Yao's recent play got me interested to look at some of his past game-by-game stats. I decided to graph his game-by-game ppg & rpg stats from 04/05 thru the current 05/06 season. I debated putting this into two other threads on the bbs but decided to create one on its own. Here they are: NOTES: a) blue markers are actual stats per game, b) blue curved line is a 5th order polynomial trend line, c) red jagged line is a 4 game moving average, d) 81 games on are the 05/06 season stats. I've highlighted the 21 ppg bar to help highlight trends. The first thing to note is that this quantifies what we've all noticed since the start of the 05/06 season and that Yao is looking more aggressive than he did during 04/05. You can see a difference in the moving average trend line from 80 games on where it begans climbing toward the 21 ppg bar. (Actually even in the later part of 04/05 - 70 games on you see a marked difference). The variance between the peaks and valleys are also diminishing meaning more consistency. The 2nd thing that I noted which we've all seen during the games is the almost night and day shift we've seen from him in just the 05/06 season. Note the moving average trend from 81-100 games where it is climbing but hovering just below the 21 ppg mark. At 100+ games the mov. avg. jumps up dramatically with 4 peaks above the 21 ppg mark like he's reaching another level in his performance. I've also graphed his rebounds per game and posted the results in another thread but I'll repost them here for completeness. NOTES: a) blue markers are actual stats per game, b) green is a 5th order polynomial trend line, c) yellow is a 4 game moving average. There's a definite shift from his 04/05 performance in the 05/06 season. I put a thicker line at 10 rpg to help draw out the visibility a bit. First off you'll notice starting in 05/06 (81 games on) he's been steadily increasing his rebounds per game. The moving avg trends show this as you can see Yao edging and crossing into the 10 rpg. 2ndly the swings in the moving average for the 05/06 season are not near as dramatic as they were in the 04/05 season. I'm guessing this means he's also getting much more consistent in his rebounding. 3rdly Yao has established this increased rebounding trend over a 34 game stretch over the course of the 05/06 season which is by far longer than any stretch of games he's had any upswing in rebounding in 04/05. All in all very encouraging to see. Has the sleeping giant been awakened?
This is very impressive! I hope you are right about this being an indication of Yao Ming becoming more consistant in rebounding and scoring. I hope that he is able to keep this up, and continue the upward trend. Since he's come back from surgery, I think his upward spikes have been more dramatic than before.
I love it. A real analysis to back up an opinion. Nice work. As your graphs point out, its definitely a positive trend. I'm optimistic that this trend will continue...
Career Averages Rebounds YR TM G GS MIN FG FG% 3P 3P% FT FT% STL BLK TO PF OFF DEF TOT AST PTS 02-03 Hou 82 72 29.0 4.9-9.8 .498 0.0-0.0 .500 3.7-4.5 .811 0.4 1.8 2.1 2.8 2.4 5.8 8.2 1.7 13.5 03-04 Hou 82 82 32.8 6.5-12.5 .522 0.0-0.0 .000 4.4-5.4 .809 0.3 1.9 2.5 3.3 2.4 6.6 9.0 1.5 17.5 04-05 Hou 80 80 30.6 6.7-12.2 .552 0.0-0.0 .000 4.9-6.2 .783 0.4 2.0 2.5 3.7 2.6 5.8 8.4 0.8 18.3 05-06 Hou 34 34 33.4 7.5-14.9 .505 0.0-0.0 .000 5.0-6.0 .828 0.5 1.5 2.4 3.6 2.5 7.1 9.6 1.2 20.0 Looks good to me
Very nice analysis. However, you missed one fact that Yao is playing 10% more minutes this year, so PPG and RPG should be 10% more as well. That's roughly what he've got this year. The problem is his FG% is down 5%. This is not good for the team.
As ymc said, Yao has been playing steadily more minutes from the beginning of the 2004/2005 season up to now, so even assuming his play remained consistent we should see improvement in ppg and rpg. Yao's biggest improvement of late has been staying out of foul trouble and not turning the ball over. As far as his rebouding numbers, I prefer to look at rebounding percentage instead of RPG. And even better, to look at offensive rebounding and defensive rebounding separately, as they really are two very different parts of the game: 2004-2005: offensive rebounding: 9.1% defensive rebounding: 19.3% overall: 14.3% 2005-2006: offensive rebounding: 8.2% defensive rebounding: 21.1% overall: 14.9% So, he is rebounding the ball better overall, but he's down on offensive boards. I would guess it's partly due to McGrady being out of the lineup so much, so Yao is taking a larger percentage of the shots while on the floor. As for scoring, Yao's per minute scoring is the same as last season right now (23.9 pts/40min). But Yao was much more efficient last season, so I would say he's not scoring the ball quite as well so far this season. But he is making up for extra missed shots by not turning the ball over as often, per touch.
Well, his percentage has gone down, but I don't think it's to the point of hurting the Rockets' play. A couple of his misses in the clutch against the Warriors were aggravating, but overall he did great. He missed a lot of point-blankers that game, I guess stuff just wasn't falling for him.
Yao has gradually been getting better....i am most impressed with his ability to stay out of foul trouble. It has translated into better production. Keep up the good work.
He may be playing 10% more minutes from last year but not from 03-04 but he's shown improvment over those numbers as well. He's shooting 5% less but that still means he's shooting 50% and being more aggressive on top of that. You get more aggressive and your shooting percentage is going to drop. I think the production in other areas of his game well overshadows a drop in shooting percentage.
Yeah, his percentage may have gone down. But I don't care. It's just an indicator that he has figured out he has to take more shots and even shoot over the double team. He's figured out what is best for the team. The efficiency and shot percentage will improve as he gets used to those shots. We can only dream about the next phase of his development when he calls for the ball and doesn't get it, like from Wesley the other night, and he gets in Wesley's ear and gives him you know what over it. If he would have just called for the ball the other night, I think Wesley would have dumped it to him. I think Wesley was struggling with seeing him because of Wesley's defender's height. If Yao would have just hollered and gotten Wesley to throw it up......man.
If you look at the % increase in PPG and RPG... a 10% increase over last season would have gotten you 20.1 and 9.2... so his production does scale with PT. What hurts him a little is the fact that he only gets 6 free throws a game, which is fewer than last year.
Be careful with spending so much time on tracking yao's stats on graphs. You'll have to do the same for Chuck Hayes, Skip, and McGrady. We'll call you a YOF, if you don't.
Being a PhD in Economics (who does a lot of data analyses), I'm impressed by your work! You don't come up with sth off the top of your mind, but argue with digging the underlying facts out!!! Keep on going~~~
Firstly, 10% more minutes doesn't necessarily lead to 10% more production. If you regress one's production on his minutes, you'll get sth positive, but with declining trend! Secondly, more minutes will however necessarily lead to less FG%. If you regress one's efficiency on his minutes, you'll get sth negtive, and even with increasing trend!
I am most impressed with his ability to stay out of foul trouble as of late. That factor alone will allow his minutes and production to increase. DD
Exactly. Yao is clearly being more aggressive and yet he is staying out of foul trouble! Once Yao starts to build confidence that his new style of play works AND (maybe more importantly) the refs start to give Yao more leway than last year, Yao may make a leap in his productivity.
Thanks for the positive comments folks. Heh - I'm not worried about being labeled. Folks that have seen my trending stuff in the past know I'm a Rockets fan. The effort for the analysis - well that's a another story! It's all pretty manual and time consuming so don't expect me to do this too often ! I've toyed with coding all this so that I can scrape the data automatically and load it into a database etc. but alas that's just too much work in conjunction with real life responsibilities!
