Thanksgiving Mail Bag!

Welcome to the second mail bag of the season. I'll take your questions.

But before I do, I just want to express how thankful I am to each and every once of you that subscribes to this newsletter and website. When FiveThirtyEight shut down a couple of years ago, I really didn't know how I was going to pivot and where I was going to cover the NBA. But enough people have stepped up to subscribe to make this viable for me, and I'm endlessly appreciative for that.

From Brenhart: It feels like the NBA is allowing a lot more contact and hand-to-hand combat outside the paint (at least when players aren’t shooting). Why don’t more teams play physical perimeter defense like OKC, HOU, DET, ORL, and IND (at least in last year’s playoffs)? Is it just personnel or philosophy?

I think it's a little bit of both. Nobody else in the league has the absolute hyenas that the Thunder have, to be able to execute that type of system. The personnel just does not exist elsewhere, period full stop. Other teams can try to replicate the strategy, as you mentioned, but it's really freaking hard to do without the personnel.

The second thing I think is a factor here is that while officials do let a lot of contact go for these teams, executing this type of defense still leads to a ton of fouls.

While everyone complained about OKC getting away with everything last year, the Thunder had the league's fifth-worst opponents' free-throw rate. The Magic, who were sort of secondary in this discussion, had the second-worst opponents' free-throw rate. It's a similar story this year. The Thunder have improved a lot in this area (they have the eighth-lowest opponents' free-throw rate, which I think is at least in part a testament to officials getting used to the fact that they are just everywhere, all the time, and becoming desensitized to some of the fouling in a similar way to how they got used to it with the Grit N' Grind Grizzlies), but the Pacers rank 30th, the Pistons rank 29th, and the Magic rank 20th.

You have to be willing to put up with getting whistled a lot, in order to play defense that way. And coaches, generally, just do not like fouls, for obvious reasons.

Sending your opponents to the line is giving them a chance at free points. You have to be able to still defend at a high level when you're in the bonus, and do so without letting the other team parade itself to the stripe for the rest of the quarter, which is obviously very difficult. And fouling a lot also means your players (and occasionally stars) get into foul trouble, which means you have to go deeper into your bench, and not a lot of teams are comfortable doing that. A lot of coaches are extremely risk-averse (too risk-averse, if you ask me) when it comes to managing foul trouble, and they'd rather just not have to do it at all.

So even if there are obvious benefits to playing as aggressively as some teams do, there are also drawbacks, and it's difficult enough to execute in the first place that a lot of teams just opt out of trying.

From AD: Kel'el Ware — actually good?

I think so! I've been a fan of Ware's since he was in college (my brother went to Indiana and turned me onto Ware while he was with the Hoosiers), and I voted him First Team All-Rookie on my officially unofficial ballot last season.

He's taken things up a notch so far this season, particularly as a rebounder, and especially since Udonis Haslem called him out after Mitchell Robinson got 467 offensive rebounds against the Heat. Ware's had at least 14 boards in every game since then (heading into Wednesday night's game against the Bucks, at least) and averaged 15.6 per night.

His taking and making more threes (40.4% on 2.6 attempts per game after shooting 31.5% on 1.7 attempts a year ago) makes for a nice fit with Miami's new offense, which needs to create as much space as possible for all those isolation drives. He's not just camping out beyond the three-point line and being a spacer (his work along the baseline and in the dunker spot is good), but it helps that he can step out there and be counted on to knock them down on occasion.

(Side note: You would think that improved shooting would really help with the viability of the two-big lineups with him and Bam Adebayo, but they're actually being outscored on the season, which is interesting. With The Heat are minus-6.8 per 100 possessions with both guys on the floor, plus-5.4 with just Ware and plus-16.7 (!) with just Bam out there. Last year, they were plus-3.9 per 100 with both guys on the floor. Just something to monitor.)

I also like Ware's agility and versatility on the defensive end of the floor, where his 83rd percentile athleticism really plays up. He's not and is likely never going to be Bam, who is just insane on that end of the floor, but his ability to cover a lot of space and protect the rim and occasionally handle himself on switches and cross-matches allows for the defense to remain somewhat solid (it'd rank 14th in defensive rating if the points per possession mark were stretched over the full season) when he's out there alone.

From Det Beal: Are the Hornets finally developing a competent team/culture?

The culture part remains to be seen. That's usually connected to actually winning games, even though we pretend it's not, and the Hornets are still 4-13. I also don't think you can be said to have a good culture while still employing Miles Bridges, given the allegations against him — to which he pled no contest, which means that he admitted that they were true.

As for the team, I wrote over the summer about how I like what the Hornets have done lately in terms of building out their roster. Jeff Peterson and Co. have turned some pretty blah assets into future draft capital that could pay off down the line. It looks like they hit a massive home run with Kon Knueppel in the draft this year, and both Sion James and Ryan Kalkbrenner seem like they could be solid rotation guys. (Kalkbrenner in particular has long-term viability as at least a backup center, I think.)

I still think there's a decision to be made on the LaMelo Ball front, as I did before the season, but I also think they're moving in the right direction, even if a lot of the reason for that is just that Knueppel seems like he's going to be awesome and a lot of the rest is about the possibility of nailing draft picks in the future.

From Morris Day's Mirror: Can the Knicks eventually guard the damn 3 point line?

I would say I'm more worried about the fact that 45% of the Knicks' opponents' attempts have come from three (sixth-most in the NBA) than I am that opponents are shooting 38% on those attempts (fifth).

When you adjust for the location of the shot, shooter, defender, and more, you see that Knick opponents are out-performing their expected effective field-goal percentage on threes by the fifth-largest margin in the league. They "should" be giving up the league's 12th-lowest three-point percentage but instead have yielded the fifth-highest. I think that will stabilize somewhat over the course of the season, because it usually does.

But the reason I'm concerned about the fact that they give up so many threes to begin with is because they don't do the thing you're supposed to do when giving up the three-point line: take away the rim. 25.2% of their opponents' shots have come within three feet of the basket, which is the ninth-highest rate in the league. And opponents have finished there on 69.3% of their attempts, which is only the 11th-lowest mark, so it's not like they give up shots at the basket but are alite at preventing makes.

You can't be a good defense giving up a lot of threes and a lot of shots at the rim. It basically isn't possible, especially if you're going to allow high conversion rates. That being said, despite all this, the Knicks still wake up this morning 15th in defensive rating, which is not terrible. So what the hell do I know.

From hardbap: Are Scottie Barnes and the Toronto Raptors legit?

Barnes is legit and that has been true for a while. So I'll leave that one to the side.

As for the Raptors, I think it depends on what "legit" means here. They're on pace to win 60 games. Are they that good? I doubt it. But are they just a straight-up good team? Yeah, I kinda think they are. They are one of two teams, along with the Thunder, that rank inside the top eight on both offense and defense.

You don't do that unless you're good. Of their 14 wins, 11 of them have come by double-digits, the most in the Eastern Conference and the second-most in the NBA. You don't do that unless you're good.

Barnes is good. Brandon Ingram has been great. R.J. Barrett was playing well before his injury. Immanuel Quickley recovered from the slow start. Sandro Mamukelashvili and Jamaal Shead are good off the bench. They play hard. They play together. I think it's a good team.

From Brendon Ogmundson: Can Dillon Brooks keep this up?

The Suns are one of the teams that I unfortunately haven't gotten to watch often enough so I don't want to speak over-confidently here so I will say it like this:

Can Dillon Brooks continue to score 20-plus points a night? Sure, if he keeps up his 29% usage rate. Should Dillon Brooks have a 29% usage rate in the year of our lord two-thousand and twenty-five? Probably not. Especially if he's still going to carry (slightly) below-average efficiency despite his best free-throw rate since 2019. But there is at least some value in being able to be achieve slightly less than league average efficiency on incredibly high volume, especially on a team that is not exactly teeming with shot creation outside of Devin Booker. So if he can keep that up, that'll benefit to the Suns to some degree.