rrravenred wrote:Well... Wins Produced values efficiency over several different raw stats. It's all (in my understanding) about how many possessions a player obtains for a team and what they do with those possessions.
It is not possessions based. Berri just took the boxscore numbers for his regression analysis.
rrravenred wrote:It's bad on defence, but standard box-score stats don't really measure "proper" defence in any case.
This is true, and that is the reason why every metric based on the boxscore will not be very successful in representating defense. The highest correlation with the DRtg of a team will be found for defensive rebounds. You will get a correlation coefficient of around -0.5 between the pace and minutes adjusted defensive rebounds and the opponents points per possession. While you have a around -0.1 and close 0 for those adjusted values of steals and blocked shots. So, rating a player by his steals and blocked shots in terms of defense isn't a good way. Rating him by his DRB% is the better way. But the correlation is still pretty low in comparison to those 0.82 between PER and winning. So, PER isn't doing a bad job overall.
rrravenred wrote:Production: I assume you're talking about individual point production, which isn't (for mine) necessarily the most important part of the game. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Production is not only scoring, but all the other numbers in the boxscore. PER for example has a pretty correlation to usage, more than it has a correlation to TO% or TS%. So, overall PER is more about production than about efficiency (despite of the name).
rrravenred wrote:I'm an unabashhed fan of efficiency in terms of offence. You get the ball to a player who is most likely to score, either yourself (a good shooting percentage) or another player (a good Assist / TO percentage). If you turn the ball over or take a low-percentage shot, you're not helping your team.
Well, if you don't shoot within 24 seconds, your team will lose their possession anyway. Therefore the assumption that taking a "bad" shot isn't helping your team isn't quite accurate. That is also one of the main problems of Berri's regression analysis, which leads to results like Rodman was more important to the Bulls than Jordan. Well, imagine a team with 5 Rodmans vs. 5 Jordans. Rodmans inablity to create a scoring opportunity will hurt the team more than Jordans lesser ability to rebound the ball.
rrravenred wrote:Impact: +/-? Noisy, noisy, noisy. Starters generally play with the best players on their team, who are most likely to have the best chance to score / stop the opposition scoring. In theory, it works its way out over the course of a season.
Uh, starters are also supposed to play against the better players from your opponent, right? So, your idea is basically pointless overall. You need also take into account, that adjusted +/- numbers are including those kind of things, which makes them a good indicator for overall impact. And again, Bryant was better in all three different +/- numbers.
rrravenred wrote:For mine, it never escapes the interference generated by the other players the coach puts on the floor. If you're talking about defence, you're on stronger ground, but I'd question whether on average Kobe is a substantially better defender than Pau.
Well, a big usually has the bigger impact on defense, which is related to the fact that the DRB% has a good correlation to the DRtg and bigs are usually the better rebounder.
rrravenred wrote:BTW, what are the significant problems that you believe Berri hasn't recognised?
A couple of those are related to the 24 second clock, Berri shows that he isn't really understanding Basketball at all. Another point would be his overall assumption that the boxscore can tell him enough about the game and the impact of a player for winning. Well, he is making strong adjustments to get even the numbers of wins for a whole team close to the real number by applying a team factor. He also makes an adjustment for position, which complitely contradicts his purpose of comparing different players on different positions. Basketball is a big men game, lower their numbers to get better values for small guys isn't a good way and can explain why he got Kidd as the more important player than Nowitzki on the Mavericks. Well, Nowitzki had even the better TS% and better TO%, if you use the possession based argument Nowitzki was the more efficient player.
I developed a different player rating, which gives an assists a higher value than the usual metrics. It also includes the effect of offensive rebounds. Overall Nowitzki was responsible for 30.9 points in every 100 possessions the Mavericks had last season, if I use my model. Kidd had 23.4. So, Nowitzki's offensive production was bigger and he done that with a higher efficiency.
Basketball is still a game in which a team wins, if it scores more points than its opponent. Basically that means that mean being able to score more points per possession than your opponent is the key to winning. Bryant has a clearly better TS% and better TO% than an average player, so he in fact helps his team winning by doing what he is doing on the court. His overall scoring efficiency is also hurt by the fact that he usually takes a shot, if the Lakers couldn't get their planned offensive system working for a possession. That will be most likely a bad shot. Gasol took way less of those kind of shots. As Gasol played for the Grizzlies he done that more often and his overall efficiency was lower than on the Lakers. I guess that is a pretty good example to show that only focussing on efficiency while comparing players is the wrong way. The complexity of the game just makes it hard to judge a player in this adequately.