Kobe Bryant: Winning, still can't win
By Kelly Dwyer
It's been spinning around the internet for a few days, so you've likely seen it, but if you missed Christopher Reina's study on Kobe Bryant's shooting habits, and how they parlay into wins for the Lakers, it went something like this:
Kobe shoot over 20 times = Lakers bad.
Kobe shoot under 20 times = Lakers good.
It's a nice sentiment that works well with the popular ideal that Kobe is some ball-hogging freak by nature that has to somehow rein in his instincts to shoot every time down court. That he's so obsessed by putting up points and being the focal point that it's taken him years to understand that basketball is a team sport, and that he needs to, wait for it, "trust his teammates."
And it's all bollocks.
A study like this is so rife with caveats and qualifiers and chances for inaccuracy that it isn't worth its weight in however the hell you would weigh a webpage. I think you start with a Geiger Counter, convert into something tangible, and ... anyway, the "study" is pointless.
http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie/post/Kobe-Bryant-Winning-still-can-t-win;_ylt=AtyzzqI.Tic23ptRCnDqo6i8vLYF?urn=nba,86015
really good article, needed to be written a long time ago.