OhayoKD wrote:lessthanjake wrote:OhayoKD wrote:You are saying the stat you don't like the results of shouldn't be taken seriously because it is a box-prior and dressing that up with "it has a bunch of additional sources of error". Yet a thread ago you were arguing we shouldn't look at on/off components because they lack the error-rediction that comes from a shitton of inputs.
I imagine when we get to bird it's going to turn into "everything else is not the metric we should take seriously" when you realize passer-rating likes him best.
That’s not a remotely accurate representation of anything I’ve said. The issue I’ve raised with Passer Rating is not “because it is a box-prior.” And I’m not going to explain it again because I’ve spent quite a lot of time explaining this, and I think it’s not a difficult concept.
And all those explanations fall apart once you realize that "assist" or "score" are
wholly subjective in how they're defined and that there are various inputs going into how credit is distributed and the terminology used with them. This is the case with every single "simple box-stat", including all the things that are weighted into gamescore or RAPTOR or PER.
Ben regresses to more accurate(Based on objective results) version of assists and comes with something that predicts offenses getting better. And your criticism of the inputs in passer-rating come down to you wanting things that are not relevant to efficiency being tossed in to distort everything.
You are whiffing on the basics. I am not the one who needs things explained.
The box-score is
always wholly subjective, and it only loses subjectivity when it is checked against objective outcomes
This is largely an inscrutable and vague post, so it is difficult to respond to, and, if it were less inscrutable, I suspect the response to the vast majority of it would be to refer you back to things I’ve already said multiple times.
So I’ll just add a few quick things:
1. If you think the “score” is “wholly subjective” and just as subjective as one person’s personal 1-10 rating of passes, then I don’t know what to tell you (in fact, it’s such an odd statement that I feel like I must be misunderstanding). I understand the point that box score stats can be subjective in the sense that they don’t describe the whole picture. Which is part of why I wouldn’t say we should take “assists” stats very seriously either—something I keep saying and yet you keep beating a straw man about this over and over. But the “score” of a game is not “wholly subjective.”
2. The idea that “Ben regresses to more accurate(Based on objective results) version of assists and comes with something that predicts offenses getting better” is something you keep repeating but that doesn’t appear to have much support, at least as it relates to Passer Rating (I’ll address further below why the support you use for this is logically meaningless as it relates to Box Creation). For instance, Ben himself specifically stated that Passer Rating only has a weak correlation with offensive rating, and he never actually said anything about whether it has a higher correlation with offensive rating than even basic stats like team assist/turnover ratio or team assists (which we do know correlates at least somewhat with team success too: for instance
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11361327/). I’m not of the view that those more basic measures necessarily are actually better measures of passing quality (intuitively, I’d guess Passer Rating probably is a bit better), but I don’t see any basis provided for the statements you keep making on this.
3. Even on the question of Box Creation, Ben points out that *team* Box Creation correlates a good bit with team offensive rating. But please note that’s actually not the same as an individual star’s Box Creation correlating with team offensive rating. An individual player could have huge Box Creation numbers, but have the rest of the players on the team not have much Box Creation, such that the overall team total isn’t high. And, indeed, we’d expect a negative correlation between an individual’s Box Creation and the rest of their team’s, since, for example, scoring volume is a major component of the stat (so, a player’s Box Creation goes up as they take more shots, but obviously their teammates’ Box Creation would also go down as a result of taking fewer shots). So you can’t really draw a conclusion about the accuracy/predictiveness of the stat at the individual level, based on its purported accuracy/predictiveness at the team level.
4. More importantly, related to the above,
Box Creation correlating a good bit with team offensive rating is actually in large part just a meaningless tautology. Points scored is a huge input into the Box Creation stat, so of course a team’s overall Box Creation would correlate with how much the team scored! It’s basically like saying “Teams that score more do in fact score more.” The conclusion that, because of this largely tautological outcome at the team level, the stat is a really good measure at the individual level is…dubious to say the least.