Archive for the 'Statistical +/-' Category

Miami Heat

58-24, 1st in NBA Southeast Division (Schedule and Results)
Coach: Erik Spoelstra (58-24)

PTS/G: 102.1 (8th of 30) ▪ Opp PTS/G: 94.6 (6th of 30)
SRS: 6.76 (1st of 30) ▪ Pace: 90.9 (20th of 30)
Off Rtg: 111.7 (3rd of 30) ▪ Def Rtg: 103.5 (5th of 30)
Expected W-L: 61-21 (2nd of 30)

Arena: AmericanAirlines Arena ▪ Attendance: 810,930 (4th of 30)

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Chicago Bulls

62-20, 1st in NBA Central Division (Schedule and Results)
Coach: Tom Thibodeau (62-20)

SRS: 6.53 (2nd of 30) ▪ Pace: 90.4 (23rd of 30)
Off Rtg: 108.3 (11th of 30) ▪ Def Rtg: 100.3 (1st of 30)
Expected W-L: 61-21 (1st of 30)

Arena: United Center ▪ Attendance: 893,462 (1st of 30)

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With Derrick Rose's 2011 MVP looking like a foregone conclusion, it seems only natural to compare his campaign to that of Allen Iverson in 2001, the year another popular guard won the MVP despite not being the game's most talented player.

Here's the numerical tale of the tape for A.I. and D-Rose, with Rose extrapolated to 82 team games: (Glossary)

Statistically, the two players are incredibly comparable. If you translate Iverson from the 103.0 league-ORtg environment of 2001 to the league ORtg of 107.1 in 2011, his ORtg/%Poss/DRtg becomes 110.5/33.8/103.0, production that is basically equivalent to Rose's after adjusting for usage.

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During Chris Bosh's brickfest last night, all I could think of was, "Wow, this is a John Starks-ian performance." Turns out it was even worse, albeit in a much less critical situation than Game 7 of the Finals.

Using offensive statistical plus/minus (OSPM), I put together a list of the most detrimental offensive games in our box score database (this spans 1987-2011 for the regular season, and 1991-2010 for the playoffs). For every game, I calculated the player's OSPM, the team's offensive rating, and what the team's offensive rating would have been had the player turned in a league-average performance. The most detrimental performances were the ones that sucked the most points from a team's offensive rating. I also added one requirement to qualify for the list: the player's offense must have cost his team a win -- i.e., with an average offensive performance from a player in his minutes, they would have outscored the opponent, but instead lost the game.

Let's use Bosh as an example. Last night, Bosh had an OSPM of -15.18, which means for every 100 possessions he was on the floor, he drained more than 15 points away from Miami's offensive rating relative to a league-average performance. Miami's actual offensive rating was 95.3, but if Bosh had just been average, Miami's rating would have been 108.5 -- meaning he cost them 13.16 points of offensive rating over the course of the entire game. Worse yet, Chicago's offensive rating was 99.6, so if Bosh had been average (or even merely below-average), Miami would have won the game. That's why Bosh qualifies for the list, because his poor offense cost his team a win.

Anyway, here are the most detrimental offensive performances in our database (mouse over column headers for descriptions):

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Just as we did last season, let's take a look at which players would have made the All-Star teams if various advanced stats were the only criteria in the voting. To pick teams, I used the official positional designations from the 2011 ballot; each team must have 4 guards, 4 forwards, and 2 centers, with room for 2 wild cards from any position to fill out the roster. Players in bold are starters; "*" designates the player as a member of the real-life All-Star team.

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Although we're only a month and a half into the season, the 2010-11 campaign has already seen its share of impressive winning streaks. The Spurs rattled off 12 straight across almost the entire month of November (a streak matched by the Mavericks last week), the Lakers & Hornets each won 8 consecutive to start the year, and the Celtics, Heat, & Knicks are currently in the midst of 8+ game win streaks themselves. How probable have these runs of victories been?

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Facing his former team in Cleveland last night, LeBron James played like his vintage Cavs-era self, pouring in 38 points on 15-25 shooting with 8 assists in 30 minutes. That had me wondering, where did James' performance rank among historical instances of a player facing his ex-'mates the season after he left town?

So I ran a database query on all games since 1987 where a player was facing a team he had played for the previous season. And for the performance metric of choice, I want to introduce an adjusted plus/minus-based game score-style metric called "APMVAL". I basically ran an intercept-free regression between APM value over replacement (minutes * (APM + 6)) and raw box score totals, coming up with this formula:

APMVAL = 45*pts - 35*tsa + 18*reb + 30*ast + 72*stl + 41*blk - 75*tov - 39*pf

The best APMVAL game of the overall 1987-2010 period was Michael Jordan's 69-point outburst vs. Cleveland in 1990 (Kobe's 81-point game was 2nd). Here were the best games against a player's former team in the first season after his departure:

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Here's a follow up to a post I made two years ago regarding the best Thanksgiving Day performances since 1987. I only looked at raw totals then, but this time around I think we should nerd it up with an overflowing cornucopia of advanced stats. Yum!

Hollinger Game Score

The most basic metric you might consider "advanced" is John Hollinger's Game Score. It's a simple linear weights formula based on his infinitely more complex Player Efficiency Rating, but the weights are a step up from something like TENDEX. Here are the best Thanksgiving games by game score since 1987:

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Two weeks ago, I looked at the players who were under- and over-achieving the most so far this season. Today, I want to take the same concept and apply it to teams -- given the projected SPM performance levels of their players and the distribution of minutes to those players, which teams are currently playing better or worse than we would have expected?

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Which players are playing better or worse than we would have expected so far this season? Well, let's look at each player's actual Statistical Plus/Minus (SPM) in 2011 vs. what the simple projection system would have predicted their SPM to be. The overachievers:

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