Basketball Stats: They all maximize what they think they’re being paid for
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I think over the next decade we're in for a huge shortage of analysts and statisticians in almost all fields of life. Availability of data is ever increasing. The benefits from using it more effectively than competitors are immense. In almost all of the startup businesses in our portfolio (venture capital firm), we've now hired number-crunching guys who do nothing but metrics and we're seeing the results.
The author (Dave Berri) is an economist who's done some work on connecting team success to the actions of individual players through stats. A major theme is that many players try to maximize their paydays by over-emphasizing scoring, and that this is actually reasonably sensible on their part because decision makers in basketball currently overvalue scoring, and pay accordingly. It does look like that's slowly changing, at least according to this article.
For the rest of the story, I recommend the book. I have no interest in sports whatsoever but one of my stats geek friends does, and he accords it a place of honor in his bookshelf.
The "moneyball" idea doesn't translate quite as well in basketball. One, it's a significantly less statistical game than baseball. Athleticism doesn't translate perfectly to numbers and individual stats can be largely effected by teammates.
By the way, some committee leaders think it's a great idea: http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/823
says Nancy Grasmick, Maryland's state superintendent of schools, in a recent article in the American School Boards Journal. "If you're teaching to the test [...] then we don't see anything wrong with that."
I'm surprised this article didn't mention Dean Oliver or this book: http://www.amazon.com/Basketball-Paper-Rules-Performance-Ana...
Glad to see my hometown team developing new basketball statistics :-)
Also, help defense makes a huge difference - just ask Marcus Camby :).
You'd need to watch deviations from the average points the guy scores. Otherwise whoever is guarding the enemy star player looks bad.
To give a more concrete example, a team with a great defensive center gives the guards flexibility to play tighter man to man, because they can more readily afford to let the guy they're guarding get by them (thanks to their "backup", the center). This has the additional consequence of implying that they give up less room on jump shots.
Another thing to consider is steals. A steal is really big because it obviously prevents the opponent from scoring, and frequently leads to fast break opportunities. However, it's misleading to simply look at the number of steals a player gets. Some players get steals within the "flow of the game", whereas others get them through gambling (I don't have a quantitative source for this, but anyone who's watched Larry Hughes play knows what I'm talking about) for steals, meaning that whenever they fail to get the steal, they also end up way out of position, often leading to an easy score for the opponent.
The list of variables goes on and on....
While I love Posey (Celtics fan here), it takes a foundation of superstar talent first to even have a chance.
Many people take for granted the 20-30 points, that the team scoring leader puts up every night, and start to look elsewhere for that magic winning element. Without the consistent play of the scorer (and the attention that draws from defense) guys like Posey would be exploited by a good team.