Archive for the 'Statgeekery' Category

2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on March 3, 2011:

Read the rest of this entry »

While I'm en route to Boston for the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, here's a neat question SI's Zach Lowe had regarding the Memphis Grizzlies' defense:

"Memphis has emerged as a top-10 defensive team despite being good at only one of the four factors--forcing turnovers, which they do extremely well. They rank below the league average in eFG (barely below the avg), DRB rate (horrible) and FT/FGA (somewhere in between). I have a feeling it's unusual for a team to rank in the top-10 overall while ranking below the league average in 3 of the 4 defensive factors, but perhaps it's not as unusual as I think it might be."

It is very unusual, in fact. Since 1974, the first year we can compute the Factors, just eleven defenses (including Memphis) have ranked in the top 10 despite being below-average in 3 of 4 Factors. And if we expand it to include either offense or defense, the list contains only 27 teams:

I'll let Zach provide the commentary, so go check out his post at SI's Point Forward blog.

If you're a long-time reader of this blog, you know that Ken Pomeroy's Kenpom.com is one of my favorite college basketball websites (just a notch below CBB @ Sports-Reference, of course). So it's great to see that Ken will once again be using his ratings to generate win probabilities for each conference tournament (and the NCAA tourney) over the next few weeks. You can find all of those posts at the Basketball Prospectus Unfiltered Blog, but to start you off, here are the odds for some of the early tournaments:

Let log5 season begin (Big South and Horizon)

Log5: A-Sun, OVC, and Patriot

Tom Haberstroh had a great piece at ESPN last week in which he broke down the ongoing Derrick Rose-vs-LeBron James MVP debate. To me, the key passage was this:

"Oddly enough, what's not helping Rose's MVP case is his plus-minus numbers. And implicitly, this is where most Rose supporters state their case. When his advocates ask, 'Where would the Bulls be without Rose?' the question is meant to be a rhetorical one. The obvious implication is that a Rose-less Bulls squad would instantly become a basement dweller. But rather than blindly accept it, we can actually see how the Bulls have managed without him on the court. And how have they fared with Rose benched? By beating opponents by 51 points on the season, or an average of 4.9 points every 100 possessions. Why? Whether Rose is in the game or not, [Tom] Thibodeau’s game-changing defense remains."

I don't want to get into Rose-vs-James specifically here, but I do think what Tom wrote is a very important concept to apply to all NBA MVP debates in this modern age of plus/minus.

Read the rest of this entry »

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):

Read the rest of this entry »

2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on February 24, 2011:

Read the rest of this entry »

With noted shot-creator Carmelo Anthony on the move, I was wondering which players have a hand in "creating" the highest percentage of their team's shot attempts when on the floor.

If we're just looking at a player's own shooting attempts, this is pretty easy. You can look at the percentage of team FGA a player takes when on the court (all leaders minimum 1,366 minutes):

You could also take it a step further and factor in free throws as well, calculating the percentage of each team's True Shooting Attempts (FGA + .44 * FTA) each player takes while on the floor:

But I think you need to take assists into account as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it's (quasi) official now: Carmelo Anthony is a member of the New York Knicks.

Finally, we can put aside the trade speculation and ask the really important questions about the deal. No, I'm not talking about how this shifts the balance of power in the East, or if 'Melo and Amare Stoudemire can coexist in the Big Apple... I'm talking about where Carmelo ranks among all-time players who were traded in the middle of the season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Reading yesterday about Dave Duerson's tragic passing made me think about the player similarity system he inspired at PFR, and that in turn caused me to remember a similar system I concocted for basketball players.

Using the methodology I outlined, who are the most comparable players to this year's All-Stars in terms of career quality and shape (through their current age)?

Read the rest of this entry »

2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on February 17, 2011:

Read the rest of this entry »