Mo Williams exposed by the numbers

Sometimes my temper will outrun the facts. This noon I posted a rant against Mo Williams after I heard him take some sideways shots at the Milwaukee Bucks in an interview with Jim Rome. In that post I said Mo hasn't added much of anything to the Cleveland Cavaliers. When I wrote that, I was going off what I believed at the time. Tonight I ran the numbers to see if I was correct. I was.

Click Here to see a comparison of Mo Williams production this season compared to last season

As the chart shows, he's the exact same Mo Williams! Its uncanny how precisely his numbers in Cleveland mirror his numbers in Milwaukee. He's providing for the Cavaliers what he provided for the Bucks... slightly below average play. (I have to note one thing. In Milwaukee, Williams played all point guard in his final season. In Cleveland he is splitting some of his time at shooting guard. That split is depressing his numbers. If he were purely a point guard, his MWS/48 would be +0.0... which is actually pretty good. It means he's average, and you can't find average players very often. At the 2 guard, however, Mo is -2.5, which is very bad. So deployment is an issue.)

With that all said, the improvement in Cleveland is due mostly to the incredible play of LeBron James. He's having an MVP season. He's also getting great help from Ben Wallace, Anderson Varejao, and Zydrunas Ilgauskas, who I believe is hurt at the moment, but is nonetheless having a magnificent season... his MWS/48 currently stands at +3.8, and his TWC stands at a stellar +0.372.

In the next day or so, I'll do a Win Profile of the Cavaliers to sort things out a bit better.