THE CRUCIFIX: Cato: Wood isn't thrilled w/ his role...Will depart in the summer

[DanSchwartzgan]

Scroll down to the splits for starter vs. bench

Here is a summary of how things have been when Wood has been on the floor.  All data is from NBA.com

Dallas Full Season. 115.3/113.1 (net is 2.2)

Wood Full Season.  116.1/112.5 (net is 3.6)

For the full season, the team is better when Wood is on the floor both offensively and defensively.  Not surprising really.


Wood as Starter.     118.4/118.7  (net is -0.2)

Wood from Bench.   114.9/109.6  (net is 5.3)

This is a little surprising to me.  Again, this is what actually happens when Wood has been on the floor.  It isn’t a direct link to him as four others are on the floor also.  But, if we are trying to decide between extending or trading Wood, what happens when he is On The Floor is what matters.  I know you like to net players against the players who are on the floor when the player in question is off.  That answers a different question.  It is especially misleading in this sample size as we are talking about players like Bertans, Frank and McKinley Wright.  I think it is just flat wrong to try to paint a picture based on Off-Court when the players who are on when Wood is off are barely NBA players.  The question is what happens when Wood is on the court, not how bad are we when he’s not.  Down three important players, we know that is going to be bad.

If I’m being intellectually honest, I don’t think the Starter vs. Bench On-Court numbers above are particularly fair either.  When Wood came off the bench, the team had the benefit of Maxi, DFS and Green.  Since he’s been a starter, the team hasn’t had that benefit.  So, O is up and D has gotten bad since Wood began starting…fairly predictable, but not necessarily attributable.  We’d need to hold the Maxi/DFS/Green variable steady to have some idea what the straight swap of Wood Bench to Wood Starter really means and it would need to be more than a few games.

Note there is a fairly big difference between the last 10 games and the 10 games as a starter that skews our numbers a bit.  I quoted the 10 games as a starter which include a 29 point loss.  You quoted the last 10 games which replaces that big loss with a 20 point win.  Wood wasn’t a starter in that game (but did play almost 30 minutes and contributed significantly).  You can see from just that substitution of one game for another that there are significant flaws to both the methodology and sample sizes of both approaches.  

Here is what I think is fair to say…in the nine games in a row sample where Wood has started and we’ve missed significant players (so removing the Chicago loss that Luka missed), the team is 7-2 and we’ve outscored opponents by a total of 35 points. (About 3 points a game).  25 of those 35 points of spread have occurred while Wood has been on the floor and the other 10 occurred when he wasn’t on the floor.