Rinaldi wrote:because many of those made-up stats are just stats. and stats are just scientific lies.
Assists are a crummy stat IMO and they're recorded arbitrarily. Not to mention that the assist is an ex-post facto statistic and is too reliant on the player who receives the ball.
I think (hypothetically) one of the better ways to measure a point-guard's impact in terms of assists is to measure the percentage of passes to a particular player that result in a made shot versus a missed shot. If you multiplied the total assists by the eFG% of those particular shots you'd have a better idea of how good a point guard is, regardless of the pace a team plays at.
So, for instance, player B is delivered the ball by player A 100 times; if player B makes 40 then you multiply 40 by the eFG%. Call this the eAsst% or something gay like that. If you compared Player A's eAsst% with player A's own personal eFG% you'd have a general idea if he's making a good decision hanging onto the ball or passing it off. For someone like DRose, it could explain why he shoots so much as a point guard; in certain cases, passing to his teammates could be detrimental to the team's offense.
Of course, if your teammates aren't very good at shooting or finishing that could be reflected in the statistic, but if you're racking up "empty assists" that could be measured as well. If the shooters' overall eFG% is higher than the eAsst% when they are assisted by player A, the quality of the assist is somewhat diminished. Or if a scrub point guard has a consistently higher eAsst% than the starter with the same exact players, maybe the starter's impact is overstated.
Or, more simply, maybe you just tally up the number of points that result when player A passes to player B, divided by the shots taken by B. That would give you a raw score, points per shot from the assist. For instance, Player B makes 48 assisted shots, but scores 100 points. Those 100 points should show up as some kind of statistic that shows player A's 48 assists accounted for 100 points. (I think a point guard should get some kind of credit for assisting free throws as well btw).
I only say all this stuff because it's a point guard's job to make the right reads of the defense; if you make the right reads consistently, your teammates are going to be making higher percentage shots than if you were making the wrong reads. In the flow of an offense choosing who to pass to and when is just as important as scoring the basketball or taking a high percentage shot.
On top of all that, the way a team is put together (by the GM and the coach) is just as important in all this. DRose would get more assists if he had more capable shooters on his team. But maybe if he had more shooters (different personnel) then the team wouldn't be as good as it is right now, or he'd be playing a different style of ball, scoring less, etc.
You can't measure a lot of this stuff with statistics. Rondo and Rose are both top 5 pg IMO. I think it's disingenuous to put one in "top 5 point guard" company, but not the other.
I will never pretend to have good or impartial opinions.
