The Rotation: The Essence of Amare

The Rotation is a weekly study on the NBA by one of our All-Star voices. In rotation this week is Tom Ziller.

The potential blockbuster trade season has its first incredible rumor, a persistent bug repeating that Phoenix is looking to trade All-NBA forward Amare Stoudemire. Local bloggers have been hinting that Amare's in play all week, and Yahoo!'s Adrian Wojnarowski offered the most definitive assessment of Phoenix's motives on Thursday.

Amare will or will not get traded in the next three weeks; that's a binary outcome with little to be discussed outside the scope of listing suitors and judging return packages. But in leading up to this conclusion, it's worth investigating what Amare did to convince Steve Kerr that he, Amare, is not the man to build around.

What's the matter with Amare?

To broach this, we need to decide that something is even wrong with Amare. And yes, there is something wrong. His numbers -- per-game, per-minute, per-possession -- are down almost across the board. Shooting. Scoring. Rebounding. Shot-blocking. Foul-drawing. It's been bad. But Amare's hardly alone: Steve Nash's slide has been even greater. And since Raja Bell's exile to Charlotte, these two -- Amare and Nash, the fastest pick-and-roll in the modern NBA -- have shown their stress in public most often.

But the biggest criticism of Amare has not come because his field goal percentage dropped from 59 percent to 54, or really that his scoring has been sliced by almost 25 percent (mostly due to a 20 percent cut in shots). The complaints revolve completely around EFFORT: defense and rebounding.

Defense is somewhere between difficult and impossible to measure; anecdotally, it's been bad. But let's be honest: it wasn't exactly good in prior years. Amare always rotates slowly, has been loathe to make the right (from our view) decision defending the screen-roll, and doesn't close on shooters on any sort of consistent basis. Re-read that list ... don't those look like mental issues?

But it's the so-called lack of effort, the motivation that has been under attack. The common complaint is that if Amare isn't getting enough shots any given game, he'll go rogue and refuse to rebound or give effort on defense. Is this true? Does Amare slack off on the glass if someone else is taking all his shots?

This we can investigate. What I did is figure Amare's shots (0.44 x FTA + FGA) per minute and his defensive rebounds per minute for each game this season. We're trying to assess the relationship between offensive load and rebounding; since offensive rebounds tend to result in immediate shot attempts fairly frequently, I held those out to clean up the data and prevent as much noise as possible. I took shot/min and reb/min and normalized them, so that a completely average shot-taking game for Amare would register as a zero, as would a completely average rebounding game. This allows us to easily compare Amare's game-to-game performances and conclude whether the theory holds water.

In the graph below, each game is represented by a pair of bars, one blue and one orange. The blue bar represents the normalized shot/min for said game; the adjoining orange bar represents normalized reb/min. There are 47 pairs, a combination for each game Amare's played this year. Above this you'll see colored dots. Green signifies that Amare's normalized reb/min surpassed his shot/min -- or, that Amare's per-minute rebounding far exceeding his shot-taking. Red signifies that Amare's shot/min exceeded his reb/min -- that he either got a normal or above-average number of shots but he did not perform at a high level on the glass. Grey represents a fairly even output in terms of shots and rebounds.


Does this tell us much on first glance? There's a lot of green and red -- like any player, Amare's production seems to vascillate. Does that settle it, then? Is Amare cleared on charges of slacking off when he doesn't get the ball on offense?

Um ... no.


Things have been salty in Phoenix from the start, but the scenario turned real sour around Christmas ... when Roger Mason stabbed the Suns in their fragile hearts. That Christmas loss put the Suns at 16-12. Since -- and against a much easier schedule -- Phoenix has gone 10-9. The rumors have been swirling, embarrassing losses have torn the roster and the front office apart. Late-night meetings, dark Nash quotes ... just a spell of gloom.

And during this spell, Amare has been guilty of the crimes accused: in 12 of the 19 games (63 percent) since Christmas, his expected per-minute rebounding has lagged far behind his level of shot-taking. This is defensive rebounding, some of which comes by default. (There's a joke about Mark Blount in there ...) You can get a few rebounds without much intent; guarding an opponent, on the other hand, doesn't come without effort. Amare's not exactly tanking, but his game-to-game rebounding has fallen off a cliff despite as much offensive focus as early in the season. Imagine how his defense would look if we had the right tools to measure it.

But there's good news for any prospective Amare buyer: it is all Shaq's fault. Despite Amare's slumping rebound levels, the Suns as a team are rebounding at a clip better than any time since the beginning of the Nash era. Why? It should be intuitive that having a massive, high-rebound center next to Amare might dampen his rebounding figures, right? But we ignore it. And Amare's offense -- how dare we question Amare's offensive skill. The man is No. 2 among active players in True Shooting percentage, despite a massive usage rate. His scoring is down largely because of the decrease in shot frequency, and that has fallen because of ... Shaq. A trade might hurt from the standpoint of ball delivery -- Nash knows exactly where Amare needs it -- but some oxygen in the post would surely help re-stoke the scoring fire.


In dismissing Amare as a cancer, a selfish prig out for his own numbers and nothing else ... that's gross simplification of the situation. But the evidence shows he has devolved a bit as the team has fallen apart. It seems like everyone wants a fresh start for Black Jesus, and it really does seem like that'd be the right salvation for Amare's career. Now let's make a deal.