Look beyond the sterling 9-2 record and watch the ebb and flow of the games played and you know there’s something amiss with the Celtics.  The defense that we know and love appears to be there for the most part, as the team is near the top in defensive field goal percentage (1st at 39.6%) and points allowed (3rd at 89.7 pts/g) just like last year.  But what appears to be lacking most is the offensive punch the team had last year.  The Celtics are only scoring 93.5 pts/g compared to 102.9 pts/g thus far last year – a whopping 9 point difference.  So instead of leading the league with a whopping 14 point scoring differential last year, they have a less impressive 4 point average margin of victory.  And you were wondering why your nails are shorter this November than they were last November?

So since this is Boston and we fans are more often inconsolable than not, we ask the tough questions.  What’s up with the downturn in the offense?  Is it the bench?  Do they miss James Posey?  Did they need to go back to Rome for training camp?  You expect me to know the answers to these hypothetical questions?  Well I’ll try. . . .

Is it Posey?

I can tell you this, the offensive shortage is not due Posey being gone.  Posey was more of a status quo guy on offense until it came to the clutch situations at the end of the game – and we all know that Posey’s biggest contribution was on the defensive side of the ball.  But you can see that the Celtics are still leading the league from a defensive standpoint, so we have to move on to another suspect.

Is it the Bench?

The Celtics rotation has been pretty tight, and we are seeing Tony Allen, Eddie House, Leon Powe and Glen Davis getting 93% of the available bench minutes, which is 29% of the total minutes for the team.  We’ve seen some uneven play for sure, but Tony Allen and Leon Powe have certainly been bright spots, and so it’s hard to fault the bench’s play.  In fact, the bench seemed to be carrying the team through the first 7 games, until the Big Three finally showed up in unison for the Toronto game.

The biggest star for the bench has in fact been Leon Powe who is ranked No. 2 behind Chris Paul for adjusted plus-minus, meaning the C’s are almost guaranteed to outscore their opponents when Powe is on the floor.  Kevin Garnett, Kendrick Perkins, Glen Davis and Ray Allen are also ranked in the top 50 for this metric.

If you look at the plus-minus collectively for the team and the bench, you would have a hard time pointing a finger at either, as both are ranked 9th respectively as a group according to 82games.com.  Of course, arguments can be made that they need a better scorer off the bench or a veteran big a.k.a. P.J. Brown, but the bench is certainly not the Achilles heel of this team any more than the starters are, which begs the question, do we the fans have a bone to pick with this team?

The Unusual Suspect

At first glance, it should be noted that the Big Three aren’t quite the Big Three we saw last year.  Glance at Hollinger’s PER ranking and there is nary a Celtics player in the top 50, save for Paul Pierce slipping in at 49th.  Where’s Garnett?  Where’s Ray Allen or even Rajon Rondo?  I mean the Lakers have four in the top 50 with Bryant, Ariza, Gasol and Bynum.  Rest assured - we have ubuntu and LA doesn’t!

In an effort to explain why there is ab apparent drop-off in offensive production for this team compared to last year, I looked at the individual performance using the box score stats.  The folks that are scoring less than last year (through 10 games) are Garnett and Ray Allen at about 4 pts/g less, and then Pierce, Eddie House and Rondo at 2 pts/g less.  Really it comes to poorer shooting across the board for these 2008-09 version of the Celtics – they are shooting a pedestrian 44% from the field versus a sizzling 50% last year through 10 games.

However, to get the full impact of the individual on the game, I utilized Dave Berri’s Win Produced (WP) with his simplified Win Score approach to estimate WP (see http://dberri.wordpress.com/2006/05/26/wins-produced-vs-win-score/).  Here is a table of the difference between last year and this year.

So clearly the Celtics are winning ugly with their narrower margin of victory.  This is born out by the WP of 4.7 being well short of the actual 8 wins through 10 games.  Note that last year the 9.8 WP closely approximated the 9 wins the team had.

So to account for the change from last year, if culprits are to be named, they are House and Davis.  However, the biggest drop off is from our Big Ticket.  Sorry Kevin – it hurts to say it – but the stats say something’s amiss and it starts with you.  Statistically, he’s doing less of everything even compared to last year, and his absence from the top 50 PER rank is additional evidence of his "sub-par" play. 

But there is little doubt that his 33 minutes per game, which is 5 minutes per game less than last year, is Doc’s order, because we Celtics fans are now burdened with remembering the fact that the season doesn’t actually start until April.  The burdens we bear as New England sports fans!