ideas. Starting guard Willie Green thinks the team "just had to grow up together." The squad's camaraderie can't be denied — Dalembert notes that it's "the type of team that has dinner with each other" — but it's also worth pointing out that the cohesion on the court is enabled by point guard Miller, who's a half-dozen years older than most of his teammates and the Sixer most aptly described as a loner.

The fact is that in the NBA, individual talent matters. In this year's playoffs, 15 out of 16 teams will have at least one all-star. The only one that won't is the Sixers — in fact, since the Iverson trade, the team hasn't had any players who have ever been all-stars.

Could it be that the Sixers have just become better individual players before our very eyes? That sounds good — Iguodala and Dalembert haven't become all-stars yet, though they certainly could — but the numbers don't bear it out. Iguodala's scoring is up slightly from last year, but his assists and rebounds are slightly down. Dalembert's progress — an extra rebound and a half-a-block a game — is nothing to scoff at, but two rebounds and one block every other game does not a 15-game swing make.

What else is there? David Aldridge, long-time sports reporter and current TNT analyst, attributes the turnaround to "old-fashioned want-to." And that could be a factor — just as a new GM, maturation, new game plan and team chemistry could. The real explanation, however, might be simpler.

What changed? Maybe nothing did.

David Berri is a professor of economics at California State University-Bakersfield, and one of the authors of The Wages of Wins, a book with an accompanying blog. He posits that the success of basketball teams can be accurately measured in the stats of individual players. He claims to have come up with an algorithm that gauges the value of NBA players based on "Win Scores," the predicted number of wins a certain player is responsible for over the course of an NBA season. Berri says the Sixers' record is no shock, and that the so-called experts should have seen this coming. After all, he did.

In a recent e-mail, Berri traced the Sixers' resurgence to something that at first glance seems counterintuitive: last year's trade of The Answer. "The key issue when it comes to the 76ers is the impact of Allen Iverson. People believe that Iverson is one of the greatest players to play the game. And when such a player departs a team, you should be much worse. When we measure productivity, though, we find that Andre Miller ... is actually more productive." The trade — widely panned as a talent-dump — may have actually made the Sixers better.

How much better? Well, according to Berri, pretty much exactly as "better" as the Sixers have been this season. In a blog post following last winter's AI trade, Berri wrote that "the 76ers can expect to win about 30 more games [in 2006-07]. This gives the team a final record of 35-47."

The Sixers' final record last year: 35-47.

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"When we look at all the numbers generated last year by the current [76ers] players ... and we value those statistics in terms of wins — we see that fans of the 76ers should have expected this team to win about 41 games," Berri says. In other words, this playoff-bound Sixer team is not a mirage or a fluke, but rather almost exactly as good as it was after they traded AI last year. They've played better since their slow start not because of philosophy or chemistry, but because of the law of averages.

If Berri is right — and on the subject of the Sixers, he has been now, twice — it may mean that traditional basketball experts are missing something when it comes to analysis. After all, they're getting beaten by an econ professor with a blog.

Of course, statistics don't capture the entire picture. They couldn't predict that Thad Young would dedicate himself to defense. (By his own admission, he "played no D in college.") Nor could they have guessed that the Sixers players who have produced the most wins — Andre Miller, Andre Iguodala, and Samuel Dalembert — would miss a combined zero games this year.

But while effort and luck — and maturity and chemistry — may matter, ultimately, they can't compare to player quality, and that's best measured by on-court statistics. When it comes to wins and losses, it seems, everyone should leave the predicting to the professor.

(e.james.beale@citypaper.net)