Berri is a professor and instead of posting poorly thought out ideas on a comments section he submits his analyses to peer review - no doubt he doesn't have time for some half-baked comment section back and forth. I would hardly call that throwing in the towel though.
If someone has serious methodological objections they should write an actual piece and submit it to the site. That should be fun...
Regarding the defensive adjustment, which Floppy makes sound like some black box voodoo that has to be done in order for the data to otherwise make sense:
Q: Wins Produced only considers a player’s offense. Defense is not considered.
A: When people look at the box score statistics they tend to focus on scoring. So it is probably not surprising that some people think that the box score is only about offense.
The box score, though, includes statistics that reflect activity at both end of the court. In fact, the box score statistics do a wonderful job of explaining wins in the NBA.
There is something missing, though, from the box score. Most of the data tracked is linked to an individual player. Data on opponent’s points scored, opponent’s made field goals, opponent’s turnovers that are not steals, team turnovers, and team rebounds, though, are not linked back to individuals. To incorporate these factors in the calculation of Wins Produced, a team defensive adjustment [labeled DEFTM48 or TMDEF48] is calculated (as detailed at the Calculating Wins Produced page and in Stumbling on Wins).
As noted at the Calculating Wins Produced page, this adjustment is quite small and does not substantially alter our per-minute evaluation of players: “The average value, in absolute terms, of DEFTM48 is 0.011, so again this is a very small adjustment. And as we saw with MATE48, DEFTM48 has very little impact on our assessment of individual players. The correlation coefficient between P48 and Adj. P48 in 1977-78 was 0.9977.”
Also, Floppy and Sleepy can say (I paraphrase) that "WoW doesn't work, because David Lee is obviously not really helping the team and WoW predicts that he will help a lot." And TK can say that Lee is hurting the team, and you can all dig up esoteric and indirect measures like how other players are rebounding when they're alongside David Lee... but the fact remains:
Even when you look at plus/minus statistics adjusted for on- and off-court variance, you STILL find that David Lee is the most effective player on the Warriors roster:
For every 100 possessions that Lee is on the court, the team is +6.8 points better than it is without Lee.
That's tops on the team, and just ahead of Steph Curry, at +6.1 points.
And BTW, for what it's worth, for every single Warriors starter, the team is a little bit worse on defense with that guy in the lineup than without that guy in the lineup. The only exception is Biedrins, who improves the team's defense
slightly (by 1.2 points per 100 possessions, which is more than erased by the offensive stagnation when Goose is in).
On the other hand (and although he's still not logged a ton of minutes), Udoh helps the team D a lot: the team is 6.1 points better on D (and about the same on offense) per 100 possessions when Udoh is on the court.
So, nobody among the starters, including Lee, is an exceptional defender. No wonder the team is not good defensively. However, despite Lee's slightly less than average defense (-2 points per 100 possessions), the positives he does for the team - scoring efficiently, rebounding among the best of them, and passing as well as any big man in the League - help the team quite a lot, and more than any other Warrior, according to both Wages of Wins and 82 games statistics.
What we have here I think is some guys have really ingrained assumptions about David Lee and what he does (doesn't do) for the team, and then they go looking to discredit anything that shows otherwise, while cooking up half-baked scenarios (like slight differences in the TEAM's rebounding rate (not David Lee's , but the TEAM's) to justify their preconceived notions.
And what makes this reality even more clear is that no one is really railing on Monta Ellis, or devoting threads as to how Monta Ellis is not a good defender, or is overpaid, when Monta has the worst production per 100 possessions (including a brutal -7.9 points on the defensive end) of any of the Warriors starters.
If you're looking for answers as to how the Warriors could be better, I'd say: we need a better center. We need a two guard that can defend two guards. And we need a coach who can get these guys to play with energy for 48 minutes. David Lee is not a great defender, but he is far from the problem.
So bite that Floppy
:
