capfan33 wrote:Djoker wrote:It's funny how Squared2020's work on another thread was dismissed even though he's an employee of the NBA but the data in this article is taken at face value. It reeks of bias and double standards. Where are the calls for peer-reviewed data?
A major part of the pushback against Squared simply had to do with being cautious about drawing meaningful conclusions from the sample Squared has processed (yes its an insane amount of work, not trying to take away from it at all) and moreover, that type of work has a lot of complications in terms of how one can track it.
The examples of misallocated blocks and steals talked about in this article are much less subjective, and moreover, we have hard, immutable statistical evidence just from home/road splits available on BBall reference that something appears to be amiss here. Like both the raw blocks/steal splits and also the chart that jalengreen posted make it very difficult to argue against the idea that MJ wasn't benefitting quite a bit from home cooking.
To what degree is reasonable to argue about, but he appears to be a historic outlier by both charts.
Personally, I fall on the side of generally trusting what we have from both sources (with sample size caveats always being relevant, of course). But I wouldn’t say this data is “less subjective” than Squared’s data. What Squared has compiled is objective information—i.e. who was on the court when points were scored. Steals and blocks definitely have a more subjective element to it than that. In fact, that’s ultimately kind of the point of the article! It’s inherently a squishier concept than what Squared’s data is measuring, so the reporting of what someone found when looking at tapes and comparing them to the stats is also IMO inherently *more* subjective than what Squared did. It’s taking the author’s subjective assessment and comparing it to the actual scorekeeper’s subjective assessment. That’s all still squarely in the realm of subjectivity. All that said, I find this article’s evidence compelling enough to conclude with a pretty high degree of confidence that Jordan was getting some home cooking. I just really wouldn’t distinguish this from the pushback on Squared’s data in that way.
You are right that some of the pushback on Squared’s data is just about sample size (I’m one of the ones that posted some about that!). But some of the pushback went well beyond that and was basically just suggesting that Squared was likely falsifying the data, because there was no formal peer review. That same concern is largely present here too, and I think that’s Djoker’s point. Moreover, even sample size concerns are quite relevant here, since the authors actually only looked at film of like 6 games, and the rest of the evidence is not all that conclusive (home-road splits on their own may be grounds for suspicion but could also just have happened organically). Again, I personally find the evidence here compelling, so I am not actually looking to poke holes in it in the way that others were with Squared’s data. But I think Djoker’s note that some people have approached the info with different levels of scrutiny is a valid one.
