NBA: Part I: Could the Sixers' season be over?

Did anyone else find it a bit peculiar how little attention was devoted in the media to Theo Ratliff's possible season-ending injury, a fractured wrist that will sideline him for at least four weeks, but probably six, and maybe the rest of the year?

On Thursday, the 8th of February, it was announced that Ratliff, the best defensive player in the NBA, would be out four to six weeks. But with the All-Star game looming, and injuries to marquis names Vince Carter and Shaquille O’Neil, which may very well have overshadowed the news about Ratliff, many members of the media appeared to pay the disclosure little more than a passing glance.

Over the stretch of games that Ratliff will definitely miss, given a best-case scenario, the Sixers will face the Bucs three times, the Lakers, Kings, Suns and Heat. But if Ratliff’s wrist does not begin to heal in two weeks, when it will be re-evaluated, he may require surgery, which could keep him out for an extended, indeterminable period.

So it seems that with all of the attention Allen Iverson’s been attracting of late, of both the positive and negative variety, the media has proceeded to overlook a player who may be the primary source of the Sixers' success. Without Ratliff, the Sixers lose an inside presence who not only rebounds and blocks shots, but changes shots.

"I think we'll all be attacking the basket now. The Sixers don't just let people go by them and funnel them to Theo. We didn't do that when we had Patrick (Ewing) back there to block shots. But as an offensive player, you always knew in the back of your mind that even if you made a hard move to get to the basket, Theo would always be there. So it always required extra effort to score inside against them. Now, he won't be there," the Knicks’ Allan Houston remarked.

Ratliff leads the league with 3.74 blocks per game, but he might change anywhere from 10 to 20 ( 12.5 % to 25 % on average) shots a game, depending on the degree to which an opposing team relies on its inside players and its slashers and drivers to score. If Ratliff blocks 4 shots a game and changes 10, for instance, while the opposition shoots 50 %, his defense alone may account for a difference of 14 points or more on any given night. If his blocks translate into buckets at the other end, four four- point swings for instance, that number increases to over 20. On top of that, he averages 12 points-per-game on the offensive end.

But Ratliff is most deadly at the end of a close game, when one shot-block can win or lose game, as witnessed, for example, in that Knick/Heat contest on Feb. 3rd ( the Jimmy Buffet game ), where Marcus Camby’s block of Anthony Mason at the end of regulation enabled the Knicks to force the game into OT, where they would ultimately prevail.

Close games are becoming commonplace now, in what has become an intensely competitive post-"Jordan Rules" NBA. If we are lucky, the game will become more defensively slanted now, extracting from a pack of emerging scoring stars that includes Vince Carter, Kobe Bryant and Trace McGrady, the league’s elite superstars, the guys who can score under the most adverse defensive conditions; or, the next Jordan.

If we are unlucky, that star will emerge not by natural selection but by a process of selection involving the corporations, media, league brass, and officials, an institutional hierarchy that C. Wright Mills might have called the " interlocking directorate," which decides how the rules should be applied to favor a single star, selected by the directorate, who will in turn sell the corporations’ products, while the corporations will, in turn, pay exorbitant amounts of money for network ads. Jordan was also a benefactor of the latter. That kind of system wreaks of a racket, and undermines the game’s credibility and interest of the fan.

While I will not explore the idea here, one or two calls during the course of a game, and most conspicuously, near its conclusion, can also function as a decisive stimuli to a chaotic system, dictating the course of its evolution, and alienating fans, which serves to depress ratings and deflate the real value of ads. People want stars, but they want them to emerge in a free market, rather than one governed by a process of selective rule application, star profiling and invidious status creation.

In actuality, the Sixers have held opposing teams to 42 % shooting this season, which means that if an opposing team would have taken 80 shots and made 50 percent, but made only 42 percent given the Ratliff factor, his presence would have accounted for just more than a 12-point differential. So while Allan Iverson’s 30.1 points per game may lead the league, Ratliff’s combined offensive and defensive contributions put the Sixers over the top in terms of being the best team in the Eastern Conference.

When Allen Iverson begins to take too great a proportion of his team’s shots, there develops an unbalanced dependency on Iverson to score, which removes his teammates from the flow, feel, and focus of the game. At least that has been the Sixers’ dilemma in years past. Iverson has taken 29.9 percdent of his team’s shots this season, making 42.2 percent of those shots, accounting for 27.9 percent of his team’s total direct offensive production, which means that he shoots a slightly lower percentage than does his team. But when you add his assist numbers, with Iverson accounting for 22.1 of his team’s total assists, or indirect production, his overall production jumps to an astonishing 50 percent of his team’s total offensive production.

If Iverson shot a slightly higher percentage, could do more with fewer shots, the situation might be different. Such a scenario, as one in which a single player scores 40 points a night does not necessarily have to be counterproductive if the scoring remains distributed, with another player, like an Aaron McKie or Matt Geiger scoring 20 points, and either three or four other players scoring 8 to 10 points, or two players scoring 15 to 20 points.

Against the Kings on December 30th, a close game that the Sixers won in OT, Iverson scored 46, shooting 50 percent from the field, with Ratliff adding 18 and McKie 19. In an overtime loss to the Raptors on January 21st, Iverson scored 51, with Ratliff and Lynch each scoring 11, and McKie 15. Ratliff had 13 rebounds in that game - 8 offensive - and 2 blocked shots. In each game, supporting players scored a combined total of 37 points. The Sixers are 7-3 when Iverson scores 40 or more points, so he’s obviously scoring at the right time, within the flow of the offense, and getting his teammates involved simultaneously.

So, while it would be difficult to extrapolate what may have decided either game directly from the data, the "sensitive dependence" governing a system’s chaotic evolution over the course of a game on some singular factor, Iverson did have 9 assists to accompany his 46 points in the win against the Kings, and only 4 assists in the loss to the Raptors. Had he taken 5 more shots against the Kings, making 2 or 3, that incremental variation could very well have translated into a loss.

Ratliff shot 47 percent against the Kings, taking 17 shots, but only 33 percent against the Raptors, taking 12 shots. In a double overtime loss to the Magic, with Iverson scoring 47, 15 of which came from the line, and shooting 42.85 percent from the field, taking close to 40 percent of his team’s shots, and Ratliff scoring 21 on 8-13 from the field, Iverson had 7 assists.

In the OT loss to the Raptors, Iverson took 43 percent of his team’s shots, while in the overtime win against the Kings, he took only 37 percent of his team’s shots. In an overtime loss to the Timberwolves on December 11th, Iverson was 9-27 from the field, taking close to 34 percent of his team’s shots and dishing out 7 assists. Ratliff was 6-11 with 14 points and 12 rebounds, and three other players ended in double figures. The determining factor on which the system’s success is sensitively dependent might very well be a combination of Iverson assists and a shooting percentage in excess of the percentage of total shots taken.

To further deduce the exact effect on his team that the percentage of shots Iverson takes ultimately engenders, we would have to examine both his individual shooting percentage and that of the team, as a function of both the number and percentage of shots taken by Iverson, to find out where each begins to diminish, or where the team is critically impacted, creating a situation in which the contribution of Ratliff becomes decisive. The critical values for Iverson may be some combination of any number of assists greater than 7, a shooting percentage greater than 45, or thereabouts, and any percentage of his team’s total shots less than 40, meaning that his shooting percentage should exceed the percentage of total shots that he takes by at least a few points.

So it is a combination of Ratliff and Iverson, a subjective in the case of Iverson, involving decision making, that creates this "sensitive dependence" of a basketball system in question on some condition or combination of conditions that can be deduced by comparing similar sets of circumstances, which will ultimately decide a close contest. In a game that is not close, the system will tend to exaggerate any initial trend characterizing the dependency, with one decision at any point during the contest dictating a shift in momentum or strategy, or the system’s long term evolution, which is what classifies it as chaotic.

Similarly, a close game could be decided by one decision, usually at the end of the contest, but equally reflective of the governing trend which may have been established by that decision, made at some indiscernible prior point during the contest, dictating the decision made at the deciding point in the contest; the latter is characterized as chaotic memory, because the system’s behavior results from a repressed state existing in its long term memory, arising at some point far removed from the initial state in its evolution and governing the decision made at the deciding point, like whether or not to pass the ball.

The Sixers’ success is sensitively dependent upon Iverson’s shooting percentage, which may in turn depend upon the percentage of shots he takes and his number of assists. They key to winning is certainly for the contribution of either a single player or a combination of players, to get everyone involved, but it does not have to be direct, and does not always show up in the stats, although it usually will in an analysis of close games with different outcomes. The key is cohesion and a broadly distributed set of individual contributions.