valrond1 wrote:Aaaaand people here are again fooled by useless stat. TS% is useless to evaluate a player. By that metric, the best player ever is...
DeAndre Jordan
Yep.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/ts_pct_career.html
PER is much better at saying which player had the most impact in the game. Just check the top players in PER, they mostly won the MVP that season, or were in contention most of the time.
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/per_season.html
And career overall.
1st Jordan
2nd Lebron
(what most people have in their GOAT lists)
3rd is Davis but he's still entering his prime, while Jordan dragged on the two seasons with the Wizards and Lebron has started to slow down. Just check this list of all time greats:
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/per_career.html
I don't believe anyone is fooled, they are just answering the question differently. You couldn't have read the thread if you think anyone is saying that you rank players by TS% and use it is a rank of best to worst, that would be crazy. Many people are choosing based on what is the most reliable stat in saying what it claims to say.
The question was which stat is better judging a player. It isn't specifically saying which is better at ranking players or which is better to see how good a player is. Both the poll and first post ask about "judging" a player. Now, there's no problem with understanding that as judging how good a player is, that makes sense. BUT, the question can be understood as which one is best at judging a player at what it aims to judge. Or if I'm judging a player, which stat is most useful or helpful to use in that process, assuming this isn't a one stat analysis.
For judging a player overall, using a single stat is always a problem in itself, but if you are just trying to get a big picture idea of how productive a player is, PER works for the most part. TS% is not a stat for ranking players or getting an overall picture of a player on its own, but in an overall analysis of a player, it is the most directly correlating to what you are looking to get from it.
Of course, continuing with your example of DeAndre Jordan, he has a higher career PER than Reggie Miller. From 24-31, Reggie Miller had a PER of 19.9, DeAndre is 19.8. Now, I would think that the vast majority would argue that Reggie Miller is a much better player than DeAndre Jordan. If the lob city Clippers replaced JJ Redick with Reggie Miller and DeAndre with a replacement level C, of course injuries are still a factor, but that's a much superior team. Obviously there are more examples, and most have these stats will have correlation, especially at the far ends (best and worst players), but in the middle, it will have issues.
So certainly if you are looking at the question as which single stat is best to judge a player's approximate level of play and impact, I would agree that PER is the simplest and most straight forward to get that. Of course it fails at the more detailed level, but every single stat fails at that level.
