Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion

by Andy Glockner

  Moving on to ESPN’s wins above replacement player (WARP) calculation, which attempts to calculate how many wins a player is worth over an average player, Middleton finished ninth overall, once again only trailing eight of the sport’s best players (everyone on the RPM list besides Sacramento’s DeMarcus Cousins, who was sixteenth in this metric).

  No one metric is the gospel, but it’s indisputable that Middleton emerged as one of the sport’s bright young talents through a combination of hard work, player development, and a positional switch that helped unlock everything he has to offer on the court.

  “When I came into the league, everyone looked at me that I was going to be a better defender, and that’s how I earned my way to play—towards the end of Detroit and [in 2013–14 with Milwaukee], just playing defense and playing as hard as I can,” he said while icing down his knees after the Bucks’ morning shootaround at Denver’s Pepsi Center.

  “I think [positional certainty] has [helped] in a way. I felt like I had a pretty good year [in 2013–14] at the small forward position, but at the two-guard this year, I’m able to use my length a lot more. A lot of threes now are my size, so being able to guard smaller guys, it’s helping me at the defensive end and the offensive end.”

  In a 2013 writeup for SB Nation’s BrewHoop site examining the trade with the Pistons, Eric Buenning actually sniffed out Middleton’s upside potential, writing that he “might have the potential to become a rather nice 3-and-D type, with a little more versatility on offense. Middleton developed a rep as a guy who could get his own shot while [at] Texas A&M, which he should be able to get off over most small forwards. The question is whether he can find reliability in his stroke from distance, which tailed off during an injury-plagued junior season in 11/12,” but what’s happened has blasted through the ceiling of that projection.

  Middleton started to emerge as a small forward on the 2013–14 Bucks, playing around thirty minutes a game and doubling his scoring output from his rookie season while knocking down 41.4 percent of his 3-point attempts, but the Bucks’ decision to switch coaches to Jason Kidd ahead of the 2014–15 season initiated a move of Middleton to the shooting guard role. There, he was able to use his 6-foot-7 frame and nearly 7-foot wingspan to disrupt smaller players’ shots while still having the athleticism to guard them in space. In 2014–15, Milwaukee often used Middleton as their primary defensive stopper as well as a leading source of offense on a team that didn’t have a ton of reliable options on that end of the floor.

  “He’s grown in the right direction for us, both offensively and defensively,” Kidd said. “He’s not just a shooter. We’ve asked him to guard the best wing player, and he’s stepped up to that challenge. He’s as good as they come.

  “I don’t know if [his work ethic is] better [than the previous season]—this is the first time I have been around him—but he works extremely hard. He’s up for the challenge of being pushed, so as a coach, that’s nice to have a player that you can get on and he responds in a positive way. He’s a quiet kid. We’re asking him to talk a little bit more. Sometimes, he is talking, but maybe we want a little bit more. We get greedy as coaches when you see something, but the guys respect him, and again, he’s playing at a very high level.”

  Middleton’s development has earned him the respect of his teammates, as well. The well-traveled and well-spoken Jared Dudley (who subsequently signed with the Washington Wizards as a free agent in the summer of 2015) was Middleton’s teammate for Middleton’s first two seasons in Milwaukee, and even in that timeframe he saw the evolution of a hard worker into a very complete player—one who earned his minutes and then his expanded role.

  “Defense a lot of times is hard, there aren’t a lot of people who want to play like that and grind all the time,” Dudley said about what Middleton brought to the Bucks upon his arrival. “Khris realized the more defense he plays, the more minutes he’s going to play, where that would be more offensive production.”

  On offense, Dudley added, Middleton “has a really unique game where he is really good from seventeen to twenty-two feet, one dribble and he can pull up. He’s added the post game. He’s a big two-guard, so he can shoot over most two-guards in the NBA, especially since more NBA teams are going 2-point guards nowadays. He’s improved his ballhandling to where we throw the ball to him now in transition, but I think in our system, we find guys, and guys know he can knock down shots, so guys will turn down a good shot for a great shot in finding him.”

  Milwaukee didn’t waste any time making sure it locked down its emerging star for the long term. In the summer of 2015, the Bucks signed the restricted free agent to a new five-year, $70 million extension. Given Middleton’s desirable two-way talent and the market conditions spurred by the forthcoming massive growth in league revenues that will lift the league’s salary cap by approximately $40 million over two seasons, the deal was regarded as a terrific bargain. Meanwhile, Knight, the cornerstone of the original trade that landed them Middleton, was moved in the middle of the 2014–15 season to the Phoenix Suns in a complicated multiteam deal that sent Philadelphia 76ers point guard Michael Carter-Williams to Milwaukee.

  Ultimately, the Bucks made the 2015 playoffs as the No. 6 seed and were a significant thorn in the side of the favored Chicago Bulls, finally losing the series in six games. Then, in free agency, the team signed forward Greg Monroe from the Detroit Pistons to provide additional low-post scoring and rebounding. With a new arena on the way and smart, wealthy new ownership of the club in place, the future as of this writing looks very bright in Wisconsin. Middleton sees the team’s potential much like he once did his own: predicated on defense, with the potential for the offense to emerge from that building block with a lot of hard work.

  “Every day, we work on defensive principles, how to close out high hands, force a player one way,” he said. “We work on that every day, so it definitely helps during games. I think [everything] starts with our defense. We got a lot of young guys, but we have a lot of size and athleticism to cover a lot of positions, so once we get stops a lot and get steals, we’re able to run a lot. Once you force turnovers, it’s hard for the other team to stop you on the fast break.”

  James Harden: From Huge Potential to Star to Superstar

  In 2012, the Oklahoma City Thunder found itself in the midst of a fascinating and unusual NBA problem: they had drafted too well a few years earlier.

  Five springs prior, the franchise (then still in Seattle) grabbed the University of Texas’s skinny freshman scoring machine Kevin Durant at No. 2 overall after the Portland Trail Blazers made the ill-fated choice of Greg Oden, whose NBA career never really got off the ground thanks to a series of debilitating injuries. A year later, the team picked UCLA guard Russell Westbrook at No. 4, believing he could transition to the point guard spot as a pro. At No. 24 overall in that same draft, the Thunder grabbed athletic Congolese big man Serge Ibaka, who pretty much instantly was a rebounding and shot-blocking fiend, and held his rates as his minutes increased.

  Then, in 2009, the Thunder had the No. 3 overall pick and somewhat surprisingly used it on Arizona State sophomore James Harden, who was a sensationally efficient scorer on decent Sun Devils teams but there were some questions about how his level of athleticism would translate to the pro game. Harden improved steadily in his first three NBA seasons, ultimately becoming the NBA’s Sixth Man of the Year in the 2011–12 season as the Thunder’s primary scorer off the bench while veteran Thabo Sefolosha started at shooting guard to provide a valuable defensive presence between Westbrook and Durant.

  Over that three-year period, the Thunder absolutely nailed three straight high-lottery picks as well as a late first-rounder, and now, coming off an NBA Finals defeat to the Miami Heat in 2012, they had a problem on their hands. The club already had tied up Durant, Westbrook, and Ibaka to contract extensions worth around $200 million combined, and now Harden, a year away from restricted free agency and coming off a gold medal with the US Olympic team, also needed
to get paid. Complicating the decision was the additional strain of a third budding star starting to feel his own oats, with reports after Game 1 of the Finals against the Heat (which the Thunder won for their only victory in the series) detailing how Harden was complaining about his minutes and shot attempts. He felt the verbal wrath of veterans Kendrick Perkins and Derek Fisher in the locker room afterward.

  In the end, Harden’s fate came down to $6 million. The Thunder, capable of offering a four-year, $60 million extension to Harden per the terms of the collective bargaining agreement at the time, first offered in the neighborhood of four years and $52 million, and finally ended up at $54 million. According to reports, they also gave Harden an hour to decide whether to take it. General manager Sam Presti was concerned that offering Harden every available dollar would (a) cost the Thunder significantly more in luxury tax penalties (a sliding tax scale based on how much, and for how many years, you would be over the salary cap); and (b) would hamstring him in terms of making additional moves to round out a roster where the sixth man was making $15 million a year.

  Plus, he had a Plan B. As detailed by Yahoo! NBA insider Adrian Wojnarowski in an October 2012 column about the situation, Presti communicated to Houston general manager Daryl Morey that the Thunder would trade Harden to the Rockets if he didn’t agree to the deal.

  That’s what happened, and Harden quickly inked a five-year max extension with the Rockets worth almost $80 million. The Thunder, unwilling to let Harden reach restricted free agency the following summer, were unable to offer that magnitude of a deal to Harden because they had already used their “designated player” tag on Westbrook to sign him to a five-year extension.

  Opinion on the move from the Rockets’ perspective was far from unanimous at the time. It was a lot of money and years to tie up in a player who had only started five games in three seasons, and hadn’t played more than twenty-seven minutes a game in his first three seasons. There were questions about whether Harden’s scoring ability would translate as a No. 1 option when he didn’t have Westbrook and Durant on the floor with him.

  This is where analytics came into play. Morey and the rest of Houston’s management team saw Harden’s star potential because, when you dug deeper into what he was doing in Oklahoma City, advanced stats suggested it was very possible.

  As ESPN Insider’s Tom Haberstroh expertly broke down right at the beginning of Harden’s time in Houston, Harden had very compelling numbers on the rare occasions he was on the floor without either Durant or Westbrook. In 460 total minutes, he was scoring 32.6 points per thirty-six minutes on the floor (a normalization rate used to approximate a full game for many top-end starters) while also averaging 6.2 assists and 4.7 rebounds per thirty-six. He was able to handle a much greater shot volume, and his free throw attempts rate nearly doubled.

  Haberstroh went on to explain that this wasn’t just a case of Harden racking up these numbers against the benches of opposing teams; they were similar when he faced starters in these situations. Now, 460 minutes over eighty-two games is not a ton to go on, but these numbers were extremely promising for Harden’s potential to be a No. 1 option.

  That educated guess has panned out in spades for the Rockets, who identified an underutilized talent, paid a legitimate price to trade for him, and allowed him to become a star. From his first moments in Houston, Harden exploded. He averaged 25.6 points, 4.8 rebounds, and 5.9 assists per game over his first two seasons as the Rockets’ clear primary star, and his numbers barely changed from the first season to the second, even when the team signed perennial All-Star center Dwight Howard as a free agent ahead of the 2013–14 season. Harden made third team All-NBA in his first season with the Rockets and then made first team the next, cementing his growing reputation as one of the game’s best players.

  Still, the Rockets didn’t make it out of the first round of the playoffs in either season, and there was one looming issue that was holding Harden back from perceived superstardom: he was considered a really poor defender.

  With any flaw (or strength), the social media/video era can make you look much better or worse by quickly mining and sharing visual examples of your most egregious moments. Harden was one of Basketball Twitter’s favorite punching bags for his foibles on that side of the ball, which more often than not involved a lack of effort and/or attention as a play was unfolding. Perhaps the most egregious example was against Turkey in the 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup, when Harden completely lost track of his own man at the 3-point arc while he watched another Turkey player drive right past him off the dribble and then find Harden’s man with a simple pass for a game-tying three, but there are numerous others that can be found with a YouTube search of “Harden defense.”

  It wasn’t all that much better in the NBA, where whatever (somewhat imperfect) defense-specific advanced metrics you examined confirmed what your eyeballs led you to believe. From the 2010–11 through the 2013–14 seasons, Harden’s best defensive box plus-minus was 0.1. The other three seasons, he was below (and in one case, well below) the –0.3 mark that is considered to be the theoretical replacement-level for that statistic, based on work done by Jeremias Engelmann, who created ESPN’s real plus-minus calculation.

  Per a December 2014 column from ESPN The Magazine’s Jordan Brenner, Harden was in the league’s eleventh percentile during the 2013–14 season in terms of scoring against him in isolation (one-on-one) situations. His overall defensive rating—an approximation for personal responsibility for points allowed per one hundred possessions—for his last four seasons before 2014–15 hovered between 105 and 108, which is subpar. While much of Harden’s defensive problems were attributed to a lack of concentration, or how much effort he was putting in on offense, or the flaws of his teammates, there’s really no way around it: he was a weak defender for most of the first five years of his career.

  His improvement on that end of the floor was a leading storyline for both Harden and the Rockets in 2014–15, and was part of the reason Houston finished as the No. 2 seed in the Western Conference and Harden was runner-up to Steph Curry for the league’s MVP award.

  “On the ball, I was pretty good. It was just help-side defense, ball-watching, letting my man cut backdoor,” Harden suggested about his struggles in past seasons, in an article I wrote for The Cauldron in December 2014. “Small things like that that are very noticeable, so this year I’ve eliminated most of those things.”

  Much of the attention was paid in the first two months of the season, when both the Rockets and Harden were really improved on that end of the floor (despite rim-protector Dwight Howard missing a large number of games), but even a regression in the second half of the season (with fatigue being a legitimate issue for Harden) didn’t dampen the progress the team and its star made overall defensively. The Rockets improved from 106.3 points allowed per one hundred possessions in 2013–14 to a much stingier 103.4 in 2014–15. Harden posted the best defensive box plus-minus and defensive rating of his career, which brought him up to being a competent defender overall.

  “He’s really gotten better and that’s a credit to him,” Houston head coach Kevin McHale said, talking about Harden’s defense at a midseason shootaround in Denver. “He’s battling on every possession, he’s getting in there, he’s doing a lot of little things. The big thing is, it hasn’t affected [him on the other end]. Believe me, there are days there he is tired. We put a lot on his plate, and we understand that, but he has an unbelievable tank for the game of basketball.”

  On his favored end of the floor, Harden continues to get better while carrying one of the highest usage rates and workloads in the NBA. Harden in 2014–15 “used” (meaning a made shot, missed shot, assist, or turnover) 31.3 percent of Houston’s possessions when he was on the court, which was the sixth-highest rate in the NBA. The five players ahead of him all missed a decent chunk of the season through injury, though. Harden played 2,981 minutes, missing just one game all season. He led the league in total minutes played, and was se
cond to Chicago’s Jimmy Butler in per-game average. Given all that, Harden’s 118 offensive efficiency rating was outstanding.

  In short, Harden had the best offensive season of his career paired with his best defensive season, which at the level he plays on offense makes him an all-world talent. He came up short to Curry both in the MVP voting and in the Western Conference Finals, which Golden State won 4–1, but in many other seasons, Harden would have won multiple trophies with his level of play. Harden wouldn’t have developed the same way in Oklahoma City with two other ball-dominant stars playing heavy minutes, but he still resonates as the one who got away from a Thunder franchise that, in part due to injuries that Harden may well have helped mask, hasn’t reached the heights of that 2012 season ever since.

  Nikola Vucevic: Growth of a College Stats Monster

  Nikola Vucevic did not take the traditional blue-chipper path to NBA success. A native of Montenegro, Vucevic came to the United States to play his senior year of high school basketball under the tutelage of a friend of his father’s, and landed at University of Southern California, far from a basketball power even with its Los Angeles location and membership in the big-money Pac-12 Conference.

  Vucevic was forced to miss the first eight games of his freshman season while the NCAA worked through some eligibility issues, then made twenty-three appearances for a Trojans team that slipped into the NCAAs as a 10-seed, all but three off the bench. He didn’t even average 3.0 points per game that first season, but did convert an eye-catching twenty-six of forty-two shots from the field when he did look for his own offense, and he rebounded on the defensive glass very well for a limited-minutes freshman.

  The following year, Vucevic moved into a starting role and increased his gross outputs dramatically. He nearly tripled his minutes per game to thirty-two a night and pushed his usage rates up from around 13 percent as a freshman to 20 percent as a sophomore, and that resulted in a quadrupling of his per-game scoring average and his gross rebounds per game going up by three and a half times. More notably, he converted on 55 percent of his field goal attempts and his per-minute rates either held or increased significantly pretty much across the board. Vucevic made the successful conversion from role player to significant contributor as a starter without much impact on his effectiveness.