If youre skilled enough to make the nba the major difference in anygame will be effort. Look at the suns. Not a super star in sight but they beat our asses the other night off sheer determination. Spurs constantly turn d league scrubs into winners. There are very few people in the nba imo that are much more gifted athletically than others. Lebron griffin and howard maybe but the rest is just pure effort.
Well, then some players just consistently give more effort than others, statistically speaking. One of the nice things about stats like this is that it doesn't matter how the numbers arrive -- it just measures their patterns. If a team tends to win more when a certain player is on the floor, it doesn't matter if the underlying reason is due to athleticism or basketball IQ or skill or "effort" or using the damn Force. It will show up in the results.
If it works like "adjusted plus minus" which it probably does... then it does a linear regression where each individual player has two variables: offensive rating and defensive rating. For every possession there are 5 offensive variables and 5 defensive variables plus an additional variable for home court advantage. It then does a linear regression to fit all the variables to minimize the error (squared). Given that, it does factor in which players are on the floor, and it takes into account all kinds of intangibles that PER cannot measure. That main problem with this method is that the standard deviation is too high, so even with 1 full season of data some players will be significantly misrated due to variance. It takes about 5 full seasons of data to get the standard deviation down to reasonable levels... but then the flaw is that players abilities change over the course of 5 years. Aside from this variance problem... it is far superior to PER.
Every team has players better at certain things sure. But if the team as a whole plays harder 99/100 times theyll win (assuming refs arent throwing the game)
Oh God, that is such fucking bullshit. Other SFs are guarding Lebron and Durant too. If Batum and Matthews were such great defenders our defense wouldn't suck.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. "Can't play defense" is a funny phrase. I'd be willing to bet the scrubbiest scrub in the NBA could shut you down. They are the best in the world, playing the best in the world. At that level, even small differences in athleticism or talent can become magnified. Yeah, effort counts. But when it comes down to it, players are who they are. No amount of "effort" is going to turn Ronnie Price into Chris Paul, even though both are elite players, on a global measure.
This stat might now be my most favorite of all. They really took into account everything I can think of and addressed the point I hated most about +/- numbers to determine impact. Really interested in seeing the variability or CV% in the stats though. Or at least some sort of error calculation to gauge how valid their numbers are.
