Andres Nocioni has his positive attributes when he's on the floor. He's the definition of 'hustle player', and brings toughness to the team when he's out there. He's an extremely good rebounder, and a fearless defender. And affordable to boot!
But...
Nocioni shoots too damned much.
I took all the Bulls rotation players (don't want a Jannero Pargo chuck-fest skewing the numbers) and looked to see who's shooting the most when they're on the floor, and at what percentage.
This was originally going to be more complicated by employing John Hollinger's Usage Rate, but it's much easier to isolate shots (which I wanted anyway) and ignore team pace (since I'm only looking at one team).
I put up standard measurements like minutes/game and points/game for reference. To determine how many shots a player is creating, the APBR standard FGA+FTA(.44) was used. I normalized it for 30 minutes instead of the usual 40. This is because, as we know, Scott Skiles uses a deep rotation and players rarely get 40 minutes. And finally, to determine success rate of shots, I used the similarly-derived True Shooting Percentage, which factors in 3-pointers and free throws as the commonly-used FG% fails to do so.
The results are (ugh) surprising...
| This Season | Last Season | ||||||
| Player | MPG | PPG | Shots/30 | TS% | Shots/30 | TS% | |
| Ben Gordon | 28.0 | 14.0 | 16.0 | 46.7 | 17.6 | 52.6 | |
| Mike Sweetney | 23.0 | 11.5 | 14.2 | 52.6 | |||
| Luol Deng | 28.4 | 12.7 | 13.2 | 50.9 | 12.9 | 49.6 | |
| Othella Harrington | 28.5 | 5.9 | 13.1 | 55.8 | 11.8 | 55.9 | |
| Andres Nocioni | 28.5 | 11.8 | 12.2 | 51.0 | 11.1 | 48.4 | |
| Kirk Hinrich | 34.5 | 13.7 | 11.8 | 50.6 | 13.0 | 49.5 | |
| Darius Songaila | 15.5 | 4.5 | 9.4 | 46.8 | |||
| Chris Duhon | 35.4 | 11.2 | 8.5 | 56.0 | 7.1 | 47.1 | |
| Tyson Chandler | 12.3 | 6.0 | 6.0 | 51.5 | 7.8 | 56.5 | |
As you can see, my entire premise got shot down. This idea was hatched during the Laker game last Sunday while watching Noc shoot 4 of 12 from the field, and of course he has to go and put up 5-9 and 6-10 shooting performances against San Antonio and Houston respectively. (This likely helped Harrington as well, who also shot well after an abysmal start)
So to at least show where I was coming from, I posted last season's results for the Bulls players that were here. Due to Noc's last couple games and Duhon's hot start, they both have a TS% well above last season's effort, when they were worst on the squad.
11 games admittedly doesn't say much definitively, but the thing to notice is that Nocioni is jacking up even more shots than last year. If he wants to continue at his current percentages that isn't the worst thing to happen. But I'll be looking to see if he's back to his usual accuracy as the season progresses, and wonder if this little study resulted in confirming instead of denying my suspicions: that he just shoots too damned much (and don't forget the turnovers!).