TheJordanRule wrote: I think it sucks to have a guy at the center position who doesn't have a prayer at being the team's lynchpin on defense.
Then you pretty much have conceded the argument. Because none of the statistical sophistry can overcome the fact that he's a BAD defender (which is directly indicated by his direct defensive stats) at the most important defensive position.
It doesn't help that he's 33, and likely to decrease in impact during the life of his three year, 60+ million dollar deal.
No, it doesn't help at all.
But Vuce not some replacement level starter, either. I guess the problem I have with your argument, Doug, is that you act like every supporting stat for Vuce is some weird coincidence.
It's not a coincidence at all!
What you need to think about is just
WHY it's not a coincidence. There's a set of stats that show Vuc is OK and there's a set of stats that show he's pretty trash.
We can think about why, but it's very understandable from the evolution of stats. You've got something like
- Stats 1.0 - Your basic box scores. This was all you got 30 years ago, so you could look at things like "minutes played" and "defensive rebounds" and that was about it. And sure, it means something, but playing a bunch of minutes on a bad team doesn't mean the same as playing them on a good team. And getting a defensive rebound doesn't actually say much about defense. It doesn't tell you whether the opponent got off a good shot or not.
- Stats 2.0 - People starting to do slightly more advanced analysis to weight and combine these 1.0 stats. This is stuff like PER and DRtg. They're a step to slightly improve on the nothing there was before. But the guys who's built them will tell you they've got pretty big holes in them.
- Stats 3.0 - Incorporating game level data like +/- and regression to get a whole new look at things.
- Stats 4.0 - Incorporating advanced tracking data (like the Vuc post up data) and, importantly, direct measurement of defense. So now you can get accurate measures of how a player defends and contests, where before you just had to suss it out from +/- data and stuff like rebounding and team performance. Additionally, you've got machine learning approaches and accumulating data, like DARKO, that throw all this new info together with +/- in much more effective ways.
Every step represents an improvement over what came before.
The set that show he's pretty trash actually come from very different sources. Mostly, though, they're Stats 4.0 sources. Direct defense. DARKO, EPM, Tracking data.
The stats that show he's "good" are 1.0 or 2.0 sources. Or individual 4.0 ones (like "Vuc is good at post ups!") made by people who are purposely cheerleading him and not looking at the vast number of things he does poorly. Crucially defense. The 1.0 and 2.0 stuff, like PER and DRtg... well, it's got some utility, but not much.
And, remember how these come about? It's not a coincidence. They came about because all you had to work with was stuff like "rebounds" and "minutes" to work with. So any guy that plays a lot of minutes and collects a lot of rebounds is going to rank relatively highly. But... everyone understands this now and gets that, outside of a few very narrow uses, these stats aren't all that useful.
"Pay no attention to the efficient scoring!"
What efficient scoring? One of the hallmarks of Vuc's career is that he's one of the least efficient higher volume bigs in the league. This year, out of centers with >20 usage and >20mpg, Vuc was 15th out of 18 guys in TS%, which is the basic measure of efficiency.
So he's not efficient. He's relatively efficient at post scoring, which is a relatively inefficient way to score that most teams don't much bother with.
"Pay no attention to the large amount of rebounds he collects!"
Why should you? It's about the least valuable stat around. Almost every big dude who stands by the basket grabs a bunch. Time and study have shown it's a poor proxy for more direct measures of defense that we now have available.
"Pay no attention to the defensive rating!" "Pay no attention to the Win Shares!" So what should we pay attention to, only the flaws?
You should pay attention to what's accurate, which isn't necessarily what you want. Unfortunately, the state of the art stats show that Vuc is hugely flawed. Which explains pretty well the reality that, despite his supposed strengths, his teams have generally been pretty trash.
