[ESPN] John Hollinger reveals new statistics: VA and EWA

Who's that guy? I thought it was ok, but it seems like he's just recycling old material. I could have sworn he's written about value above replacement before.

It's just a common sense way of looking at the boxscore. It summarizes the info in the boxscore in a consistent, easy to understand way.

However, I would say I've become much more skeptical over how useful PER and its derivatives like VA are over the past couple years.

There was a nice commentary on PER on TrueHoop today:
http://myespn.go.com/blogs/truehoop/0-38-359/PER-on-Trial.html

 

2+2=4


Most of the time at least..

 

Well, even something as simple as 2+2=4 require context. In this case an assumption that it's in base 5 or higher. So numbers can always lie.

My personal beef with those who automatically throw out "stats are misleading" all the time is that THEY personally use misleading stats all the time.

People who criticize newer stats cite points/rebounds/assists numbers like they're from the bible or something.

 

It's not just saying that whoever played more minutes is more valuable. If that were the case, Lebron wouldn't still be #1 in this category because he has played fewer minutes. It's trying to correct for the number of minutes played so you can get an idea of how valuable a player is.

 

This stood out to me as well. It kind of makes sense to me as well, although I may be thinking about it wrong. Among players who don't play that many minutes, wing players have the lowest average PER. I was thinking that perhaps that's because these days, when a team takes a risk on a young player that's not really that good yet, it's usually the really athletic, but not quite a basketball player type.

 

I think a quick way of looking at it is seeing the young, athletic PFs who contribute very well in limited minutes, which every contending team seems to have around...

Yours truly, Carl Landry
Millsap
Powe
Brandon Bass
J.J Hickson
Josh Powell
Anthony Randolph
Channing Frye
Darrell Arthur
Ryan Anderson
Luc Richard Mbah a Moute

etc. etc.

 

Stats are only as good as the people taking them down.

Anyway you'll never have stats for intangible things. Give me a stat for the guy throwing himself at a lose ball before it heads of out bounds or a stat for a lock down defender who just refuses to allow an easy pass and changes the way an offense is going and then I'll start listening.

Till then this stat revolution is good information, just just one part of how a player should be reviewed.

 

Where did I say that's the case?

Since Lebron et al all play SG SF position, the only difference the formula makes in addition to PER is minutes played. It's called monotone transformation.

 

That's what I took this statement to mean:

But Lebron comes out on top even though he's played fewer minutes, so this statement is not true.

 

I wouldn't be surprised that Morey and his minions are tracking these things. Did you read the article where the reporter asked him about knowing players making a defensive stop at crucial time? Morey answered, "Why do you think we have Chuck Hayes?"

When people think of stats, they think of boxscore stats, or better, the Hollinger numbers or things from 82games. But there are a lot of other numbers they look at that we outsiders don't know. Intangibles are tangibles. You just need to know what to look.

Actually, the hard part is not getting the numbers. It is the analysis. How much value do that kind of hustle play add to winning games as opposed to say, getting an offensive rebound, or setting a teammate up for an easy basket?

It is easy to say, this guy hustles, or is tough, or has leadership. But how much does that translate to winning?

 

That's it. Kobe maybe is better player, but the most valuable for his team? ...The team that acknowledge more his absence. That's pure concept of value, isn't?

 

John "Chimpy" Hollinger's statistics are Exposed:

 

The BS Report on ESPN has a good podcast with Morey himself on just this subject.


Sure they have stats on players that are ridiculously in depth, but I still think that there are a lot of things you simply can't put a number on.



Actually, you just got me thinking. I wonder if they have a flopping stat!

 

That's pretty good, and you're right. His EWA is very, very rough as an indicator of how many wins a player adds. Basketball is too complicated to be able to estimate something like that just based on individual numbers and minutes played. A suggestion I've seen mentioned elsewhere for improving his formula is to take calculate how many VAs the player have relative to all his teammates, and then award that proportion of the wins his team got. It's still essentially would be based on PER, but it gives the player extra or less credit depending on how many wins his team got. Based on that, LeBron would lead the league by an even wider margin, because his team has more wins than any one else.

That said, your article is mistitled. It's called "Why Kobe is the MVP, Part 1." I didn't see any argument put forward as to why Kobe is the MVP. If we all acknowledge that Hollinger's formulas are very noisy indicators of whatever he considers important in an MVP race, I'm interested to see the superior evidence on the other side supporting Kobe. After all, neither is the MVP by default. Whoever eventually wins, there needs to be a good reason why they are more deserving than the other.

 

It's the "earth is flat" syndrome. It's the same mob mentality that led people want to throw Galileo in jail. Like someone said, a lot of people *are* stupid. Not all of Hollinger's critics are stupid, mind you -- there are a few who actually have cogent and substantial arguments against his work. But the majority of them are plainly idiots who find that their brain hurts too much when math is presented to them, so they find it easier to just shoot the messenger instead. On the Internet, especially, it is rather rare to find a critic of a Hollinger article who actually bothered to even read through the article he is criticizing.

 

That is interesting. I too, at first glance, was surprised at the coarse simplicity of the EWA formula. I'm not really attaching too much importance to it myself -- for all the weaknesses of win shares and other related approaches that have become commonplace among basketball stat geeks, none of them are this pedestrian, and none are wholly based upon an inherently flawed box score.

 

I don't get it. So if we can't go by normal statistical means (where LeBron blows Kobe away), and we can't go by "advanced" statistics (where LeBron still leads comfortably), and we can't go by team record (where they're basically tied, with Kobe having Pau Gasol)...what argument is there for Kobe over LeBron other than "he seems better when he's playing."

Think about it -- if you had no stats, wouldn't you think that Kobe was like 15% at his 3's than LeBron? I would, but you can't deny the fact that their 3 point percentage is nearly identical with a gigantic sample size for the season.

I need 1 person to tell me why Kobe is more deserving than LeBron other than "he just is a better player, watch the games." I still haven't seen anything else that suggests that he's having a better year.

 

The one thing people have in the back of their minds is Kobe's supposedly superior clutchness, but even that is debatable: the numbers say that while LeBron doesn't score (or shoot) as much as Kobe does in clutch situations, he actually scores more efficiently (eFG of 60.3% compared to Kobe's 53.3%), and gets to the line more (17.2 FTM to Kobe's 15.1). Personally I don't think there is any evidence, visual or numerical, that truly validates a choice of Kobe over LeBron for the MVP award. What LeBron has done this season is truly amazing. It's not a slight to Kobe or Wade who, in any other year, would be worthy of the honors, but LeBron is just a cut above the rest of the field this year in my opinion.

 

People think MVP is the same thing as best player. You could legitimately argue that Kobe is the "best player". So, if you could have one player on your side in the last quarter of a game 7, who do you think? I can understand why someone would take Kobe (I'm not sure I would, but I get it).

But I think MVP really is about who has done more for their team over the course of a season. By that criteria, you're right. It's hard to think of a reason why Kobe deserves it more.

 

But you can put a number on "results". It's like when Morey scouted Battier. He didn't know exactly what Battier brings, but knew that Battier produces when he's on the court.

You don't have to be able to explain every phenomenon through numbers. But as long as you understand what kind of players win you basketball games, it's all good.