Has he had any wrist problems since then? These are bone breaks, where the the bone heals stronger than before. The bone "welds" together and get denser to deal with greater pressures placed upon it.
I'm gonna go ahead and agree with this even though I don't know what it means. It just sounds like it's probably accurate.
Sorry, man. Sometimes even I get tired of listening to myself. I've been a Blazer fan dating back to the late 70's. The Blazers just piss me off with their decisions. I think Cho is a step in the right direction though! I do reserve the right to go off about taking Oden over Durant.
In this world that isn't a choice that exists. The choices are - Oden healthy and dominating vs. Oden not healthy and either not playing or working himself back. There is no healthy and durable and middling performance option. If you had the magic powers to grant your wishes come true, why don't you wish for 80 games per year of a dominating Oden?
I don't think we can evaluate Oden's on the court production without factoring in his penis length. After all that has as much to do with the OP's post as your silly nit picking in an attempt to put Oden in the worst light possible. Ie you and half the boards MO when talking about Oden.
"your silly nit picking in an attempt to put Oden in the worst light possible" Oden does a perfectly good job of this himself by hardly playing (not playing hard, but hardly playing) and carrying himself like he's the most depressed man on the face of the earth.
So he's hardly playing when he's out there and racking up a 23.1 per. Um, ok any other basketball knowledge you want to drop on us Mr. Wooden?
To be perfectly honest, when I tested the deviation from samples sizes of minutes, I just focused on that aspect of it and didn't attept to break the data into separate sub-categories to report out on. So I'd have to "reinvent the wheel" so to speak and add age (years in league) in there to see if that changes. Logic would say that the younger you are, the more your PER would go up after the first 500 minutes because you're still on an "upswing". Meaning even if you want to say 500 minutes is a small sample, it is actually more likely that a player will start to acclimate to the NBA style of game from his college mindset and will begin to adjust to officiating and such and a PER would go up. Just an untested theory, but it makes sense.
Not to drone on analytics too much here. But one more thing I thought I'd mention on sample size. The theory of Oden's 23 PER being a small sample size is really using the .400 theory in baseball. That being that with only 100 ABs, a hitter may only be batter .400, but after time it evens out and they end up batting like .370 or whatever. The key is there it is one stat (batting average) that derives from one numerator and one denominator (Hits/AB). So there truly IS a small sample size when you have 40 hits in 100 ABs, both stats are very small. Heck, three good catches to take away hits would make him .370 alone. So that is the example you are trying to use. PER uses a large magnitude of statistics to infuse many different statistics into the numerator. You've got things like pts, asst, turnovers, FG%, rebound rate, steals, blocks, free throws, 3-pointers, etc. So the more factors you factor in, the more you smooth out the numerator. So you'd be much more likely to see someone with true small sample sizes have large variances in blocks per minute or assists per minute compared to the norm, than you'd find a guy with a 35 PER (or too far from the norm). That's a product of all of those stats going into the numerator, then still having a pretty sizeable chunk in the denominator like 500 minutes for Oden compared to our 100 ABs for the other example.
There seems to be 2 countervailing forces at work here. 1 is the mental side of the game - experience/knowledge pushes in the direction of improvement. 2 is the physical side of the game, as there is no question the NBA season is a more intense physical grind than college ball. I seem to recall an article last season that indicated that many of the leagues top rookies saw a drop in their stats, somewhere around the 40-60 games played mark. Obviously, I haven't taken an independent look at the stats, but it does sound reasonable that this would happen.
Been meaning to ask you this for a while... are you John Hollinger? If not, what do you do? This kind of information is not something one comes across from checking basketball-reference.com from time to time.
to see some real dominance, take a look at the head to head numbers when these two have locked up. Both in college and the pros, it's Greg in an absolute landslide STOMP
I would add one other counterveiling force: Scouting. When a young player turns out to be good, what ignored no longer is. That effect would be compounded, I think, on a team where established stars are already the focus. The opposition is going to spend most of its energy on a Brandon Roy and make Oden prove he can hurt them before they get too excited.
