andre iguodala stats, plus-minus: an indication? (Photo: @letsgowarriors Instagram account)
There’s something oddly familiar going on lately with the topic of Andre Iguodala. There have been many articles written about him these past few days, yet he’s been barely registering a blip on the radar screen in terms of trending topics.
Granted, links to articles about Iguodala, ranging from how the deal with the Utah Jazz had brought him [EDITOR’S NOTE: worth the whole read!] to the Golden State Warriors him overcoming recent woes by getting healthier, are out there (see below) — yet, a search on “iguodala” on Twitter and you really don’t find any debates among Twitterers going on.
That’s, of course, analogous to his play on the court. The intangibles that he brings, the lack of eye-popping traditional stats.
As Ethan Strauss of ESPN TrueHoop recently wrote:
…Iguodala haunts passing lanes without gambling, analogous to the way Pacers center Roy Hibbert threatens guards by standing in the right places and representing the prospect of a blocked shot. The Warriors swingman keeps his arms up and his stance wide, often leaping backward to obstruct entry passes. Offensive plans are dashed, decisions recalibrated, as seconds tick off the shot clock. The well-timed presentation of a threat tilts the odds in Golden State’s favor.
.
The box score is oblivious to such maneuvers, just as it’s oblivious to most of what comprises individual effort within a team-defense concept. Elite perimeter defenders are especially lacking for tangible rewards. Steals often result from the kind of gambling that can ruin a defensive possession. This is part of the reason why Defensive Player of the Year awards tend to go to big men. The last perimeter defender to win DPOY was Ron Artest, one decade ago.
.
Iguodala once said, “I don’t think I’ve gotten enough credit for what I bring to certain things.” He’s right, he hasn’t. The man who best shadows great offensive players is cursed to have his work obscured in those shadows.
As Rusty Simmons of the San Francisco Chronicle reported yesterday:
Many of Iguodala’s gaudy defensive numbers, which include being tied for 11th in the league in steals, have been accumulated while he’s been playing at less than 100 percent. He said he was about 70 percent when he returned from his hamstring injury Dec. 17 and still has both mental and physical struggles with the muscle.
.
“You get little tweaks here and there. At night, you might wake up at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning and be like, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ” Iguodala said. “Mentally, I’m just overcoming it and trying not to think about it at all. … Your mind can play tricks on you sometimes, but I’ve been doing this for a while.
Diamond Leung of the Bay Area News Group also covered this and Iguodala’s return from the hamstring injury:
“People look at him and say, ‘He doesn’t do this,’ ” Jackson said. “He wins.
.
“Coming back when he wasn’t 100 percent, probably people expected to see the Andre Iguodala that we went and got instead of saying, ‘OK, well, it’s a process.’ But we’ve been patient with him all along, and we know what type of player he is and the things he does on the floor to make us better. But I understand the pressure of everybody else not knowing that he wasn’t 100 percent, that he was stepping into new territory.”
However, there is one eye-popping stat: the plus-minus. As Simmons writes, Warriors head coach Mark Jackson has started to appreciate the impact Iguodala brings by pushing the ball:
“When I watched the game late last night, the one thing that jumped out was (Iguodala) pushing the basketball,” Jackson said. “We’re a better basketball team when he does that and when he does it aggressively to score or to facilitate. I thought last night he allowed us to get it going in transition, because he had that mind-set.”
According to a Twitter search on the keyword “iguodala”, Strauss himself gave Twitterverse one of the first heads-ups on Iguodala being the current league leader in this plus-minus category, to which Tim Kawakami of the San Jose Mercury News wrote:
As has been mentioned by others, Iguodala currently leads the NBA in per-game plus-minus by a wide margin, at plus-9.1.
.
And food for thought: Denver has had a far greater falloff after losing Iguodala this season (down to a .439 win percentage entering Saturday) than it did after trading Carmelo Anthony a few years ago (when it put up a .576 post-Anthony win percentage).
.
Iguodala and Bogut in large part cover for Curry and Lee on defense, and Curry and Lee usually make it all worthwhile on offense.
.
But in the playoffs, the Warriors will need two-way efficiency out of almost everybody, and they just don’t seem to have enough two-way players to challenge for a conference title this season.
.
Win one round? I could see it, if they get the right matchup (Portland, probably).
.
Can the Warriors win two rounds? No, not in this conference, not unless the Warriors turn into a very different team in the last few months of this very interesting season.
However, as LetsGoWarriors peeled the onion on this “mystical” statistic, we uncovered something a bit startling. There have only been two NBA leaders in plus-minus in the last ten years whose teams did not make their Conference Finals:
- LeBron James (8.6) of the 2009-10 Cleveland Cavaliers, which lost 4-2 to the Dwight Howard-led Orlando Magic in the Eastern Conference Semifinals. The Magic would go on to lose to the Boston Celtics in six games. The Celtics would then lose to the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games in the NBA Finals.
- Tim Duncan (7.9) of the 2003-04 San Antonio Spurs, which lost 4-2 to the Kobe Bryant– and Shaquille O’Neal-led Lakers in the Western Conference Semifinals. The Lakers would go on to beat the Kevin Garnett-led Minnesota Timberwolves in six games, then eventually lose to the Detroit Pistons in the NBA Finals in five games.
That’s it, as far as the NBA’s plus-minus leader’s team is concerned in the playoffs.
So we’ll just have to see if this Iguodala indicator means the Warriors will get at least to the Western Conference Finals or if, assuming he remains atop the plus-minus category in which he currently holds a commanding lead, it will be only the third time in the last ten years that such player failed to make it his Conference Finals.
Add The Sports Daily to your Google News Feed!
