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Jalen Rose's take on analytics in basketball

RJKarl said:
Your own post contradicts your position.

The Celtics built a team around high draft picks, a FA and a trade. The Sixers built their team by tanking and not taking threes. The Spurs took the fewest threes in the NBA this year (5th fewest the year before and 8th fewest the year before that).

Additionally, you dishonestly neglected a central point in my post. I said analytics should be A tool.

My bad, this is your MO...
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lol jesus idk why i even engage

two smart analytically-minded people can draw different conclusions from the same dataset!
 
RJKarl said:
He is right about the moronic stats that show Harden as anything better than a well below average defender (which is way better than being historically awful as he was for the first half dozen years of his career). Having CP3, Capela and even Tucker (previous Ariza and Luc), artificially inflates "stats" about his defense. Steph's defensive stats are also grossly inflated because of playing next to Draymond, Klay and even KD. If you put either of them on an average defensive team, that team's D would drop dramatically.
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This is true, those players wouldn't be as good individually if they were on teams with worse team defense. Matchups matter too, as does quality of opponent as do lots of other splits. Smart teams will use all these data points together, and not raw numbers.

As to PER, if you can up with something that is allegedly predictive of a player's results, I have two issues with it. First, if you are smart enough to invent that, you should be able to either develop the next generation of it or tweak PER more. Secondly, the person who invented PER has been a senior executive with an NBA for 6.5 seasons with that team not improving and finally falling apart under his leadership. If his analytics were so good, why did the Griz improve dramatically?
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This argument and your hatred of WAR are my two favorites. They're metrics of limited value that most analytics nerds don't particularly like, but they have some value, and pretty decent predictive value too! Doesn't mean they should be used in a vacuum or that they're even all that great. The Grizz do have a solid analytics dept, but I also think they have dealt with way too much staff turnover and awful contracts for a while, in the West, and the lottery hasn't been great to them. If I had to guess, the "guy who invented PER" has probably invented lots and lots of metrics the Grizzlies use.

He's also right about the absolute reliance on analytics keep people of color out of senior management positions and that analytics should be A tool in the toolbox not the dominant or only one.
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I don't know enough about the first point except to say that there's a selection bias in all sports for people willing to take internships or low-paying analytics jobs to try and work their way up that skews rich and white. We obviously agree on the analytics being just one part of running a successful organization. Relying on it too heavily is bad! Didn't see this point in your long and hard to read post.

There has yet to be a great NBA team built on analytics. Remember, if not for Jerry West, Klay Thompson would have been traded and there likely would never have been a Warriors' dynasty.
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I wouldn't hire Jerry West to run my stats team and I wouldn't hire this guy, who the Rockets poached from Google, to run my scouting operation.
 
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PhDeac said:
Anybody should take a stats class. Learning basic stats and learning how to write in different styles for different audiences are great skills for people to have that they can use across contexts.
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I would happy if most the country would know better than to think and say "You said this event had a 70% chance of happening and it didn't. Therefore you were WRONG!"
 
This is pretty cool: https://nbathlete.com/

Takes all the measurables at the combine and creates visuals, percentile rankings, player comps, etc.

This guy, for example, is at the 99.6%ile for the NBA at his position, but his tweener size means he'll slip to the mid-second. If you looked only at his tape or only at his numbers you probably wouldn't have a great scout on him as a player.
 
TownieDeac said:
This is true, those players wouldn't be as good individually if they were on teams with worse team defense. Matchups matter too, as does quality of opponent as do lots of other splits. Smart teams will use all these data points together, and not raw numbers.

Harden plays the worst guy in his size range from the opposing team. Any rating that has him above the bottom 20% or so of starting defenders is simply wrong.

This argument and your hatred of WAR are my two favorites. They're metrics of limited value that most analytics nerds don't particularly like, but they have some value, and pretty decent predictive value too! Doesn't mean they should be used in a vacuum or that they're even all that great. The Grizz do have a solid analytics dept, but I also think they have dealt with way too much staff turnover and awful contracts for a while, in the West, and the lottery hasn't been great to them. If I had to guess, the "guy who invented PER" has probably invented lots and lots of metrics the Grizzlies use.

This is one of my favorite arguments. PER is quoted as being nearly biblical. Hollinger was hired because of his analytics abilities and the team has regressed since his arrival.

I don't know enough about the first point except to say that there's a selection bias in all sports for people willing to take internships or low-paying analytics jobs to try and work their way up that skews rich and white. We obviously agree on the analytics being just one part of running a successful organization. Relying on it too heavily is bad! Didn't see this point in your long and hard to read post.



I wouldn't hire Jerry West to run my stats team and I wouldn't hire this guy, who the Rockets poached from Google, to run my scouting operation.
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Jerry West is the best GM/President of Basketball in the history of the NBA. He's done for multiple teams, with multiple budgets, over nearly a forty year period and shows no signs of slowing down. You can have your stats guys, give me the guy who has created multiple dynasties and other successes.

The irony of relying on "analytics" is that the core of them have been used in one form or another for as long as I've been around basketball. Short charts, rebounding charts, defensive tendencies, how a player or team moves have been used for half a century.
 
TownieDeac said:
what's a short chart
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Typo...shot chart...

Thanks for proving my point again. You didn't read my post before making yours. Of course, you double down on it by blaming me. You gotta love it! :)

BTW, the most absolutely useless stat in the NBA (and maybe in all sports) is +/-. This has so many factors that don't come in the number that using it is for people who don't know the game at all. Are you starting? What's the strength of your team? How many minutes does a starter play against opponents' subs? Those a just a few holes in using this "analytic".
 
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For shits, I pulled team stats (until I got bored, stopped after 12 teams) for PER, VORP, Win Shares, 3 Pt Attempt Rate %, and Box Plus/Minus and looked at how well they correlated with wins:

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Here's what I think you can draw from these conclusions--VORP and Win Shares are reeeeeally good predictors of wins. Win shares is obvious, that's a metric where you are actually divvying up wins and assigning player contributions. VORP is a really good predictive stat for a lot of reasons. The other three...not so much, but still a positive correlation as you might expect. And the noisier the metric, the lower the correlation. For example, I didn't limit for minutes, so some of the top 3 pt rate players may have been scrubs who shot threes as the only shots they took. And with PER, it's not only pace normalized, it's normalized so 15 is meant to represent league average, but it's still pretty skewable/stochastic/noisey/whatever you want to call it based on minutes played. If you look at, for example, the fact that Brooklyn has a much better top 10 PER sum than Golden State you can dismiss it offhand as not passing the eye test. It's still a better correlative than three point rate, free throw rate, 2 pt %, pace, rebound rate, almost any counting stat. I wouldn't think anyone would use PER as a deciding factor between two players when you have better ones like VORP or WS or much more advanced stats than that. But I also wouldn't say it has absolutely no use.

Also shutup rj.
 
RJKarl said:
BTW, the most absolutely useless stat in the NBA (and maybe in all sports) is +/-. This has so many factors that don't come in the number that using it is for people who don't know the game at all. Are you starting? What's the strength of your team? How many minutes does a starter play against opponents' subs? Those a just a few holes in using this "analytic".
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You do understand that one can include context in their analysis of a stat, right? And that many advanced stats actually seek to incorporate context into their formulas? And that people who do this are much smarter than you?
 
Plus-minus isn’t even an advanced stat anymore. It’s just something in the box score.
 
:bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl:

Never change Townie...rather than saying you were wrong to make such posts without reading what you complained about , you blamed me twice...as you have always done. It's never your mistake.
 
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