Excellent find! Thank you for sharing. It's very interesting to see what the people say about Morey and the Rockets staff... and their methods.
Good article, and I agree with much of it, but I generally hate sports articles, especially basketball articles in the Times. It's like they have to explain the game and stretch for some cultural observation. Their audience contains few basketball fans, so a pure basketball article won't cut it. It would have been a much better article written for a sports magazine.
Billups is also a pretty good offensive player. You cant just play awesome defense and stink on offense. The other team will cheat on you all day. Great for a 50 win season and first round playoff blowout.
Billups is a real good ball player. I am just saying that some people seem to have a dramatically greater effect on their team than their stats would show. It appears to me that Battier (and now Billups) is in this category - I don't know why and I don't know how to mesaure it. I only watch about 80 Rocket games a year of which about are 15 in person. Somehow that is apparently not enough for me to "understand" the full impact of the players. Morey seems to have a very high opinion of the Battier effect. I am pretty sure DM has a better understanding of the game than I do. If DM likes Battier - so do I. If you have not read Moneyball it is a very interesting and well writtten book. I could be worng but I think Michael Lewis has written articles for the NY Times - germaine to this conversation. I consider the book to actually be a biography of Billy Beane - and not a baseball book. But obviously there is an overlap. One of the revelations is that the traditional stats of Runs, Avg and RBI's has little (actually I think none was the finding) correlation to winning championships, (high correlationtogoodhitters - but that does not lead to championships) and there is a quest to find out how you do measure impact. In separate chapters they talk about this in fielding and pitching also. Daryl Morey and Moneyball have opened my eyes in a different direction - may be a passing phase I don't know. But I no longer believe that points scored and blocks and such are truly meaningfull. I mean we could go back to Wilt vs Russell. Let's face it Wilt owns every stat in the book - the guy was an absolute beast! Russell owns all of the chamionships of that era. Which do you want? Do you want a guy who can make the corner three or do you want a team that wins? It is hard, all my life I have been repeatedly taught that the guy who makes the big shot or the big block is the guy who causes the win. I'm willing to look for something different. It has changed how I watch the game and it has been an interesting trip.
Well I do agree that the box score stats are very much overrated, but not completely so. If you look at the top players according to adjusted +/-, one way to try to estimate a player's value without relying on the boxscore, most of the top players are your traditional superstars -- LeBron, Chris Paul, Dwyane Wade, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, Kevin Garnett, etc. But there are also players who'll typically do very well by that measure that don't put up big "glory" stats. Battier is a good example.
1. This is one of the more enjoyable threads in a while. Good conversation. 2. How awesome would it be if Carl Herrera / Van Gundier was actually Shane Battier?
The only conclusion that i can come to is that none of it (stats) mean anything when singled out. There are so many variables thrown into a +/- stat that it is comical to point to that as the sole reason for a player being valuable. You have to pull from many things. If you can only point to one or two things as evidence of a player being good, chances are he isn't that good.
And the Rockets seem to believe that there are many things Battier does well that makes him valuable. I don't think you can point solely to a +/- stat. Rather, it is an indicator that a player might be doing something really well, or really poorly. The article says that the Rocket didn't fully appreciate how good a player Battier was until they examined his game closely.
Well, yeah, i'm not saying Battier isn't valuable but it's getting old to see people say 'hey idiot look at his +/-, it's great' as if it absolves him of any criticism. There are things that he could do better. One of the best things Battier does is find a way to contribute without being a main option. He just know how to 'fit' with other players, which is great for a championship caliber team with superstars. I'm just not sure that we're that kind of team.
Those are all good points. The problem with +/- or really any stat that tries to boil everything a player does into a single number if you lose a lot of the details. Maybe he looks like pretty good player when you aggregate all the info into a single number, but why is he good? Really, to answer that question you have to look at what he does, not what the team as a whole does with him on the floor.
It really is a good article. I never know Morey does so detailed report. And I am gonna check whether Battier refuses last second heave in future
no joke man....it's the equivalent of deducing that the worst starting position player on the best baseball team in the league is automatically a great player. it's just laughable. putting it simply: let's pretend battier has the best +/- in the league. let's also pretend that he can be cloned into 11 other exact copies of himself (and before the smartass comments roll in, let's say he's the only cloned player in the league). is this now the best team in the league?
