It's an ordinal ranking, based on these stats: 1. team winning percentage 2. turnovers 3. 3 pt field goal percentage 4. field goal percentage 5. free throw percentage 6. rebounds 7. assists 8. steals 9. blocked shots 10. points per game Understand, its a very bad measure of player skills. * Taking people's stats and rating them on a 1,2,3 basis removes the value of a superior stat (like, say, getting 15 assists a game). * shooting percentage is worth 3 times as much as shots scored. * team winning percentage has little to do with individual player skill, but oddly, if this rating system didn't have it, it would have been a lot worse. * it has no sense of scale. Being 25th in 3 point shooting percentage is as bad as being the 25th best scorer at your position. If you check out the posted URL, you'll find they rated all 5 positions by this method, and it seems pretty bad in all the positions they listed. Dave
1. team winning percentage - TERRIBLE LAST YEAR 2. turnovers - ALMOST 4 PER GAME 3. 3 pt field goal percentage - MIDDLE OF THE PACK 4. field goal percentage - MIDDLE OF THE PACK 5. free throw percentage - GOOD THERE 6. rebounds - VERY GOOD FOR A PG 7. assists - POOR 8. steals - POOR 9. blocked shots - AVERAGE 10. points per game - TOWARDS THE TOP That lumped together and basing it on that criteria, he is right where he should be.
Last I looked, in total assists, Steve Francis was 31st last year, but if you extrapolate to a 82 game season, he'd have gotten 520 assists, which would have put him about 10th or so. He's not a great assist guy, but he gets a lot of non-scoring offense. If you figure his secondary offense as: rebounds + assists + steals + blocks - turnovers - penalties / games played you get (401 + 362 + 71 + 25 - 225 - 172 ) / 57 462 / 57 8.105 secondary points a game. Now that isn't Jason Kidd or Gary Payton range, but it's better than Steve Nash or Sam Cassell. His biggest issue last year was that 41% FG percentage. If he gets back to 45% or better, it'd help his offense tremendously.
There has to be a flaw in any criteria that results in Eric Snow and Steve Francis being seen equally effective at ANYTHING...!!!!!!!!
unfortunately, most of the players ahead of Francis are on winning teams, sans Andre Miller and if it were not for his 10.9 assists, he would not be ahead of Steve! What does this mean? Win and make it into the playoffs and Steve will jump 3-5 slots. Make it to the Western Conference Finals and he jumps to top 3, Finals - 1 or 2. bottomline is that they rate these guards on the intangibles too. Steve has yet to prove his leadership and this is judged on wins and losses and playoffs...no fair sometimes, but true. He will never be fully recognized in the elite until he wins and makes playoffs. Some wil recognize him, but some won't.
John Hollinger, who wrote a book http://www.brasseysinc.com/Books/1574885111.htm called The Pro BasketBall Prospectus, had this to say about his ratings system, compared to the USA Today ratings system: The url for the quote is http://www.alleyoop.com/prates.htm Dave
