82games has published a new article on adjusted +/- (a metric that attempts to capture what Daryl Morey referred to as "ground truth" some time back [source]). http://82games.com/ilardi2.htm This stuff is interesting to me, though I expect many of you will think its useless (oh well!). Anyways, here's some introductory text in the article explaining the idea for those who aren't familiar with it: Here are ratings for the 8 Rockets players to have played multiple seasons (probably more reliable than the numbers for our 1-year players): Code: [B]player Off Def Total[/B] Yao Ming +0.21 +4.56 +4.77 Tracy McGrady +4.89 -2.05 +2.85 Ron Artest +1.79 +4.52 +6.31 Rafer Alston -0.51 -0.46 -0.97 Shane Battier +0.87 +1.83 +2.69 Chuck Hayes -4.22 +9.76 +5.55 Luther Head -0.37 +0.60 +0.23 Brent Barry +2.11 -2.53 -0.41 Just for fun, I plotted the Offense and Defense +/- from above to make it easier to visualize: I added a red box in this plot which represents lower and upper bound for players falling in the 40%-60% percentile in offensive +/- and defensive +/- for all current players who've played at least 2000 minutes last year. That's a long, possibly confusing sentence -- I hope you get the meaning. I thought it was interesting how these results kind of fit into my intuition for how these players help on both sides, without relying directly on the boxscore stats. Ron's a great 2-way player, and that's confirmed here. T-Mac and Brent Barry are both good offensive players who can be liabilities on the defensive end (for different reasons), and that shows here. I was somewhat surprised that this rating is much more favorable towards Yao's defense than offense. Though I have felt that with Yao in the game our offense tends to be more turnover-prone, and there is typically less fast breaking opportunities. Maybe that's what's going on there. Rafer shows up as a below average offensive player, and a slightly below average defensive player. Though I should note that PGs, on average, have something like a -1.6 defensive rating, so Rafer is actually above average defensively for his position according to this analysis. Hayes is what I expected -- very impactful on defense, rather dreadful on offense. Please also take note of the errors in the link above; their method was designed to reduce the error as much as possible, but it's still a noisy stat. Here are some particular observations the article had about the Rockets. They like our team:
Thanks for posting and analyzing this, really interesting stuff. It's surprising to see Battier that low. His defense isn't highly rated compared to Artest. I'd have thought they would be comparable on defensive impact. As for Yao's high defensive rating, just goes to show how underrated his ability to alter shots is.
