John Hollinger, one of the better (if not best) analyst at ESPN, has included Yao on his "All-Underrated Team". http://insider.espn.go.com/nba/insider/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&id=2378068 PG - Jameer Nelson, Jason Terry, Mo Williams SG - Jason Richardson SF - Gerald Wallace, Andrei Kirilenko, Luol Deng, Josh Childress PF - Elton Brand, Nazr Mohammed C - Yao Ming, Jackie Butler Here's what he said: and
Underrated by who, the average fan knows what brand and Kirilenko can do. Jason Richardson is not underrated but he is a lot better shooter than I thought. these guys may not get superstar publicity but they aren't superstars, except for ming. people may not see what ming is doing right now, but they will.
Hollinger's always been a fan of Yao. That's because his stat evaluations benefit the strong "per-minute" players. And Yao's been stellar at "per-minute" stats for 3 years now. The difference this year is that Yao is putting up that kind of production while playing big minutes, which is much more impressive in my book.
Because it is such a hot-button with me, I have to bring it up despite Yao: Adjusting for minutes is the worst manipulation of stats in sports. There's almost always big reasons why players get the bench time they do, be it Swift's mental incompetence and munchkin heart, foul trouble, or stamina. Yao's only now starting to develop himself into a 35+ MPG game. He used to be worthless after 5 minutes on the court and prone to silly fouls. His stamina has leaped, not only allowing him to play more but to play at full strength from start to finish. Take home message: Yao good. Stats per 40 bad. Evan
exactly, if a player like yao could have stayed on the court 40 minutes last season, he would have. the reason said player can't stay on the court factors into the evaluation of that player. but swift is the best example, fans talked themselves into believing he was going to be in the top half of fowards by evaluating his 40 min stats.
seriously...when will sports writers just give it up and say shaq is done. they are a bunch of pansies who won't dare say anything other than shaq is the most dominating player ever and that its heresy to say yao could actually be better than shaq now. shaq is the #2 center in the NBA right now and he is NOT the most dominating player ever. shaq's ft% hurts his team, he is not in good health, and he is only averaging 30mpg because he is averaging 4 fouls per game. next season yao will embarrass shaq and people will finally quit saying shaq is dominating and realize that its a different era.
That's true but there is a big difference between pro-rating a guy's stats who plays 30 minutes a game and a guy who plays 15. The 30 minute guy (formerly Yao) definitely was playing against the guys starters and a credible case could be made that he would have averaged closer to 20/10 if he played 35 minutes. To extrapolate a pure part-time player like Stro (who does not play major minutes against the opponents' best) would be a major stretch.
I disagree. If that's the case, then why do they usually do a good job predicting who will be "stars" when they get more minutes? Stats per 40 showed that Michael Redd and Zach Randolph would get big-time numbers when played more minutes, and it happened. It happened with Yao as well. Same with Tracy. Per-minute numbers showed that Darko would be an exceptional shot-blocker with more time (Hollinger observed this in his books) and that's shown to be true in Orlando. Check out Hollinger's PER rankings each year (which is a adjusted per minute), and the leaders over the course of a season are almost always stars or guys who turn out to be stars when their coach decides to play them more minutes. There are exceptions, I'm sure, but in general per-minute production is a sensible stat, assuming your looking at a large enough sample. Stat guys contend that around 250+ minutes gives a good indication of what a player will produce per minute. Obviously, it's stupid to look at a guys numbers when he's played only 40 minutes in a season over the course of several games and get a good idea of what his production will be. But with enough minutes, you can usually guage how good he is. Per-minute stats certainly are definitely more informative than per-game stats. That's a valid point with Yao, but he's an exception. Most players don't have the stamina/foul trouble issues he had in the past. Regarding Swift, his problem isn't his numbers. If he got 35+ minutes consistently every night, he'd put up some nice stats per game. The problem is that he'd be extremely inconsistent. Half the time he might give you 20/10, and the other half he'll give you 8/4. Not to mention other negative attributes that aren't captured in the box score, like forgetting where to be in a set or not running back in transition. So, it's not an issue so much with the 40 minute stats, but rather focusing too much on them without considering other factors. It isn't so much per game minutes that's the key, but rather total minutes played. Unless the guy is getting those 5 minutes a game purely in garbage time, in which case obviously the numbers are much less informative. But suppose a player played every game of the season, 10 minutes per game, and he played it during the heat of the game (say, to begin each third quarter). Over the whole season, that's 820 minutes of data we have to work with. That's enough of a sample to get a good idea what his production would be like if he played 30-40 minutes a game. Certainly, his numbers per 40 minutes would be more indicative of how good he is than simply looking at his per game numbers. The assumption, of course, is he would be capable of playing those minutes without getting tired (or fouling out). Most NBA players, once they get used to the routine and assuming they're relatively young, can eventually manage those kind of minutes comfortably.
