Fencer reregistered wrote:Everything about a TEAM can be measured in points, W/L, whatever.
Correct, and that was the whole idea of that excerise. If a player effects his teammates in a certain way, the team result should somehow show it. It was not said that we are able to give accurately credit to each player for that, but when do we hear such arguments for players most times and what is used as evidence? When the team is winning, at best even winning championships. That is always brought up as justification. People seem to think that championships aren't won by teams with more overall basketball talent, they are won only by players who have the certain "IT". People start to compare the "IT" of player A with the "IT" of player B and they actually think they are making a meaningful analysis. How do they want to judge about "IT" unless they were around those players during practice, during team meetings, etc. ALL THE TIME?
We had that discussion about Isiah Thomas, who had the "IT" as the player, but somehow the same "IT" was not seen as a coach. Why? Did he lost the "IT"? Isiah was supposed to be the drive behind the defensive improvements of the Pistons, the very reason why they won the championships, but somehow he was not able to improve the Pacers defensively as their coach. He took over a mediocre defensive team and it stayed mediocre until they traded for Ron Artest. After that they became better defensively. What a surprise, adding a better defensive player will likely make the team better defensively. They even improved defensively when they replaced Isiah Thomas with Rick Carlisle.
Then Isiah Thomas took over the Knicks, a bad defensive team, and they were still a bad defensive team with Isiah Thomas.
It seems like this "IT" is always there when a team is successful, one of those players is credited with the "IT", which was the very reason why a team was able to win. But as soon as the team doesn't win "IT" all, no player has such "IT" on that team. That is completely arbitrary, and there are people really trying to sound logical by using such arguments.
No, Isiah Thomas didn't make a big difference to the Pistons, that's a fact. The Pistons in 1991 played at the same level with and without Thomas. And his coaching resumee should be more than enough to show that Isiah Thomas didn't have the ability to push mediocre defenders to be elite defenders.
And while we were at it, we can look at Magic Johnson. He missed 27 games from 1986 to 1989 and the Lakers played at -0.36 SRS level during those 27 games (SRS means adjusted for strength of schedule), they played at +7.34 SRS level with him. That is a big difference. We can indeed see "IT" in the result how Magic changed the performance of the Lakers. They became much better offensively, while being slightly worse defensively. Exactly what we can expect from a player like Magic, who had awesome passing skills and courtvision, but wasn't great on defense.
Maybe it is better in a player comparison to stick to things we can measure rather than making stuff up about players we don't know personally, we never interact with in game or practice situations and trying to compare those things to other players we also have only an idea about via media or hearsay.
Fencer reregistered wrote:A naive approach to such an analysis would run into all sorts of noise.
And an attempt to clean it up statistically would be difficult.
Only because it is difficult doesn't mean we shouldn't even try it.
