SDChargers#1 wrote:Honestly, I am a little astounded how much APM is being touted in these threads, like it is the end all be all of basketball comparison. It is a useful tool in a sense, but it is flawed and heavily affected by team rotations more than any individual player. Yet, I see it being used to prop up one player over another more than any other single stat in the top 100 so far. It is absolutely mind boggling for me.
Interesting. I can imagine that feels exasperating. I would point out though that those of us inclined to talk about +/- have not been getting our way. Not only should that make you feel a little better cause you're winning, it also might explains why you feel so assaulted by it. The longer that guys with +/- bonafides hang around, the more they are involved in debate, and the more their bonafides get discussed.
Also just wanted to say, if it seems like +/- is just one more in a ton of statistics, and you don't understand why people single it out, then do understand that +/- stats are really orthogonal to the rest of statistics, and the rest of statistics are not only weighed more heavily, but are much more widely known among this group. There literally isn't that much need to talk about the box score stats among for the all-time greats here, because we know them well.
+/- gets discussed partly because its new and people are still wrapping their heads around it.
SDChargers#1 wrote:To go back to some of the discussions at hand. Why does everyone dismiss Kobe's "volume" scoring like the extra points don't matter at all. Especially when the "volume" is coming at a better efficiency than the majority of Garnett's career (and Hakeem for that matter). When did scoring 35 ppg on 56% TS become chucking?
Do people not realize that even if someone has a 60% TS while scoring 25 points, the difference in efficiency is really not all that great in the grand scheme of things. We are talking about 4%. Over the course of a game that equates to a point or two, and does not come close to matching the extra 10 ppg output of the first.
The dismissal of Kobe's scoring season is quite ridiculous.
You need to consider it from another angle as well though:
Basketball is a game of possessions. Take any given player out of the game, and unless they are an outstanding offensive rebounder, the number of shots per possessions will not be greatly changed. Hence, your direct impact is what you give your team in the shots you take compared to what others could have done.
There's not one clear way to calculate this, but the most obvious way is to simply take the difference in efficiency of the player compared to the league. In '05-06, Kobe averaged 55.9% TS and the league average was 53.6%. The same shots taken with league average efficiency would yield 33.9 points which was 1.5 points less than what Kobe did.
Understand? The direct advantage gained either by bumping up volume or efficiency is not huge.
Now, the natural rebuttal to that imho is "But Kobe's effects as a scorer go beyond that!", to which I wholeheartedly agree with. The point is though that there isn't a huge natural edge just because a guy scores in droves, which is why Dantley and early Wilt had not just less impact than you have thought, but literally only a small fraction of the impact that others achieved with similar volume.
