Stat Attack: Suns Win 106-99 in opener

I won't do one of these for every win, but I'll try and look at the important wins. And this is opening night. It's mostly to get used to writing about it.

Resources:
PopcornMachine
NBA.com Box Score
Basketball Value
NBA.com Lenovo Stats

Let's do some bad news.

Steve Nash was really, really bad in the first half last night. In his first two series, he was at a combined -4, with 6 assists to 5 turnovers. Of the 9 lineups he was in last night, only three were in the positive plus/minus.

The Suns were -6 on offensive rebounds. That's too many second chance points, especially for a team that was shooting 51% at one point last night (they later cooled off as the Suns heated up, but still, not what you want to see).

Here's the good news.

There's been a lot of discussion around these parts regarding our bench. Last night, the bench looked great.

For starters, our best lineup was:

Barbosa
Bell
Banks
STAT
Diaw

at +7 (best in the NBA for the night)Lenovo, with a BV rating of 110, which is very, very good. It should come as no surprise that this lineup had a 50% OffReb%.

 This is only on a few  minutes. Behind the starters, the second longest lineup was

Banks
Barbosa
Hill
Diaw
STAT

This was only +2, but shot up when you considered the defensive effort and efficiency.

So we got production. Individually, Diaw was +9, Banks was +7, and Barbosa +6. Skinner was +2, but was only in one series.

Here's something interesting.

Stat only had one personal foul when he left the game 4 minutes into the first. I thought that was a pretty quick yank by Coach D. I wonder if he was resting the knees. But then Stat comes back in 2.5 minutes later and racks up 2 quick personal fouls to go with his 1 from the first stint and has to sit down for the quarter. I wonder if Coach D will leave him in a bit longer tonight, and give him longer rests?

Grant Hill's performance was mixed. He managed to add something in the stats on each of his trips, and had a plus/minus of +3. But he wasn't as involved in the motion of the offense as you'd expect, and his units were split on positive to negative.

Not a good night for Matrix. -3 on the night, even though he had a double double. He did have the second most minutes, which may have affected it. I'm sure he'll bounce back tonight, and I'm not going to complain about a guy that goes 7-10 from the field.

Some interesting Reb% rates.
Matrix: 55.78%
STAT: 64.63%
Diaw: 75.21%

I think the starting lineup is great for 80% of the teams in the league. But the Stat/Diaw two player combo (+7 last night) could be really important this year.

Nash and Marion were -1 on 31 minutes together.

A meaningless single 1st game, but some interesting things to track for the future.