Dat2U wrote:payitforward wrote:The NBA isn't a talent show, no matter what you think.
Woah, I couldn't disagree with you any more on this. The NBA is ALL ABOUT TALENT! You can't win consistently without elite talent. Despite those TOs and missed shots, the lousy no-account Kings actually outscore their opponents when DeMarcus is on the floor. Without him, they get outscored by -6.6 pts per 100 possessions. This is what I mean when I say production is not a zero sum game. You can't simply add up the positive statistics and subtract the negative statistics to get a player's true value. The game is so much more than that.
Oh for crying out loud....
Of course, the NBA is all about talent! Which doesn't make it a
talent show. You left out what followed in my post: that there are real games and it's wins and losses that matter.
Of course, once you refer to "the lousy no-account Kings" there's no need to look at numbers to prove Cousins is great, right?
But, actually, the Kings aren't that bad - or weren't last year. Rondo had a better season than Wall. Collison was better than Sessions (and like him he played some 1 and some 2). Kosta Koufos was a more productive backup C than anyone who played the position for us. Cauley-Stein and Acy played the 4 better than anyone we had out there. McLemore, Anderson & Belinelli were awful, but Curry was good, Gay was ok, and Casspi was... meh minus (in the range of Neal, Dudley, Anderson for us).
So, please point me to data that shows the Kings outscored their opponents when Cousins was on the floor last year -- that would be worth looking at.
As to this statement...
Dat2U wrote:...production is not a zero sum game. You can't simply add up the positive statistics and subtract the negative statistics to get a player's true value. The game is so much more than that.
Unfortunately, Dat, an NBA game is exactly a zero sum game and nothing else. An NBA season as well.
Therefore, at the level of
the group of players who play in a game, and of
the team and its season, yes, the positive and negative statistics tell you absolutely everything there is to know -- not about "talent" but about the wins and losses. They fully describe and entirely account for the wins and losses.
Of course there's room to argue about *which* statistics -- but, even so, the box score numbers tell you who won. You don't need anything else. And the box score numbers are no more than columns of numbers put up by the individual players -- no fancy math needed, just the sum of what the players did.
Of course you can make an argument for dependencies -- it's a dynamic game in which the ball moves from player to player quickly; yeah, the guy who makes a shot gets credit for it, but it may have depended on something else, etc. There's no doubt about that, just about how to understand it.
One thing you'd do is look at how consistent players' numbers are as they go from team to team. The more consistent, the less their own production can be credited to the "so much more than that" you mention w/o saying what it is. And, in fact, overall players are pretty consistent in production wherever they play.
When we draft players, we look for guys who have put up good numbers. When we sign FAs, we look for guys who've put up good numbers. Ditto when we trade for players.
That doesn't mean, btw, that numbers are what make basketball
interesting! Far from it. The numbers are only interesting because they're about basketball.
Look forward to a link that shows the Kings outscored their opponents last year when DMC was on the floor.
