If Pau Gasol Wants A Trade, I'll Give Him A Trade!

Pau Gasol has made it really clear that he doesn't like his role on the Lakers this season. He doesn't get enough shots, and the shots he does get are long range. There are two problems for Pau staying in LA: Kobe takes a million shots and Andrew Bynum gets the majority of the Lakers' low-post touches. Pau is left playing facilitator at the elbow or the perimeter. And while the facilitator role has allowed Pau to get a lot of assists, he obviously doesn't follow the same mentality of Ricky Rubio (the classic Magic Johnson "an assist makes two guys happy" quote) toward passing. He wants the ball down low, and he's upset that his team isn't using him to the best of his ability - and after all, he is one of the best low post players in the NBA.

Rumors are swirling that Pau wants a trade to improve his situation. But the Lakers are in a very good spot with this possible development. If you read JA Adande's post on ESPN.com today (link here) he listed several problems with the Lakers so far this season:

• They haven't had enough time to mesh with their new teammates. 
• They haven't had enough time to learn new coach Mike Brown's system.
• They have struggled to score when anyone besides Kobe has the ball.
• Their 3-point shooting is the worst in the league.
• They don't score a lot of fastbreak points.
• They're average.
• They're boring. 
• They have inconsistent point guard play. 
• They don't get easy shots from close range. This is mainly because...
• Nobody but Kobe has the ability to create their own shot. 
• They don't get steals and thus don't get easy transition layups. 
• They are old. 

Good News, Bullets Blog Fans: The JPoint is Relevant

To be honest, the night I made the JPoint I was just looking for a numerical way to prove Kobe's overratedness. However, I was fairly unbiased and we've adjusted the JPoint calculation method slightly to reflect offensive efficiency. I meant it to be an individual thing, but in last night's post I expanded it to entire teams as an explanation of why the Heat won.

Well in class today I was thinking. What if offensive efficiency is the single most important determinant of the winner of an NBA? Sounds absurd right, because I mean it's only a part of the game - there's assists, rebounds, defense, steals, substitutions, momentum, and the occasional brawl between players and fans.

But chew on this: I crunched some numbers from the games yesterday (there were only 3 - a small sample size, for sure) and look at my findings:

Game 1: Houston Rockets 90, New Orleans Hornets 88 (Final/OT)
To summarize this game in one ESPN headline, "Rockets survive awful 4th to top Hornets in OT." The fact that neither team scored more than 90 points in 53 minutes of play should reiterate that. But if you were looking for a statistical measure of offensive effectiveness, I have just the thing (see where I'm going with this?):
Houston: 30.5 JPoint (that's horrendous, in relation to averages)
New Orleans: 28.2 JPoint (and that would be even worse)

For those of you keeping track, that's 1/1 on JPoint reflecting final score.