Can you measure things like leadership, determination, intensity, heart, desire, dedication, toughness, effort, attitude, etc... If yes, how? Or are they unmeasurable? Has Morey ever discussed, would love to hear his thoughts.
I remember morey talking about some of those topics at the Sloan analytics Confrence, but I can't remember in what video at all. I remember him saying hey recognise everything that makes up a player from skill to physiological to those intangibles, and he was saying that if they do their research they can mitigate the risk. But sometimes the risk is worth taking. As talent > anything else (note- I'm fairly sure at the time morey was talking about draft day picks in this instance)
leadership, determination, intensity, heart, desire, dedication, toughness, effort, attitude..... My eye test: Howard has none of them.
I can think of stats that share correlation with intangibles, for example in the case of Pat Bev. His box stats are virtually weaker than Lin’s, but from other stats, the team plays better with him (larsv8 posted the numbers in his epic battles in the Lin threads). TTNN also posted numbers on the most active players on the court in relation to all teams, and PBev was among the highest I believe; that’s gotta count for something. You can combine defensive rating with # of steals and maybe # of blocks or see how many times a player has saved the ball or forced a turnover through various means, including drawing charges and such. Or in Dwight’s case, how many shots he has just affected. I think maybe you can compare the opposing players’ average numbers with the number/percentage against Dwight. So for e.g., if Parker averages 70% scoring in the paint, but while playing the rockets, he consistently gets 30%, then maybe Dwight has something to do with it, as well as the defending pg.
Eyetest. We have guys with great talent, but they don't have that Jordan hustle and they lack a sense of urgency.
Effort isn't an intangible. Effort can be measured. You can measure players' work rate, the distance players cover in a game, like they do in soccer, to compare players activeness within similar roles. I.e., you can't compare the distance a rim protector covers versus a perimeter defender, a rim protector, by definition, should be comparatively stationary. You also have ancillary stats like rebounds, charges taken, deflections and so forth to base effort on. These are all quantifiable.
By definition something that is intangible cannot be measured. What you're really asking are two questions: 1) Are things like "leadership" tangible (i.e., can "leadership" be measured in some way)? 2) If so, do they have an effect on basketball performance? I think the answer to both is yes. But only if you force people to get very specific, which is hard because most people don't like getting pegged down on things they themselves are unclear on. For example, people use the word "leadership" to mean a lot of different things at once, but there are definitely ways to pare down certain facets and design ways to measure them. For example, if you consider leadership to be the willingness of others to follow you into bad situations, then you could just design a survey and ask people whether or not they'd be willing to follow Person X into Situation A. That would be, in some sense, a measure of "leadership". (This doesn't mean that leadership is only this thing, but that this specific facet of it is what you are measuring and evaluating.) Then you can do things like correlate whether or not the teams with players who have a high "willing to follow" score perform better relative to their peers.
This is a topic I've frequently discussed. I don't believe there are 'intangibles' because I believe that you can measure the effect of leadership, passion, and so on by their effect on a team's success from possession to possession. And the eye test backs this up. For example, you'll often see a game get testy with fierce competition, and after that happens, you'll often see one team rise to the occassion and start playing better. You can measure that affect in terms of a team's success on the possessions immediately following that event. That is to say, you can break it down and hypothesize that the event yielded better performance in many facets that directly affect how often a team is successful on every possession after the event. Of course, the caveat of sample size, and correlation versus causation still exist, but as usual statistics is more of a tool to diminish the bias that exists with the eye test; not the end all be all.
It's the mental toughness argument reincarnated! Ahhhh! :grin: Seriously though, sports are filled with hard to measure intangibles that are all important in varying degrees. If we could get an exact statistical measure of every aspect of the game in a nice, neat package, why bother playing or watching the games? You'd miss the upsets, the underdog stories and all the other great joys of sports.
Saying you can measure something is not the same thing as saying that you can predict the future. Nobody anywhere has ever made the argument that we should just not play the games because we can measure everything. That's a hyperbolic straw man. Every single move and ever single permutation of a game has already been cataloged for chess. That doesn't prevent people from wanting to play, reviewing old games, or watching the current masters play against each other.
My point (and I think you're agreeing) was that the superior team on paper does not always win the game. Statistical measurements are important but cannot account for every factor in a game. I was playing Devil's Advocate in favor of those intangibles. Although it would be fun to play a game of Chess where my queen keeps running ISOs and my Knight never gets to see the board. :grin:
If you're saying that you think there are intangible factors that can affect a basketball game that can never, ever be measured, then I'm not 100% sure I agree, barring "free will" as one of those factors. Another way of putting it is that I agree with you from a practical perspective, and contingently disagree with you from a philosophical perspective. But really, until we literally get to the point where we can predict the future, I don't think it's fair to bring it up in the context of statistical (or any other) measurement, because literally no one is making that argument. And if we do get to that point, then the question becomes whether or not we might as well do anything, let alone play sports... I know we like to talk about things like passion, clutchness, intensity, leadership, etc. etc. etc., but does anyone here think that we won't eventually get to a point where we can, in some way, measure these things? Like, maybe it won't be perfect, but it will be close to how points-per-minute or points-per-possession help you measure how good a player is offensively. I feel like this is a matter of time, rather than an impossibility, and I think most people would agree, right?
Yes. They can be measured. Just take the difference between individual stats and RAPM. If a quality in a player leads to winning, then the team will perform better when he's playing. This is how Morey found Battier. When Battier was on the court, Memphis was simply a lot better regardless of who else was out there. And if a player supposedly has "intangibles" but doesn't affect team performance, then his intangibles are worthless in terms of player value.
