MVN - Most Valuable Network

The Gerald Wallace “team effect”: good or bad?

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In a flurry of comments received overnight, I was challenged to “look at [Gerald] Wallace’s team effect, rather than his net stat effect.”

I have admitted that I am an unabashed Wallace fan, but I have also noted that his play this past season was not at the level it had been in previous years, all ground covered in his season review post from a couple of weeks ago. Wallace was out during the 5 game winning streak in February, which started a lot of the questioning about whether they were a better team without him.

In order to take a look at Wallace’s team effect, I turned to 82games.com to look at both his individual effectiveness and his effect on the team when he was on the floor. First, a look at the Bobcats’ top 5 five man units in this just completed season. They are, in order of minutes played:

1. McInnis-Felton-Richardson-Wallace-Okafor
2. Felton-Carroll-Richardson-Wallace-Okafor
3. Felton-Richardson-Wallace-Mohammed-Okafor
4. Felton-Carroll-Richardson-Dudley-Okafor
5. Felton-Richardson-Wallace-Okafor-Brezec

In terms of plus/minus, the lineup that played the most, with Jeff McInnis at point guard, was the worst, coming in at a -58 (suffice it to say, McInnis really didn’t help this team). The number one plus/minus unit for the Bobcats was the unit number 4 above, featuring Felton, Carroll, Richardson, Dudley and Okafor, with a +59. This unit got the majority of its minutes during the 5 game win streak and the final 6 games of the season Wallace sat out. The Won/Loss for this unit was 10-10, Won/Loss being how many times they outscored their opponent versus how many times they were outscored. Not bad really.

So what was the number two unit? That happened to be Felton, Carroll, Richardson, Wallace and Okafor. This unit played together the second most minutes of all the units, was a +23, and had a Won/Loss of 20-18.

The unit without Wallace was remarkably effective during the winning streak. However, the team also lost it’s first 4 games after Wallace was lost to injury. In fact, Wallace played in only 4 games in the month of February, and the Bobcats were 1-11 in that month.

Taking a look at the individual floor time numbers, no Bobcat comes out out of this smelling sweetly. Only Othella Harrington had a positive plus/minus, and only he and Matt Carroll had a win percentage over .500. Nazr Mohammed was the worst plus/minus offender at -259. Among the players who had significant minutes they lined up like this:

1. Dudley -43, 28-40
2. Carroll -97, 40-38
3. Wallace -114, 25-36
4. Felton -207, 31-46
5. McInnis -222, 14-38
6. Richardson -227, 31-48
7. Okafor -243, 35-44
8. Mohammed -259, 18-41

There’s a lot of work to be done across the board.

Finally, the individual on court/off court statistics; the Bobcats were outscored by about 3 points per every 1oo possessions when Wallace was on the floor, and by 7.6 when he was sitting. They scored 131 points more than their opponents when he played. A number of rebounding statistics suffered when he played, but I attribute that to when he played the 4, where he was less effective blocking out his man on the defensive boards.

Ultimately, I look at it this way: Gerald Wallace still has a raw offensive game that does not lend itself to him being set up as an outside spot up shooter. He was taking too many threes this season, and he was trying too hard. But his all around game is not a detriment to the team. He is just now hitting the “sweet spot” of 27-29 years of age as an NBA player, and his ceiling is still high. I still would rather have him than not. Is he overrated? Perhaps; for a long time he was “the most underrated player in the league” according to some. Still, I think he is integral to the improvement of this team, but will have the hardest time adjusting to the Larry Brown style of coaching besides Raymond Felton; reigning in his athleticism and making it a net positive on defense. This may result in fewer steals, but more wins.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Jeff McInnis, Jason Richardson, Nazr Mohammed, Matt Carroll, Emeka Okafor, Raymond Felton, Gerald Wallace, Charlotte Bobcats. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.