"No team has a drop off like Portland when Lillard, Aldridge sit"

Says the guy with 24k posts

 

So if the only stat with any concreteness is FG%, you should always select the player with the highest FG%? If not, please explain how you use the only stat with any concreteness, FG%, to compare players and how much they may improve a team.

 

Let me get this straight... you don't even know what the stat measures but you're confident it's garbage?

 

Yup. It's been so long since I paid any attention to it, because I found it to be garbage - so I no longer know precisely what it is. That's often how the memory works - if it's not in active rotation the details slowly fade away. I try not to waste too much time on stuff that I perceive to be garbage.

Regarding how I use stats - I use them in conjunction with what I see when I watch games. First I get a feel for a player - good or bad. Then I look at stats to see if they're supporting what I'm seeing. If they don't then I either watch some more to see if I'm missing something, or try to see what is making the stat appear to tell something that isn't quite true. This process lead me to rethink the importance of RPG - it can be a very misleading stat and it certainly doesn't measure a player's ability when it comes to rebounding.

When it comes to FG% I like to look at a team's FG% and their OppFG% to help determine whether my opinion of that team's offense/defense is "correct". I find FG% & OppFG% to be more meaningful than OffRtg & DefRtg - it measures how well they are at putting the ball in the basket or keeping the opposition from putting the ball in the basket and weeds out stuff like how good a team is at shooting foul shots, or how many FTs a team shoots which is largely based on whether they have a superstar on their roster. It also weeds out stuff like steals, which is part of defense - but I'm interested in the actual ability of making a team shoot low percentage shots...steals are a gamble, bad defense can lead to a steal. I also like to compare individual's FG% by position, and their FG% by shot location. In this way you can see how good a player is compared to other people who score in similar ways.

No individual stat is going to tell you the whole story, and trying to make one stat by doing a bunch of math with a whole bunch of stats is just blurring an already blurry line - at least when it comes to fan talk. Advanced stats may come in useful for teams who are employing people to do nothing but pore over volumes of stats - but when those stats are used by fans as stand-alone measurements they lose all meaning.

But I more than anything it's the eye test - seeing is believing.

 

It's a really noisy stat in small sample sizes, but over the course of a season or two it's a pretty useful number.

 

It seems to me that Olshey has a decison to make pretty quickly. The Blazers are presently sitting in the 8th spot in the West. I suspect that's a surprise to Blazers' management as compared with preseason expectations. The starting lineup is competing fairly well and probably is playoff-worthy. In order to stay in the thick of the playoff hunt, especially given that the schedule gets much tougher from this point on, is going to take an infusion of talent in the bench unit. Whether through trade or even just a signing of an older vet or two, the bench could be beefed up. Guys like Bibby or even Derek Fisher, are available and have playoff experience. By now, Olshey has seen enough of the bench players to know who he wants to keep and develop and who can be dumped. Sitting out of the playoffs one more year and getting a decent pick wouldn't be the worst thing, but I don't see it as likely to really move the dial towards contending either. The Blazers are likely to get no higher draft pick than the 11th or so. The absolute worst thing would be to finish out of the playoffs but with the 13th or 14th pick and have to hand it over to Charlotte.

 

Ummmm.

Ok.

 

The only stats that are legitimate are the stats that support my opinion. Stats that fly in the face of my opinion are to be disregarded and called garbage.

Regards,

All S2 Posters

 

The amount of "herp derp" in this is simultaneously shocking and awesome.

 

How do you quantify "good things" versus "bad things" while a player is on the court?

Seems to me a rather basic stat is to see if a team scores more or less points while any given player is on the floor. It's not ideal over a large sample, but it seems foolish to call it and PER "garbage". Is it just a coincidence that the players with the highest PERs seem to be on All-NBA teams and All-Star teams?

If you're going by FG%, then Przy the year he almost shot 70% should have been MVP.

 

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Too many people here turn to these advanced stats when talking about a player they've seen play probably less than 5 times and think they're an expert. It's stuff like this that leads people to say that Travis Outlaw and Rudy Gay are equal talents(yes, that actually happened on this forum). Not many people here actually break a player's game down and tells you about his on-court play. It's just numbers

Some people crunch numbers

Other people watch the game

 

That's what she said.

 

Uh-oh. Someone used a statistical analysis to suggest that LaMarcus Aldridge is a useful player. Of course that statistic is therefore garbage. What are you guys thinking?

 

Oh and thats not full of subjectivity...

 

I'd say 95% of people on here watch the games...... And half of them STILL don't know what they're talking about!

 

And some people don't understand the point of statistical analysis.

 

Regarding good/bad things, I realized I was thinking of yet another composite stat - EFF. And rather than type out all of the individual stats that go into is I simplified it by using "good" and "bad" - good things being points, rebounds, etc, and bad being TOs, missed shots, etc.

And I think I better explained in another post in this thread my feelings on PER. It's a stupid stat when used in isolation - and that's the only way message board fans can really use that stat. Most don't even know what it means - it's just a number to them and if it's higher that's better than if it's lower. And I'm guessing that most NBA teams have far better metrics than PER - so, really, it's stupid all the way around.

And as I explained in another post - FG% isn't the be-all end-all measurement of a player, it's just the purest measurement of a statistical category. Other statistical measurements have other factors that affect the meaningfulness of the stat, but FG% directly measures a players ability to put the ball in the basket. I don't think the player with the highest FG% is the best player in the league - that's stupid, and I'm sure you realize that I was never making that argument. But comparing FG% amongst players who play the same position is useful and can add meaningfulness when trying to determine which is the better player at a given position. Also, breaking down FG% by shot location is a very useful tool - shows you where a player is most and least effective.

 

All of this is being said with absolutely nothing showing that FG% has a higher correlation to "goodness" of a player than PER.

 

I'm not attempting to make that correlation - those are three separate statements, responding to PapaG.

 

It's much, much easier to identify a good player, mediocre player or a bad player by PER than FG% or pretty much any other stat.

I will say, though, that PER is imprecise. A guy with a PER of 24 is not necessarily any worse than a guy with a PER of 26. Things like defense and intangibles come into play. PER can overvalue guys like Kevin Love, just because he puts up all kinds of great stats and gives you so little on defense.

Obviously, the best way to evaluate talent is to watch games. If you have time to watch all 1230 games in an NBA season and also have a great memory and a critical mind, you'll have a leg up on PER.