Okay so why is on/off more valuable to you than BPM or epm which do show massive improvements in Green over the past four seasons? Show your work. Look around and ask yourself what some of the most stubborn Green doubters(the sincere ones) over the past few years are changing their minds. They probably watch rocket games so they can see the massive progress he's made. Are you a Rocket fan?
We don't doubt the tracking data. What we question is the method of defining "gravity" which has nothing to do with all those technology. It's a human methodology. It's just weird that the metric would not include the best offense generating player in the top 10 list. Either "gravity" as defined by this metric is not what we normally think or important contexts aren't specified.
I think I explained it quite well. Ball handling guards who have have an outside shot that is feared enough to cover are going to have a more omnipresent form of gravity. For example have you ever seen Jokic get face guarded while walking up the court? Im sure you can find one off instances but then a player like Green who obviously is nowhere close to Jokic level often does get face guarded walking up the court. What Amen did to Curry off ball we seen the best perimeter defenders do to Green with the face guarding off ball. And then with the ball compared to someone like Alpi, Green's gravity is going to be felt in more parts of the half court where Alpi's gravity is only going to be felt when he's posting up. The way they track the data does benefit primary ball handling guards but look at the list. Outside of Green is there some anomaly for ball handling guards with gravity here? Is Tyus Jones on here? Everyone on this list outside of Jalen are lead ball handling guards that make sense to be at the top of a "gravity" list. Also yes @AlperenSengun did question how the data was accumulated and questioned my claim they use optical tracking data.
I doubt it. For some people analysis of basketball comes down to staring at a ts% number and a on/off number and nothing beyond that.
it is not the part about tracking. That is certainly the case, how else would they do it. It is what they measure using tracking data. He claimed Something that doesn’t match with the description. And I am trying to understand what the stat measures not to debunk it. It is actually impossible to go either way on it without knowing what it measures. When you market a stat with a name and without an actual definition people can take it as something very different than it actually measures. the only part about debunking that is true, yes I am a little bit more suspicious and reactive when it comes from a poster who spammed every thread with on/off numbers of green for ever until green lost his edge on it and he is giving lectures about how noisy the stat is. I know I should just ignore but sometimes I fall for the trap.
If you approached this in good faith you'd see my explanation and my explanation doesn't make one player like Alpi better than Green. I'm just saying the way they track it will make primary ball handling guards with gravity be at the top. Because if you measure the average distance of all defenders to a given offensive player at any given time, a guard is more likely to have defenders close to them as their gravity is in effect even when they walk up the court due to things like full court presses and face guarding. Defenses don't usually face guard bigs off ball when they walk up.
All this just shows that this metric doesn't really give us a lot of meaningful information like the word "gravity" conveys (i.e how much defenses worry about certain player) because it privileges certain style of players. The description also mentions about using of screen. What about players (e.g. Harden) who don't like screen but prefer 1 on 1 iso? How do they measure their gravity?
James Harden is a pnr savant. Modern NBA defenses try to switch a lot and therefore Harden hunts for weaker defenders to switch on but his bread and butter isn't iso. It's pnr ball handling. That is the possession type he dominates and that is the possession type he does most of his playmaking and scoring from. Almost all his assists come off the pnr. I don't know how this doesn't give meaningful information. Does Jalen Green discredit the entire top ten that much for you? All those guards make sense to be ranked here outside of Green but then you realize the Rockets have the highest concentration of non shooters in high level roles which does elevate Green to this list. At the very least you can take away from the gravity list here that it's the ball handling guards that have the most gravity. Is that narrowed down enough for you to see value in the list? Is it fine then if we just call this gravity ranking list a "gravity ranking list of ball handling wings and guards"? Is that okay then? And yes your old school traditional iso scorers like Joe Johnson or Carmelo Anthony don't have much offensive gravity relative to ball handling scoring guards that do stuff like operate the pnr.
First off, Harden in his prime playing for MDA was documented as not wanting screens. He thought it crowded his space. He might have changed his style after his physical decline. But at his peak, Harden was one of the most "gravity" players. Second, this metric also measure off-ball gravity. That's why Curry is at the top. Curry uses lots of screens to free himself off ball. So it's not just the ball-handling guards. And like I said, this thing has a lot to do with the kind of teammates you have and the kind of schemes your team uses. So it's a very narrow kind of metric. If you have to qualify a metric with a lot of contexts then it doesn't really give you a lot of useful information about the impact of a player. (BTW, this is true about most individual defensive metrics too. I am usually very skeptical about people using those numbers to say "this guy is a good/bad defender.")
Is curry not a primary ball handler? Yes players who are a combo of primary ball handler, feared off ball shooting threat, poor shooting threats surrounding the etc are going to be on the top of this list. It's overall gravity so it measures off ball and on-ball. There are many guards who dribble the ball in the league. Green is top 10 in overall gravity amongst that group of players. Everyone in the top ten makes sense in there context outside of Green but it does make sense when you account for the players around Green.
What you’re describing applies to all advanced metrics. If you put them in a ranking, they are messy. So I assumed what we normally do is acknowledge the weakness in the data and make a guesstimated inference. As fchowd mentioned, Jaylen Williams looks garbage in some advanced data. So does Banchero. There are lots of examples like that. We don’t treat that data like holy grail, neither should you do it with this one. As I’ve said before, go watch a couple of Sloan conferences. The creators of these metrics don’t treat them as though they’re holy grail. Even if you line them all up. Unless - as they’ve discovered - you have 5 years of data across a variety of contexts these things are shaky. I just find it interesting because I wonder if every other time gravity has ever been mentioned anywhere, did you decide to focus on the weakness of the metric rather than the general direction? There are no bad players at the top of that list. Jalen Green is our leading scorer, he gets face guarded a lot and especially when he’d hold onto the ball too often teams are content to double him. Seems like a great but imperfect thing.
no, it doesn’t apply to most advanced metrics and it is not about weakness of data. You can get complete formulas or detailed explanations for most advanced metrics, look at win shares, epm etc. then with this knowledge you can evaluate why a player does or doesn’t perform well in that metric. The stat is not a final answer but if you don’t know how the stat is calculated you cannot understand why certain players do well others don’t. in the gravity case we don’t know how it is calculated, so basically we don’t know what it tells us about the players on the list. It is not a weakness issue, it is about what it measures. A poster claimed it measures particular something so I looked up the description but the description doesn’t say that. It suggests that it measures how you are defended off the screens, which is very good for green to be high in that list. It is just not what he says and personally I wouldn’t call it gravity either.
Nah, you’re just selectively reverse engineering that one. Any of those metrics, if you set them up as league-wide rankings (as you have with gravity), they will show their weaknesses. There are exactly 0 coaches who treat those metrics the way you’re describing. Everyone treats them as faulty and that’s because these metrics are in their infancy. We know how the gravity is calculated. You just don’t like it is all, but that's besides the point. Every time anyone has mentioned gravity as a metric, this is the metric they use. Honestly, it sounds like you’re on a bitter witch hunt of said poster because you keep bringing him up out of nowhere. You pretended as though the camera data claim was bogus when it was on one of the primary tabs of the website. Someone who cares about this truth is not missing that. You’re just flinging poo here. I don’t really care about that personal thing you have going on. I just wanted to note how pedantic you’re being about a standard imperfection in the advanced metrics world. It would be like me spending 3 pages over-explaining the weaknesses in on/off. It wouldn't be false but it would not be genuine or representative. We can talk about every advanced metric’s weakness and some are better than others, but the exaggeration here is odd.
https://www.gq.com/story/nba-nickna...n the case of Jalen,woman 17 years his senior. Jalen Green: The Ad Hominem Fallacy Per Wikipedia, the ad hominem fallacy is a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than the substance of the argument itself. In the case of Jalen Green, the mercurial Houston Rockets shooting guard, fans were once quick to poke holes in his often infuriating shot selection, questionable defense, and the fact that he is dating a woman 17 years his senior. But this year Green has undoubtedly made the leap. His defense and shooting has improved, he’s gotten much more efficient offensively, and he’s become one of the faces of a Rockets team that will return to the playoffs for the first time since the the Bubble. With this step forward, Green has shielded himself from the kind of basketball criticism that defined his early career. If you’re hating on him now, it’s probably a fallacious ad hominem attack.
i'm not quite sure where to find certain stats but I remember Jalen used to be one of the most blocked players in the league. I'd wager he's massively improved on that this season... but I can only report from the good ole "eye test" on this front.
