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Around SBN: Explaining Jeremy Lin's Early, Surprising Success

The crowd chanted his name and gave him a standing ovation.

A teammate said: "You can see all of his qualities and everything he brings to the table."

His coach said: "He obviously has tremendous potential and capabilities."

Which NBA superstar in the making were they talking about?

Darko Milicic?

almost 2 years ago Dr wyn 58 comments 0 recs  | 

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Interesting.

And disappointing. Anyone have any insight on how reliable the wages of wins stat is?

by LoveTo on Mar 2, 2010 12:05 AM CST reply actions  

It's very good at proving itself

Everything beyond that is very much ‘your milage may vary’ territory. Personally, I think it’s an okay system, ruined by the fact that Berri feels a need to jump up and down and say ‘see! See! It works!’ every other day.

by McCleak on Mar 2, 2010 12:36 AM CST up reply actions  

As with most "aggregate" statistics...

it’s not the strongest statistic. Berri is the analyst who believed that AI was the 75th best player in the game the year he won MVP. He firmly believes that the best teams are the most efficient teams and tends to punish high-volume scorers while rewarding those who fill up the boxscore. He’s got some beef with Hollinger over that.

From what I’ve read, the total Wins Produced by a team comes pretty close to the number of games that team actually won; that is, if Berri thinks an entire team produced 60 Wins Produced, the team would win pretty close to 60 games. I’m not sold on the strength of the analysis on the individuals level, but it’s hard to rationalize tossing out those statistics when the team level of the analysis is A. Accurate and B. Simply an addition of all the individual players

by KMils on Mar 2, 2010 12:43 AM CST up reply actions  

It's my least favorite stat.

It overvalues average players on good teams at the cost of undervaluing all players on bad teams. It’s really only useful for comparing the best players on the best teams.

Consider that a top 10 team will beat a bottom 10 team, say, 4 out of 5 times. Yes, Atlanta’s players are better than Indiana’s, but are they 4x better? The WoW system says they are, giving Win Shares almost exactly proportional to the number of wins each team actually had. The best players on the best teams rightly have the highest scores, but there are still too many Win Shares to go around, which results in the inflation of everyone from winning teams’ scores. An easy way to illustrate this is to look at role players who join contenders. WoW says Shelden Williams became 3x better upon joining the Celtics. Did he?

I think most stats would undervalue Darko’s contributions to the Wolves so far, as none of his box score stats are particularly impressive. An advanced stat meant to correlate with winning would undervalue him even more, because his team doesn’t win.

by John Doe on Mar 2, 2010 7:16 AM CST up reply actions  

Berri does overlook one other thing in his numbers though

Darko W48 = -.104
Hollins W48 = -.167

That, my esteemed friends, is addition through subtraction.

Growing my own "Darko-stache" since last Monday.

by biggity2bit on Mar 2, 2010 8:23 AM CST up reply actions  

The article makes this point

though not very clearly. It’s the “replace the negatives”, even if he means, “replace the negatives with lesser negatives.”

by Zev on Mar 2, 2010 1:20 PM CST up reply actions  

The difference is...

Win Shares uses a current teams number of Win’s as the base, while Win’s produced is calculated separately…it just so happens that it almost always comes within 0-3 wins of a Teams actual total. I wasn’t sure if it was Win Shares or Wins Produced that you disliked.

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 8:29 AM CST up reply actions  

Neither wins produced nor wins shares starts with a teams wins. They both start with measures of team efficiency.

In both cases they build up a players performance from his individual stats plus measures of defensive efficiency, though they do so in different ways and come to somewhat different conclusions about the talent level of a player.

But Win shares and wins produced both have “conclusions” about players that are closer to each other than to other “single stat metrics” like PER or NBA player efficiency.

If you are interested in how

Win share is calculated see the explanation below.

http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/ws.html

To see how wins produced is calculated see this:

http://www.wagesofwins.com/CalculatingWinsProduced.html

by Kevin Love Jefferson on Mar 2, 2010 2:21 PM CST up reply actions  

I like Berris' work and his stat

I think Iverson is a great example of why his stat has merit. Iverson is fun to watch, looks impressive but doesn’t generate wins at the rate you think he would.

Any smart system should reward efficient teams. Were you being sarcastic? :)

by Django Z on Mar 2, 2010 3:07 AM CST reply actions  

Were you?

Quick, name the 74 players who were better than Iverson in 2001.

by John Doe on Mar 2, 2010 6:59 AM CST up reply actions  

I liked his book

I read Berri’s book 4 years ago. I remember thinking the reasoning behind the stat was sound at the time. And it confirmed my opinion that Iverson and players like him were overrated.

At the most basic I have always thought that anyone who had a high PPG but low FG% was inefficient and inefficient on a large number of possessions, therefore not as valuable as most people think. It would be like looking at hits per game in baseball and not batting average, yet that is what most fans do with basketball.

But, as with adjusted +/-, I don’t make player evaluations in a vacuum and only look at one stat or stats alone. I would never, ever want Iverson on a team I was running not because he is untalented, but because his salary vs. his contributions would not be equal.

But I bet if I looked at the 74 players listed above him on wins produced that year I would find many that I think he is more talented than and if I’m choosing sides for a pick-up game I’d choose him above the 75th place…but I doubt I’d take him in the top 10.

What I’m really interested in, in the game of life, is how we fool ourselves. In basketball that means overvaluing PPG or Kobe’s miraculous game-winning shots (and not all of his misses), streak shooting (which doesn’t appear to be real), etc. So books like Berri’s or Freakanomics or any of Gladwell’s stuff are fascinating to me. I don’t think they’re always right, but they often point in new directions of inquiry.

Wyn said it better than me below: this is one stat, a useful one to put into the mix along with other stats and personal observation.

p.s. I also would not want Barry Sanders on my team. Spectacular to watch, but I don’t think what he did helps a football team win games at a high rate.

by Django Z on Mar 2, 2010 11:20 AM CST up reply actions  

I'd take Barry

Dude got Scott Mitchell’d. No one can recover from that!

Growing my own "Darko-stache" since last Monday.

by biggity2bit on Mar 2, 2010 11:37 AM CST up reply actions  

As far as Advanced Statistics go...

There is no better individual statistic right now then “Win’s Produced”. In coming up with the statistic, Berri looked at one thing and one thing only “What correlates to winning”. That’s why “Win’s Produced” is often so close to the actual Win Total.

To go a step further with the Iverson example…

When Iverson was traded for Andre Miller, Berri was able to accurately predict that Philly would actually get better, while Denver wouldn’t change (or even get worse). I think he even predicted both team’s final win total.

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 7:07 AM CST reply actions  

Meh...

I like the idea of a Wins Produced type stat, but my gut instinct says that there should be too much noise in the team aspect of basketball to say that Love is responsible for x.x wins whereas Brewer cost us y.y wins. I think what I’m trying to get at is where the distinction lies in this merely being a relatively accurate description of factors/pieces of evidence for players who play well on teams and being considered a causal argument for why a team wins games. Does that make sense? In other words, in the first instance Wins Produced is simply the most accurate algorithm combining various data sources that enables the sum of all players ‘wins’ value to most closely equal the actual team win value. In the second instance Berri would actually be suggesting that the reason why a team wins or loses is because of the relationship of the data computed in the algorithm – in essence, the algorithm describes the most perfect player and is the cause or source of wins. While I know that Berri started from the first instance in developing Wins Produced, he sounds now like he’s coming from the second instance too often for my tastes.

Growing my own "Darko-stache" since last Monday.

by biggity2bit on Mar 2, 2010 8:32 AM CST up reply actions  

In a perfect world...

We would see a team take tons of chances on players that do well in “Win’s Produced” but aren’t commonly thought of as Great (or even average). I’m going to come up with a potential off-season the Wolves could have if only focusing on Win’s Produced…

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 8:56 AM CST up reply actions  

If you were going by Win's Produced, this is what you would do...

1. Offer Big Money in order to Sign Marcus Camby!!!!!
2. Draft Evan Turner
3. Trade Jonny Flynn to Houston for Kyle Lowry (sign and Trade)
4. Trade Al Jefferson, Corey Brewer, and Beef Wellington to Philly for Iguodala and Dalembert
5. Re-Sign Damien Wilkins
7. Fill out the rest of the line-up with non-negative players.

Here’s your team…
PG: Kyle Lowry (36 m/g at .200 wp)
SG: Evan Turner (32 m/g at .145 wp) That equals Tyreke Evans
SF: Andre Iguodala (40 m/g at .234wp)
PF: Kevin Love (34 m/g at .431wp)
C: Camby (28 m/g at .448wp)
6th : Sessions (20 m/g at .049wp)
7th: Dalembert (26 m/g at .232wp)
8th: Wilkins (18 m/g at .138wp)
9-12: Fill ins ( 6 m/g at .000 wp)

If we did this, and these players were able to do this for 82 games. We could expect to win 98 games!

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 9:22 AM CST up reply actions  

"We could expect to win 98 games!"

Well, sure, but that would take us out of the lottery.

by PoorDick on Mar 2, 2010 9:36 AM CST up reply actions   1 recs

LMAO

I love Twins Baseball and Minnesota Vikings Football.

by Percy Harvin My Fav! on Mar 2, 2010 3:48 PM CST up reply actions  

We're appromixately on course to wine 98 games now

*Over four seasons though.

"Never make predictions, especially about the future." Casey Stengel

by uncle rico on Mar 2, 2010 10:14 AM CST up reply actions  

Your comment

Is Exhibit A for why Kahn should say “F@#K it, I’m going to give this Win’s Produced Team a chance!”

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 10:17 AM CST up reply actions  

Sorry for the orthographical errors

Must be a Freudian slip there with all the discussion of drunken action. I assure you, the posts were made sober (had to turn down Mayn’s offer to get thowed yesterday).

"Never make predictions, especially about the future." Casey Stengel

by uncle rico on Mar 2, 2010 4:50 PM CST up reply actions  

Doesn't surpise me that he's been below average

He has been below average. He’s been better than many guys on the team, but this squad has a long way to go to get to average. Besides, the team is 1-4 in his 5 games, and a couple of those losses were blowouts. Not going to have bunch of above average players when that’s what you’re doing.

In better condition and more practice time, he might be able to scrape average, which would be a huge improvement at the center position.

by Eric in Madison on Mar 2, 2010 7:08 AM CST reply actions  

Yeah, this is my take as well

Darko is out of shape, doesn’t know the offense, and hasn’t practiced with the team much. So, given his “stats” according to this article do they mean much after 5 games??? Perhaps some, but there is certainly room for improvement. Average isn’t unreasonable.

by DR_JPK on Mar 2, 2010 2:14 PM CST up reply actions  

I'm just happy for Darko

The guy has bounced around for the past couple of years, never being thought of as more than a disappointment or a long-term investment. I’m glad that he’s finally being appreciated for what he brings to the table now.

Hopefully Timberwolves fans’ continued appreciation can convince him to reconsider leaving the NBA this summer.

"You wanna make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs."
- Fight Club

by hutcht on Mar 2, 2010 7:32 AM CST reply actions  

Berri might have noted

that the fans chanting Darko’s name were doing so in that first game, when the guy was ridiculously effective for an otherwise hapless-looking roster.

It wasn’t that our expectations were ridiculously low. He played a very solid game, busted his hump on defense, and the fans cheered for him. Berri may have something useful to say abotu Darko’s consistency, but suggesting that those fans are silly or suffering from distorted perceptions is wrong. The fans would have cheered Brian Cardinal for the same sort of performance, on a given night. On Darko’s first evening for the team, yeah, they cheered a little more. Because it was fun.

"It has come to the editor’s attention that the Herald-Leader neglected to cover the civil rights movement. We regret the omission."

by feral on Mar 2, 2010 8:18 AM CST reply actions  

I really dislike Wages of Wins

Whis wins produced stat makes no sense to me. The point is the higher the number, the more wins that player produces, right? Wins Produced….

Well, call me crazy, but I’m pretty damn sure LeBron is going to produce more wins for any team in the league than Marcus Camby or Kevin Love.

by Oceanary on Mar 2, 2010 8:31 AM CST reply actions  

As with the Iverson example...

taking any one instance and saying “this advanced stat doesn’t work” misses what I think is the important part: how good of a predictor is it overall? There will be plenty of examples where instinct or unquantifiables trump then number crunching. 100% accuracy isn’t just an unreasonable expectation, it’s an impossible one. Outliers are everywhere.

Since Wins Produced focuses on proportional contributions of a player to an easily quantifiable outcome, it’s relatively easy to measure the stat’s accuracy. While it’s not 100% (or even 90%) I think Berri’s system shows accuracy in predicting an individual’s contributions to success more often than not.

www.canishoopus.com

by wyn on Mar 2, 2010 8:56 AM CST up reply actions   1 recs

So

would you say that stats like Wins Produced and adj. +/- are useful cues for identifying players worth investigating more closely?

Growing my own "Darko-stache" since last Monday.

by biggity2bit on Mar 2, 2010 9:11 AM CST up reply actions  

I think it raises important questions that should be asked about players

That’s fair to say. I just don’t like how it’s used as a way for fans to say x player is better than y. I haven’t picked through the formula too closely, but for me, just an eyeball test of the overall order WP puts players in looks really off compared to players that you know are going to win you games just using common sense.

by Oceanary on Mar 2, 2010 9:15 AM CST up reply actions  

I agree: X > Y is too simplistic

And I think (I’m no stats expert) the advanced stats are worth using for player evaluation, in concert with other things. For example, the proportion of team wins a player produced, looking at the qualitative info about a team’s offensive or defensive schemes and how that player may be advantaged or disadvantaged in that. Or what about looking at player pairs to see if a teammate is largely responsible for that player’s success.

My general point is that I think of each stat as answering a question. Advanced stats try to answer very difficult questions, where the accuracy may be lower. It’s far easier to answer “How many points did a player average?” than “How much did that player contribute to his team’s success?”

www.canishoopus.com

by wyn on Mar 2, 2010 9:21 AM CST up reply actions  

Well, like I said, I may just misunderstand the statistic

Or misinterpret it’s intent based on how it gets used. So it might be something on my end that the dots just aren’t connecting the way they should.

by Oceanary on Mar 2, 2010 9:24 AM CST up reply actions  

I can see the value in using it to compare players on the same team in terms of how much they help that team

But Berri constantly uses it to compare players across different teams, and comes up with some pretty absurd conclusions.

For example, in his post about All Star snubs, he stated he felt tat the WC starters should have been Kidd, Ginobili, Odom, Love and Camby, because their combined WP was more than the actual starters. Am I missing the point of his stat or something? Because if you were to field that team on a regular basis, it’s got no chance of winning more games than a team built around Kobe, Melo and Duncan, basically regardless of who you put at point guard or center with them.

That’s where the stat falls apart for me. Berri and fans use it like it’s a comparative metric of all players across the league, but the rank it puts them in is illogical to begin with.

by Oceanary on Mar 2, 2010 9:12 AM CST up reply actions  

Well it's an argument that can only be had hypothetically...

and no one is going to ever to be able to prove it one way or the other. I just know there is a long line of failed GM’s that have paid a premium for scoring in the league who would agree with you.

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 9:49 AM CST up reply actions  

I hope you understand..

that the way you have setup your argument, there is no way that your mind will ever be changed. There is no statistic that will ever be useful to you. A statistic will either confirm your assumptions or is flawed.

Statistics are used to formalize our assumptions in order to expose these biases, not help us defend them.

(it should also be noted that Melo is the only played you listed that WP48 doesn’t play nice with. Duncan and Kobe (especially historically) are well within the range of error and are appreciated as top-flight players by WP48)

by vjl110 on Mar 2, 2010 10:38 AM CST up reply actions  

Not really...

….Kobe’s WP at the all star break was 0.184….a third of what LeBron’s is. Yet Kobe is universally hailed as one of the top three players in the NBA, if not the best period.

Now does his WP is going to take a hit being on a team stacked with talent the way the Lakers are? If that’s the case, why does Berri use it to say Kobe isn’t as good as Ginobili? If not, then why do players like Camby and Love rank ahead of LeBron and Kobe at all?

If it’s not meant to be a metric to rank players overall, then Berri should stop using it to rank players overall. If it is, then it’s just a bad formula, because the results are illogical to even the most casual NBA observer.

by Oceanary on Mar 2, 2010 7:53 PM CST up reply actions  

Not Illogical at all, and I'll use Kobe and Lebron as an example...

If you’re using the discrepancy between Kobe and Lebron’s WP/48 as an example, let me show you why the discrepancy should exist.

In 2005/2006 Kobe had a supporting cast quite comparable to Lebron’s. Over the span of 82 games, the rest of his team (everyone not including Kobe) combined to produce 33.4 wins. Here is the link.

This year Lebron’s supporting cast is on pace to produce 30.6 wins (not including Lebron) over 82 games. Here is the link for all the 2009/10 teams at the halfway point.

So the supporting cast is pretty comparable with LA’s being slightly better. In the end, the difference between the teams is Lebron vs. Kobe. Kobe was able to produce 14.3 wins that year, and LA ended up with 45 total wins. Lebron on the other hand is on pace to produce 27.7 wins, and this is why Cleveland is on pace to win 60 games.

Lebron is significantly better than Kobe because what he does on the court leads to more victories than what Kobe does. Win’s Produced just puts that in number form.

Check-Mate.

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 9:23 PM CST up reply actions  

So by that logic...

….we could say that if we replaced LeBron James with Kevin Love, the Cavs would win even more game that way?

by Oceanary on Mar 2, 2010 9:33 PM CST up reply actions  

Only if...

You believed Kevin Love was able to play the same amount of minutes as Lebron at the same position. Something that isn’t true.

by Blakeley on Mar 3, 2010 6:19 AM CST up reply actions  

That's why I hate

these ‘wins’ stats – they’re supposed to be all inclusive and ‘one to rule them all’ and just so easy to make comparisons, but then if you do make comparisons there’s all these qualifiers and other stuff. I like it for breaking out who’s responsible for what on a team (such as Love contributes more wins to our team than Hollins does), but much beyond that I have significant doubts (not necessarily with the veracity of the stat, but with our understanding of how it can be used and interpreted once you start crossing teams and positions).

FWIW – Queen City Hoops’ player swap tool suggests that Cleveland would only be -3.8 wins worse if they swapped Lebron for Love.

Growing my own "Darko-stache" since last Monday.

by biggity2bit on Mar 3, 2010 9:43 AM CST up reply actions  

Straight swaps don't necessarily work wtih Win's Produced

Because the reason Lebron is so valuable is not just his production, but also his clear supremacy over all the other SF’s in the league.

What you can figure out by looking at Win’s produced is that to be a good team…you need productive big’s (who often produce the most wins), but to be a great team…you need superior players at the 1,2,and 3 along with productive bigs. That’s why Lebron is so fricking good. He can keep Cleveland competitive without super productive Big’s. Kobe never could do that.

by Blakeley on Mar 3, 2010 10:00 AM CST up reply actions  

I am a very big fan of WP48

but it should be noted that its biggest flaw (and one that Berri has admitted to himself) it that it under-appreciates man defense. This inflates the Troy Murphy’s of the world and hurts the Darko Milicic’s. I think this analysis should remind us just how mediocre Darko is in general, but likely misses a lot of his value that has been most exciting for us wolves viewers.

by vjl110 on Mar 2, 2010 9:29 AM CST reply actions  

I would argue...

that on an individual level, it under-appreciates man-defense…

But if you assume that strong man-defense leads to more missed shots which leads to more rebounds for other players on the team, then the composite win’s produced of players on a given team will still accurately appreciate Man Defense.

by Blakeley on Mar 2, 2010 9:41 AM CST up reply actions  

That is a good point.

And would explain why it is such a good predictor of team wins, in spite of the obvious paucity of defensive statistics. I suppose if this was the case, good rebounders will be overvalued at the expense of good defenders on their team.

I don’t want to overstate how much i think WP 48 under-appreciates man defense either. The predictive power of the stat leads me to believe that while there is no box-score stat that obviously captures defense, steals blocks rebounds or maybe even some other stat must correlate with man-defensive skill in a way that it is captured in the regression.

by vjl110 on Mar 2, 2010 10:30 AM CST up reply actions  

Really Low Expectations

I read WoW regularly and think WP is revealing. What Berri’s Wolves table tells me is that our expectations have really been lowered by all these crappy Wolves teams. It shines a harsh light on our quite possibly delusional hopes that Brewer is improving (he’s still awful), Flynn has potential (he’s so far below average he has a Himalayan-sized mountain to climb), Gomes is a useful bench player (he’s consistently bad), and Ellington was a good value late-first pick (he’s not really producing anything).

Do we Wolves fans see positives where there really are not any because we are so used to abysmal that kind of crappy looks hopeful to us? I still kinda have hope for Brewer and Flynn but I also feel pretty stupid for doing so.

The scary part is that Berri’s statistics show that most player’s production changes very little over time. So if you put any stock in WP, the Wolves have 4 decent players and most probably a bunch of garbage.

The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness

by Victor Mature on Mar 2, 2010 1:18 PM CST via mobile reply actions  

We do have one thing to be very excited about however

at 21 years old, Kevin Love is putting up obscene numbers. While it is true that WP48 shows impressive stability across years, players also consistently increase up until 25-26 (often drastically so). If Love improves from age 21-26 at even an average rate we will have a legitimate superstar on our hands.

The most important step in building a successful franchise is finding your superstar, I just hope the Wolves organization is smart enough to realize that they have already accomplished that.

by vjl110 on Mar 2, 2010 1:28 PM CST up reply actions  

Yep.

Lowered expectations – check.

Flynn, Brewer, Gomes, Ellington not meaningful players on a playoff team – check.

Love is our “superstar” – um, no.

But maybe, just maybe, he’s that #2 player.

We’ve got Love, maybe Rubio, and we still need that #1 superstar. That’s why I’ll be rooting for the second worst record in the league until we get him.

by Django Z on Mar 2, 2010 3:01 PM CST up reply actions  

Improvement and Reason for Hope

One thing to note about WP48 is that Berri does acknowledge some improvement as players approach their “peak” production period from ages 24-28. And there is SOME statistical evidence for the improvement of Flynn, Brewer and Ellington this season. In particular, using the monthly splits from basketball reference (lumping the 2 october games into november), here are monthly “projected WP48” (*) for each player:

Flynn
Nov -0.004
Dec  0.000
Jan  0.042
Feb  0.020

Ellington
Nov -0.074
Dec  0.047
Jan  0.109
Feb  0.051

Brewer
Nov  0.007
Dec -0.002
Jan  0.082
Feb  0.033

So all three players are putting up much more respectable numbers in 2010, and since all three are either young or recovering from ACL surgery, it’s not unreasonable to think that they will continue to produce like solid rotation players going forward, and Flynn in particular could benefit from moving to a backup role. But it is probably true that none of them will produce like quality starters.

(*) Projected WP48 = ( Win scores / minutes – positional average ) * 1.621 + 0.104, see: http://dberri.wordpress.com/2007/02/25/.

by hopps on Mar 2, 2010 5:36 PM CST up reply actions  

WP doesn't account for defense

Nor shot-creation, while overestimating the importance of gaining possessions. That’s why he had Troy Murphy as the 2nd best PF in the league last season or why Dennis Rodman produced more wins to the Bulls teams than Michael Jordan. Very flawed metric – even if not much worse or better than all the other metrics that summarize a box-score in a single number. It’s not like they can add something new to what one already can see in a box-score line. It’s just a Reader’s Digest version of the boxscore.

Anyway, Milicic major contributions are and can be as a defender. And WP simply ignores defense.

by Joana on Mar 2, 2010 3:11 PM CST reply actions  

The problem with any quantified statistic

is that apart from outscoring opponents, they don’t take into account incredible screen setting, good rotation defense, or how much a player makes his teammates better in general.

And that’s the stuff that Darko was doing that I was excited about. And it’s shortsighted of guys like Berri to assume their stat is better than that.

by Mplax on Mar 2, 2010 10:25 PM CST reply actions  

Berri's stats don't, but that doesn't mean stats can't

I’d guess Darryl Morey or Synergy Sports have stats about #s of screens that directly lead to baskets or times a player stops someone from scoring who wasn’t his original assignment.

by pagingstanleyroberts on Mar 2, 2010 11:24 PM CST up reply actions  

You're completely right

I really hope Kahn has someone doing that too. I asked a question to him during the OKC game about what stats he likes and he just said he looks at historical trends… telling yet disappointing all at the same time.

As for my comment though, I was more talking about stats that we have access to.

by Mplax on Mar 2, 2010 11:50 PM CST up reply actions  

Quantified stats vs. others

Mplax’s quote…

is that apart from outscoring opponents, they don’t take into account incredible screen setting, good rotation defense, or how much a player makes his teammates better in general.

I agree that this is an issue, but no mainstream stats account for this either. The issue then if you disregard quantified statistics because they don’t account for this is that most people will then inevitably rely on the more basic statistics (Pts, Rebs, Asst, Stl, Blks, Per Game). Quantified statistics shouldn’t be viewed as perfect, but they should be viewed as better alternatives to the basic statistics more commonly seen in the box-score.

by Blakeley on Mar 3, 2010 6:27 AM CST up reply actions  

Ya

I think the thing with quantified stats too is that once you get into them you just want more (like access to Synergy’s stuff). They’re like the ultimate rabbit hole leading to a massive hidden time sink – you start going down the path of figuring out if Darko is really as productive/helpful as he seems or not, and then maybe why Hollins can put up a big night but not seem as helpful and then the next thing you know it’s 1 AM and your whole night has disappeared, and yet you still keep saying to yourself, ‘if only I had access to the number of Darko’s passes that directly led to an assist for the next player I could prove that he’s better than Hollins!’

Growing my own "Darko-stache" since last Monday.

by biggity2bit on Mar 3, 2010 9:48 AM CST up reply actions  

Yeah

I think that the stats are definitely helpful, I was just pointing out that they don’t really do a good job of appreciating the true value of guys like Milicic (or at least the Milicic that we saw in the first couple games). There are a few guys that this happens to and the effect is never as noticeable as it is on a bad team. Battier would be suffering from the same issues (even if he was a little closer to his prime) that Darko is if he was on the Timberwolves, but he is on a better team. Lucky him…

by Mplax on Mar 3, 2010 11:06 AM CST up reply actions  

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An Idiot Abroad
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D12? Welcome to the Island of Misfit Toys (With Poll!!!)
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2/10 Dallas -2 at Wolves
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My thoughts on the game last night
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Austin Rivers?
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I'm Going to Friday's Game Against the Mavs!

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