Archive for the 'Statistical +/-' Category

In the final installment of the season, here's your official Statistical +/- prediction for the 2009 Finals:

Read the rest of this entry »

Click here for the results for Round 1.

Read the rest of this entry »

Using the technique I introduced a few weeks ago, here's what Statistical +/- sees in the cards for the Conference Finals:

Read the rest of this entry »

Congrats are in order to Danny Granger this week for winning the NBA's Most Improved Player Award for the 2008-09 season. Now, this award is often decried by statheads for its insistence on identifying players who haven't really improved at all but have just seen more playing time, but Granger actually did make a leap in production from 2008 to 2009. Not the biggest leap, mind you, but a leap nonetheless. Here's what SPM says about the biggest year-to-year differences from '08 to '09 (minimum 500 MP in both seasons):

Read the rest of this entry »

Some people have been requesting updated playoff SPM scores, so here are the results through the first round of the playoffs. I'll update again after every round with both round-by-round and cumulative splits.

Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, we delved deeper into our new Statistical Plus/Minus results and tried to retrodict the standings for the regular season, coming within a healthy +/- 6.6 wins per team. Now the question is, can we put the same method to the test for a playoff series? Let's use the recently-completed first round as a test case...

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I promised that we'd see how well our new statistical +/- formula "retrodicted" this season, and today seems like a good time to follow through on that.

Read the rest of this entry »

(Before reading this, read this.)

OK, this post is in response to a few questions by our readers over the past day or so...

Read the rest of this entry »

We've used statistical plus-minus a lot on this blog in the past, and I generally like it, because I think it's an "organic" way of deriving a linear-weights-style box score-based formula from actual, real-life data. That's also why I still have faith in the pure adjusted plus-minus methodology, despite its occasionally bizarre and/or counter-intuitive results. I mean, sure, by cherry-picking individual examples, you can certainly find instances in which APM suffers from the dreaded multicollinearity, stemming from 2 players occupying the same lineup for the majority of their on-court minutes (see Chris Paul & Peja Stojakovic, 2007-08). But for the sum total of players, across the entire NBA spectrum, it actually describes the fundamental truth of basketball perfectly -- did your team score more points than the opponent?

Read the rest of this entry »

With the playoffs looming -- and consequently, some postseason-related content on the horizon -- I think we should finish off this series about Statistical Plus-Minus' greatest players of all time, don't you? Read up on the previous posts (Centers, Power Forwards, Small Forwards, Shooting Guards) if you're curious about the method, or just skim the (alphabetically-ordered) list if you want to get right to it:

Read the rest of this entry »