Comments on: Making advanced stats friendly and useful

By: Max

Max — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 23:27:37 +0000

And I should have thrown tempo and harmony into the jazz analogy to boot. Harmony, tempo, synergy, pitch, flow, spontaneity and creativity actually are some of the factors that really distinguished players like Magic, Bird, Cousy, Monroe, Ginobili and Billups.
The stats do agree that these players were all great but they fail to separate them from the more mechanical players and players who just were always “the man” on bad teams and not on great teams that were winning a lot of games.
Stats are fine and all. I just don’t like some of the retroactive reassessments of history and use of them to justify absurd comparisons like Kobe Bryant versus Kevin Martin in the clutch, I’ve been hearing guys like Henry Abbott and the like talk for forty minutes at a time on these subjects and it’s been driving me crazy.

By: Max

Max — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 17:59:10 +0000

The music analogy to math reminds me of the one frequently made with basketball which is jazz. This seems useful to me because stats, advanced or otherwise, completely fail to take in the factors which make basketball comparable to jazz and they are: flow, synergy, creativity and spontaneity. These are relevant markers which distinguish, for me at least, who some of the best players actually are because stats are also not very useful at projecting whether a change in role, team, teammates or coach would significantly alter a given player’s stats.
I’ve said it before but stats fail to take in context. Cedric Ceballos scored 20 points a game in his prime but he did it as a garbage man and had hardly any plays run for him and yet what distinguishes his stat line from a go to scorer who takes the same number of shots and shoots the same percentage? Ceballos’ stats could theoretically be identical to an incredibly different player.

By: gordbrown

gordbrown — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 19:46:28 +0000

I personally don’t understand why anyone would argue for advanced stats over the “eye test.” The answer is always to incorporate both. What advanced stats are really good at are finding players who are over-rated. If you just look at points scored, you can say “wow this guy is a great player.” If however he is cranking up shot after shot and wasting possessions (which are becoming more and more precious) then the eye test has failed. Having said that basketball is a team game and sometimes a players stats are affected by that. A point guard on a team where nobody else can score (or even catch the ball) is going to have bad stats. Also I detected in five minutes of watching Maxiel live and in person that he cannot move laterally at all and will never be able to defend players on the wing (something that seemed to elude John Kuester but there you are). But the real problem with advanced stats is that line you see on every mutual fund prospectus ever printed “past performance does not necessarily translate to future gains.” Hence the interminable debates over very young players thrown in to sink or swim as best they can.

By: brgulker

brgulker — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 19:22:23 +0000

Thanks for your good work on this, PH. It proved to be some really good reading… well, at least what the other guys had to say!