The New York Knicks have agreed with Amare Stoudemire on a 5-year, $100 million contract, which will likely be their only major acquisition during this much-hyped NBA free agent bonanza. I like Stoudemire, but he strikes me as a player who, like many others, looks much better playing with Steve Nash than he’ll look with whomever the Knicks sign to play point guard.
Stoudemire can’t really create his own shot, so someone has to get Stoudemire the ball, and Nash gets scorers the ball as well as any point guard in the league. Is Stoudemire going to look like a $20 mil / year player with Sergio Rodriguez setting him up? As a longtime Knick-hater, I’m looking forward to 5 years of “No”.
It would be interesting and useful to quantify a player’s efficiency conditioned on whether a certain teammate is playing with him or not. My hunch is that, for example, Stoudemire would look a lot less efficient playing without Nash than playing with him. There is a basic evaluation of player-pairs here http://basketball-statistics.com/nbaplayerpairs.php, but these numbers don’t tell us how Stoudemire performs when Nash isn’t on the floor.
An effective analysis along these lines might have saved the Knicks some money. In theory, anyway.
