2010 FIBA WBC in Turkey: Linas Kleiza Stats

After all that work putting together the team Canada stats I didn't really feel like doing any further analysis - even though I started working on the WBC in order to cover former and current Raptors players. However, I thought about it and realized that...I already had most of the work done! All I needed to do was replace all the Canadian stats with other teams' stats (and add a couple of pages...and fiddle with positions...and formatting...). It's still quite a lot of work, especially given that I'm generally only interested in one player on each team, but at least I'm not starting over from scratch.

Let's take a look at Linas Kleiza's numbers from the bronze medal-winning Lithuanian national team:

As you can see, Kleiza did very well over in Turkey. His shooting was efficient and frequent, and as a consequence he scored a lot of points. His rebounding was very good and helped to compensate for his below average performance with respect to steals and TOs. His blocks and assists were slightly below average, but he fouled far less than the average forward. Put it all together and Kleiza had a WP40 of 0.221 and produced 1.56 wins in 281 minutes across 9 games.

If you are interested in the other Lithuanian players or want to see more detailed, game-by-game stats, here's the spreadsheet data:



A couple of things that I found interesting:

• All of the Lithuanian players produced in the positive range - except for Jonas Maculius, who was barely negative.
• The four best players on the Lithuanian team (by EWP40) were all front-court players.
• Kleiza got completely shut down against the US. Take a look at Kleiza's game by game performance:

To make it more obvious, you can also arrange the data like this:

• Durant killed Lithuania; he produced 0.609 wins by himself that game, which is enough to win the game without any additional production from his teammates. Even worse for Lithuania, USA actually produced more than one win over the course of the game...which means that the whole Lithuanian team produced a negative number of wins. That is what we call an ass-kicking (although not as bad as the ass-kicking Spain gave Canada).

That's it for now - check back in the coming days for more on Leandro Barbosa, David Andersen, and possibly other interesting international players.

 - Devin.