The Running of the Bulls

During the 2006 NBA regular season, fate seemed to be heavily favoring the Detroit Pistons. Fresh off two straight appearances in the NBA finals, they roared to a 37-5 start, causing many observers to coronate them as the 2006 NBA champions halfway through the year. Although they went just 27-13 after this point, that was still a respectable record, and there wasn't much for them to compete for anyways. Yet as we all know, they had a miserable playoff run, barely getting past a mediocre Cleveland team (which in my mind, didn't even play that well), and were put out of their misery by the surging Heat in the Eastern Conference Finals. The momentum that they had been building under Joe Dumars had suddenly come to a crashing halt.
The Chicago Bulls, on the other hand, were out of playoff contention nearly the entire year, before a late-season surge that brought them to 41-41 earned them the seventh seed and a tough first-round series with the Miami Heat. The Bulls looked surprisingly game in this series against the team that would eventually claim the NBA Finals by the same margin that they defeated the Bulls (4-2) by. One of the youngest teams in the NBA, it could certainly have been said after their first-round exit that they would be a team to watch in the coming years.
As America now knows, these two teams are now forever connected, with the Bulls having signed Ben Wallace, considered to be the rock of the Pistons, to a four-year, $60 million contract. This begs the question: Have the Bulls now passed the Pistons as the Heat’s primary contender for the 2007 Eastern Conference crown?
Subjectively, the fit seems to be great for Chicago. Scott Skiles is a tough, defensive-minded coach, and Ben Wallace is commonly regarded as the best defensive player in the NBA today. However, I wish to go beyond first impressions, and undertake a more thorough analysis of the impact a player like Ben Wallace can have on the Bulls (and what his loss could mean to the Pistons).
Since standard defensive stats often don’t capture the true talent of a star defender (although Ben Wallace does block more than his fair share of shots), a fuller appreciation of Ben Wallace’s impact on the defensive end can be garnered by examining the plus/minus statistics provided at www.82games.com. In the 2005-06 season, the Pistons defense played 10.6 points per 100 possessions better with Wallace on the court as compared to off the court. Although such a high number is probably a fluke due to small sample size and a weak bench, his positive effect has been consistent: the defense was 3.5 points better in 2004-05, 3.0 points better in 2003-04, and 3.1 points better in 2002-03. Based on this, I make a rough estimate that Ben Wallace has improved the Pistons’ defense by 3-4 points per hundred possessions during his tenure in Detroit. This may sound like a small number, but in fact improves the team by about 7 to 10 wins per year, if he has in fact improved the defense that significantly. Obviously, there are other factors, but this is probably a reasonable ballpark estimate of Wallace’s impact defensively. If you subtract 7 wins from the Pistons’ expected win total from 2006 (calculated using Pythagorean winning percentage), you get a 53-29 team. If you add 7 wins to the Bulls’ expected win total from 2006, you get a 50-32 team. Suddenly the difference between a 41-41 team (43-39 expected) and a 64-18 team (60-22 expected) is reduced to almost nothing.
However, I would have forecasted the Bulls for significant improvement even without the addition of Ben Wallace and the reason is one of the youngest rosters in the league. Shooting guard Ben Gordon will be 23, point guard Kirk Hinrich 26, forward Luol Deng 21, forward Andres Nocioni 27, guard Chris Duhon 24, center Tyson Chandler 24 (although he may be traded). Ben Wallace will be 32, but hasn’t shown any sign of slipping yet, even if he could be a risk by the time he hits the last year of his contract and will be 35. I also feel that 20 year old first-round draft pick Tyrus Thomas has the chance to be the best player in the 2006 NBA draft, as he was able to play at a very high level in the NCAA despite only being a freshman, dominating the NCAA tournament defensively and on the glass. Even if he is not ready to contribute offensively, signs point to him being able to contribute defensively right away, helping to make the Bulls a potentially dominant defensive team.
I also feel that there may be a bit of a delay factor working in favor of the Bulls. Often times, a team is slated for great things in an upcoming season only to apparently underachieve. This allows them to be forgotten the following season, and I have seen many teams succeed at this point, revealing the hype to have come a year early. This scenario no longer applies to the Bulls perfectly, as they will hardly be forgotten with the addition of Wallace, but keep in mind that they were seen to have underachieved this season after a surprising 47-35 campaign the year before. However, natural regression to the mean took place, and most of the Bulls’ young players (who may have overachieved the year before) didn't make significant strides. Their expected win-loss record only dropped by 1 win however, and it is not unreasonable to suggest that after a year of stalled development, the Bulls’ youngsters are if anything, safer bets to have break out seasons. Players like Ben Gordon and Luol Deng have star potential given their youth and what they have accomplished so far. The more young players who break out offensively, the more powerful the Bulls will be, given that with the addition of Ben Wallace and Tyrus Thomas, they may now possess the best defense in the NBA. Chad Ford’s summation of the trade on espn.com laments how the Bulls will be imbalanced towards defense, but I would point out that there’s no such thing as too good of a defense, and if your defense is the best in the NBA, even a mediocre offense can take you pretty far. More importantly, with so many young players, it is not hard to imagine the Bulls taking sizable strides on offense as well.
However, even with the rise of the Bulls, the Pistons do not need to hit the panic button. With a little defensive depth added to the roster, they shouldn’t drop below the 50-55 win level. Since the team played so much worse without Ben Wallace on the court this season, this may be an indication that his substitutes were huge negatives on the basketball court. A glance at the roster shows that Detroit had no frontcourt players behind the Wallaces in the frontcourt besides Antonio McDyess, which would probably explain why the team faltered so badly in Ben’s absence. The writers at ESPN seem to think that Detroit may address their needs by adding Joel Przybilla or Nazr Mohammed, but I would caution Detroit from spending a lot of money on a player like Przybilla, who would be on the roster not to replace Wallace, but to keep the team from falling apart. However, looking through the available free agents, there certainly seems to be a dearth of big men who could contribute defensively, so perhaps the Pistons’ hand will be forced in this regard. To address ESPN one last time, Chad Ford suggests that the Pistons could re-cast themselves as a more running, up-tempo team to fit into the new NBA (which would involve playing McDyess at PF and Rasheed Wallace at C). He seems to envision them as being a more offensive-minded team, but this makes little sense, since it wouldn’t address the team’s defensive concerns whatsoever, and the team already ranked 4th in the NBA in offensive efficiency (1 place higher than their defensive ranking!) in 2006. Whether Ford’s plan fits into the new “style” of the NBA or not, it would be a hard argument to make that a simple roster shift could turn the Pistons into such an offensive juggernaut so as to offset their pending defensive decline. Ford overreacts to the lackluster offensive performance the Pistons put on in the playoffs, ignoring that the Pistons did not play like that for over 90 games until Game 3 of the Cleveland series. In my opinion, the Pistons do not need to be shifted around to improve their offense, as the offense will hardly suffer from the loss of Wallace. The potential defensive problem absolutely cannot be ignored, however.
In closing, I would also recommend that the Pistons try and find someone who can coach their team, as Flip Saunders has proven time and time again that he cannot coach beyond the regular season. My fellow statistically-oriented analysts always made the argument that none of Saunders’ Minnesota teams performed under expectations in the playoffs, as they were always the underdog, yet this argument only seems to hold up if you assume that the favorite always wins in a 7-game series. Yes, none of those Minnesota teams were going to win the NBA title or anything with a different coach (excluding perhaps the 2004 version), but you would have to think that they should have won a series or two between 1997 and 2003, instead of bowing out in the first round in seven consecutive appearances. Moreover, Flip Saunders has now had his chances to coach a favorite in the playoffs twice, and failed to make the NBA Finals both times. Do I even need to mention that the friction between him and Ben Wallace may have been one of the impetuses for Ben Wallace’s eventual departure? In conclusion, the addition of Ben Wallace and the corresponding improvement of the Bulls may turn out to be perfect timing in terms of returning the Bulls to the sort of win-loss records that they posted in the Jordan years. The Pistons, in their current state, do not really have a full roster, so they will certainly need to address their issues of depth via free agency or trades.