Assist to Turnover Ratio: Why?
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 10, 2007 10:05 AM PST
Email
PrintI have always wondered what the value of Assist-to-Turnover Ratio was. More specifically: Why that particular ratio? I understand that it is supposed to be indicative of a player's ability to make good decisions with the ball, but I cannot figure out how this ratio is a good way to measure that. What it basically tells you is how many Assists a player has per Turnover by taking a player's total Assists and dividing it by his total Turnovers. Not that Assists and Turnovers are completely unrelated events, but they hardly have a cause-and-effect relationship like, for example, Field Goals Attempted and Field Goals Made.
I know you all know what these stats are but I think it will help frame the discussion:
Assist: This is credited to a player that passes the ball to another player that makes a field goal. More specifically, the pass has to "directly lead to a basket" or be given to the player attempting the field goal in a position to score. What is the letter of the rule? I've heard two steps and I've heard two dribbles as far as what the offensive player can do after the pass and before taking the shot. Find me a better definition and I'll make you a dope-ass webpin.
Turnover: Basically, if the player has the ball and then loses possession of it to the other team (without scoring or being fouled or the quarter clock running out etc . . .) or if the player's team has the ball and that player commits an infraction (like an offensive foul or 3-second violation) that causes his team to lose possession of the ball, that player is credited with a Turnover.
So how are these two things related?
To the extent that a player can commit a Turnover attempting an Assist either on the pass or a "pass-and-crash" foul or (and this is a stretch) while trying to get into a position so that he can have a better angle at attempting an assist.
So how are these two statistics completely unrelated?
The answer lies in listing the myriad of ways a player can commit a Turnover without attempting an Assist:
- Dropping a pass (see: Foyle, Adonal)
- Moving/Illegal Screen
- Committing a charge while not attempting an Assist
- Dribbling the ball off his foot
- Having the ball stolen either on a pass, dribble or just holding it (non Assist situation)
- 3-second violation
- Stepping out of bounds (see: what GSOM's widely held untruth about MP2 2007/08)
- Traveling, Carrying, Palming, etc . . . (see: Players, NBA)
- Double-Dribble
- Etc . . .
Dependant versus Independent:
The other thing that makes these statistics very different is that Assists are completely dependent on another player's ability to convert a field goal attempt.
BRICK BROS. We eat Assists for breakfast.
Whereas Turnovers are mostly independent of other players to the extent that anything on a basketball court can happen without regard to the positioning/activity of the other 9 players on the floor. I would say that over 90% (observational only) of Turnovers are completely preventable by the individual credited with the Turnover.
Get me the rock!
So why do they measure Assist-to-Turnover Ratio and how does that Ratio tell you something about a player that is useful that could not be garnered by looking at Turnovers and Assists per 40 minutes, side-by-side?
So my questions are:
1. Why does Assist-to-Turnover Ratio exist and why are two, mostly unrelated statistics, displayed as a ratio?
2. What predictive or other value does this statistic have?
3. Wouldn't Assist-to-Steal Ratio make more sense? At least this would measure how many net possessions a player is worth.
This FanPost is a submission from a member of the mighty Golden State of Mind community. While we're all here to throw up that W, these words do not necessarily reflect the views of the GSoM Crew. Still, chances are the preceding post is Unstoppable Baby!
39 comments
|
0 recs |
Do you like this story?
Comments
awesome diary
i personally think a steal:turnover ratio might be a little useful.. cuz it shows how much a player can make up for lost posessions.. or how many posessions that player lost/gained for his squad..
i dunno
is latrell sprewell gonna have to choke a b*tch?
by Spree4Threee on Dec 8, 2007 11:09 AM PST reply actions
This is exactly
Another example: Offensive lane violations that occur when one player expects his teammate to shoot, and the shot never comes, causing a turnover that can be the fault of either player.
Nice analysis to wake up to on a saturday morning after a big win.
more specifically
24 > 23
WE NEED A BACKUP POINT GUARD
AIM: Jetforze
by OptionZero @ Golden State Of Mind on Dec 8, 2007 12:01 PM PST up reply actions
Right, and the biggest offender: PPG
The beauty of statistics is that they can help explain, validate or invalidate your observations.
Observation without Statistics and vice versa will rarely result in a good evaluation.
The first key is understanding the value of each statistic and that's what I'm trying to do with Assist-to-Turnover Ratio. My brain is unable to figure out why those two stats are presented as a ratio.
It would be helpful if they tracked "Playmaking Turnovers" or, as Barnett calls them, "Turnovers of Aggression". That way you could at least pare off the Turnovers relevant to attempted Assists.
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 8, 2007 12:11 PM PST up reply actions
It's irresistible
Turnovers of Aggression = the apples bust out of their buttery crust trying to pop the cherry turnovers
by mikej @ Golden State Of Mind on Dec 8, 2007 2:49 PM PST up reply actions
PG
- Assist-to-Turnover Ratio exists primarily to assess PG play and as stated above is only one measure - but a valid one when used in context. When the PG is setting up other players to score and registering high assists he is making the whole team more dangerous and difficult to defend, meanwhile if a PG is turning it over he is not only killing possessions but also very likely creating fastbreaks for the opposition - the most damaging of turnovers. They're displayed as a ratio to give a relative means of assessing the PG and being in a ratio negates the impact of style of play to some degree as artificially influencing the PG appraisal.
- Its predictive value is somewhat limited in that like all stats they don't predict at all but give a look at the past. If last night's PG defender was a dogged competitor and tonight's is just a dog then the ratio isn't going to predict success tonight. Context matters. Regular season vs. playoffs is another example - level of competition ...
- Assist-to-Steal Ratio wouldn't make any more sense - particularly for non-PG players. Team steal and team assist totals do give a good overview of what kind of team you've got - again when looked at in context. Doesn't matter if you get a lot of steals if you're gambling and getting beat for high % shots more often than not.
Thanks for taking time to answer thoughtfully
My responses to your responses:
1. I get that it's used primarily for the PG position, but I don't get how the ratio tells you
anything about the PG performance that straight Assists and Turnovers per game/40/48 don't. It's like a shortcut to nowhere In fact, I think it actually distorts the information because it's end-result tells you less about the player's performance than the component parts (As and TOs).
- It was kind of a dumb question on my part.
- I still think there is more of a useful conclusion drawn from Steal to Turnover ratio because it results in "Net possessions". It's still not a great ratio because blocked shots, altered shots and rebounds would have to factor into the equation for "Net Possessions".
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 8, 2007 3:06 PM PST up reply actions
JB nailed
straight g
Another thing about A/TO Ratio
For fun, here are the top 10 in the league in Most Turnovers Per Game at the PG position, with their league rank among PGs in A/TO Ratio in parentheses:
- Gilbert Arenas (31)
- Jason Kidd (17)
- Steve Nash (8)
- Deron Williams (23)
- Jamaal Tinsley (21)
- Chris Paul (7)
- Mo Williams (24)
- Baron Davis (13)
- Jameer Nelson (22)
- Tony Parker (15)
- Jose Calderon (24)
- Steve Blake (23)
- Carlos Arroyo (27)
- Jason Williams (18)
- Chauncey Billups (14)
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 8, 2007 3:17 PM PST reply actions
stats
Assists are dependent on many things. Teammates are one, but so is the offense. A basket does not require an assist and if you look at the team level, the variation doesn't map on to offensive success all that cleanly. It's more a marker of the type of game a team plays (isolation vs break vs motion offense etc) than how well they play it. So in this sense, comparing assists to any other stat in a ratio is going to be a bit of a stretch. It's not completely useless. It does give an idea of how often a guy passes and how often he screws up before getting a good pass off, but far too many things can complicate the analysis to say so-and-so is better because the A:to ratio says so.
Is the assist even a useful stat at all then? Apparently, it is to some degree. Assists do indicate fg's by teammates and players who get a whole bunch of assists tend to raise their team's FG% even if they're not great shooters themselves (like Jason Kidd). Dependent or independent? Cause or effect? Probably cause to some degree if not a whole bunch as removing guys with high assist totals doesn't necessarily mean the replacement will do as well and tends to bring down teammates' FG%. Your teammate must execute afterwards, but generally, assisted buckets are the type that your average NBA player makes with enough ease and regularity that a good assistmaker will be a good assistmaker (and help his team) given more or less any set of teammates. Assists tend to bring up FG% more than high FG% brings up assist total. But the assist by itself doesn't correlate with success nearly as much as does FG% or many other things. Know how good a team is at getting assists and you still don't have a great idea of how good the team is.
Turnovers on the other hand are tightly tied to team success. It's entirely reasonable too, as, since possessions are equal between teams (score or don't score--your possession ends with a possession by the opposition--no way around this) what you do with your possessions is what determines who wins. A turnover is a clear indicator that you did not score on that possession. It's costly, far more costly than an assist is good. Since it may well be that a turnover will lead to easy scoring opportunities, it's just about the worst thing you can do on the court because it will likely covary with high fg% by your opponent which is also bad.
It is possible to get more than a rough idea of the positive value of an assist and the negative value of a turnover as they relate to that one most important thing in the game: winning. An assist raises the probability of winning. A turnover lowers it. And with a big set of data we can see in isolation what these actions are worth on average. As it turns out the average value doesn't vary much from contest to contest and as such, the stats can be used to show how much a particular player has contributed to helping or harming his team.
As it turns out, an assist is worth about 2/3rd of a turnover in terms of their relative impact on winning. Looking at only those two stats, a guy with better than a 1.5:1 assist to turnover ratio is helping his team with respect to those two stats. At that 1.5:1, he's neutral (his assists helping the offense as much as the turnovers are hurting it and helping the opposition) and below that and, with respect to those two categories, he's hurting the team.
But of course, since those categories aren't really opposites and there's much much more, this ratio is only a small aspect of a player's impact. So guys with better ratios may still be worth piles of TroyHudson and guys who are worse may still be Biedrinific in helping the cause. By factoring in the isolated value of all stats as they relate to win probability, we can get a good idea of what a player's worth is--a very good idea-- and this seems to predict their future worth pretty well too such that with reasonable accuracy, the affect of losing or gaining a player on future record can be reasonably well estimated.
Were it that the stats were meaningless, this would not be true. There are exceptions and the stats don't show everything that happens in a game as related to winning and losing, but they do track most of what's influencing victories. If they didn't then the stats would vary highly (they don't) and there wouldn't be predictive ability (there is).
Interestingly enough, the players who seem to deviate most from their statistical assessment as related to victories that I've seen include Jax (who by stats shouldn't be as much of a good influence as he seems to be) and Murphy (who should have helped, but just didn't). These probably represent near the extremes of defensive abilities. Most players are close enough to average that the untracked defensive stats don't impact things that much, but at the extremes, players can help or hurt so much that the rest of their tracked game gets overwhelmed.
A couple of questions & comments
I agree with you about Turnovers being one of the most important statistics. If you look at a possession in terms of best and worst possible outcomes, the best is 4 points and the worst is 0. A Turnover is always 0. A Turnover, in theory, is the worst possible offensive play as it. I'd be curious to see the FGA/FGM-off-turnovers versus total turnovers and compare that to a teams overall offensive efficiency to see how turning the ball over affects the other teams resultant offensive production.
I don't want to get too much into the "value of Assists" argument because there are too many dependencies involved with them to really sort out a concrete value from my end. It sounds like you have some corollary data:
As it turns out, an assist is worth about 2/3rd of a turnover in terms of their relative impact on winning.
I would be interested in how that was derived and an explanation on what that 2/3 means. I'm assuming it means an Assist will negate 2/3 of 1 Turnover's negative impact on winning but that's me inferring.
Questions:
- Is your conclusion that Assist to Turnover Ratio has value as an indicator (one of many)of a player's impact on winning and 1.5 should be viewed as neutral?
- Is it your contention that the Assist to Turnover statistic has value beyond what a viewing a player's Assists per 40 and Turnovers per 40 would give you?
- Is your evidence for this largely or completely based on corollary statistical analysis or do you have a more lay or logic-based reason why Assist-to-Turnover ratio exists? Or am I just missing something very obvious?
I'm really trying to better understand this stuff and, as always, you do a really clear job of explaining it in an accessible way.
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 8, 2007 8:04 PM PST up reply actions
ratios and values
You can also see that the A:TO ratio is pretty good when comparing teams. Teams with higher ratios are usually winners, lower ones usually not so much. Of course other things get in the way of this being completely clean, but it's generally true. If you look at the ratio for all teams, all games last year, it was about 1.5 (a little lower actually) and since there have to be exactly as many wins as losses, this puts it at the neutral point for all players. It fluctuates from year to year a bit, but that's about where it stays.
I don't think too much about A:TO on its own, so the 1.5:1 ratio that is statistically neutral doesn't influence my thinking about a player that much. It is neutral at that point, but being less than neutral isn't so bad if you're a power forward who rebounds 12 a game, or a SF who hits 50% of all his shots including threes and draws a whole lot of fouls. But if you're a point guard who shoots 41% from the floor and gets 3 rebounds in 42 minutes, your assist:turnover ratio starts looking very, very important to your net player value.
That ratio is empirically derived by regression analysis, taking assists (or turnovers, or points, or anything) vs. wins and seeing what the change in assists does to total victories to see how one affects the other. Since there's so much else a player can do on the court, just looking at that becomes meaningless. A center, just by the position they occupy on the floor in most offenses, probably has a better chance to turn the ball over than to get an assist. Wing players? Not so much.
For a particular player like a pointguard who has the ball so often that he's got plenty of chances to get assists and to turn the ball over and thus looking at the ratio can suggest something about their worth. A whole lot of a point guard's productivity comes from assists, so if their assists don't outweigh the negative that comes from holding the ball so much (turnover opportunity) then they're not helping. I wouldn't want a point guard with a A:T of less than 1.5 because I'd wager that 99% of the time, they can't do enough else good to actually outweigh the negatives.
assist to turnover ratio
The point gaurd needs to be able to set people up and make his teammates better while at the same time controlling the game and controlling the ball, not turning it over.
It makes sense to me.
by Proof on Dec 8, 2007 10:39 PM PST reply actions
um
A big man that has an ast:to ratio of over 1:1 is someone to look at for a team that uses its bigs in the high post...like us.
Eddie Curry, for example, has generally been atrocious. Any clue how you should defend him? Yeah.
Some stats are more useful than others, but only a few are completely irrelevant...to those willing to think about how to use them.
24 > 23
WE NEED A BACKUP POINT GUARD
AIM: Jetforze
by OptionZero @ Golden State Of Mind on Dec 8, 2007 10:53 PM PST up reply actions
okay maybe not
but i mean besides point gaurds and good destributors, most people in the league are going to have somewhere between a one and a two ratio.
by Proof on Dec 9, 2007 12:35 AM PST up reply actions
Good Diary
But bloodsweatndonuts makes a VERY good point. Assists/Turnover ratio is Apples vs Oranges. Especially when you consider the ridiculously broad application of the turnover stat & the supremely vague definition of assist.
Consider the ratio's NFL counterpart, TD's to Int's. An intercepion is a type of turnover that is a result, in most cases, of the quarterback's mistake. The NBA's assist to turnover is the same thing as adding fumbles to the TD/Int ratio and using that to gauge a QB's passing efficiency. Wouldn't work there, thus the QB efficiency rating, so it really shouldn't work in the NBA.
Also there really should be a stat for a pass that leads to an assist. You know, when a guy drives, sucks the whole d-fense in & dishes out, only to have that guy immediately dish to a shooter even more wide open for a score. I'm telling you, that drive makes the play work.
Best duo since...
by Tim N Chris Burger on Dec 8, 2007 11:22 PM PST up reply actions
great points
by Proof on Dec 9, 2007 12:38 AM PST up reply actions
and
Stats are a tool, to be used properly or not. Some are more useful than others; some have more specific uses than others.
You'd probably say that the screwdriver was a horrible invention because you couldn't use it to drink soup.
No one's ever said you shouldn't watch the game- yet for some reason the individuals who are either too ignorant or too lazy to bother understanding how to use stats automatically assume that anyone who DOES use them "doesn't watch the game" or "puts too much weight" on them.
It's fully possible to combine an understanding of stats with observations from watching a game...but that would take some effort, wouldn't it?
Pretty ironic that a guy called "proof" is ragging on how stats are overused.
but I guess the only proof you accept is "because you said so"?
24 > 23
WE NEED A BACKUP POINT GUARD
AIM: Jetforze
by OptionZero @ Golden State Of Mind on Dec 9, 2007 12:20 PM PST up reply actions
The Most Well Rounded Analysis
But in itself assist/turnover isn't a standalone stat to evaluate a pg's performance(no stat is, actually). It would be better to use multiple statistical matrices for that purpose, like how JAE uses ast/TO combined with FT/FGA to show how good a pg is.
Best duo since...
by Tim N Chris Burger on Dec 9, 2007 12:35 PM PST up reply actions
yup
Amen.
The notion that merely watching games somehow gives you a better understanding than the stats also assumes that people see the same things, understand what in these things is important to winning, and aren't fooled by the fact that no one can watch every second of every game. (Stats, for what it's worth, cover ever second of every game. They may be limited in what they 'look' at in those games, but I doubt that most people watching aren't also limited in what they pay attention to.)
Since it appears that there are some who can get quite a bit more out of watching in terms of who is worth what, just watching assumes that watching means understanding. It doesn't. Bill Russell vs. Jerry West. I imagine that Russell have seen far more NBA games than any of us. Same with West. But while West appeared to be good at spotting talent, at figuring out who would be helpful and who wouldn't, Russell didn't appear to be so inclined. Hell, I'm certain that Garry St. Jean has seen more games than any of us here, but it certainly didn't give him some special abilities to know who was going to be good and who was going to suck.
People can be fooled by what they see as well, putting value on things for aesthetic reasons that in the end don't really have as much to do with winning and losing as some think. People can be fooled by stats too, and they can be misused pretty easily, but that some people don't understand their utility doesn't mean that they don't have them in the right hands.
My gut is that properly using stats probably provides a better predictive value than just watching because we get a much larger sample with the stats and because we're not as easily fooled by what we see as spectacular, overvaluing it accordingly. It's not perfect and they're are outliers (though by definition, outliers are rare) and combining visual analysis with statistical analysis probably gives the best results, but I'd wager if I was armed only with stats, I could outperform most people in predicting season win totals for teams. For what it's worth, speaking of wagering, odds makers, people whose fortunes depend on having a better idea of what's going to happen than the average joe, utilize stats far, far, far more than they rely on watching games. Can some people out perform them without using stats? Sure, but some of that in the short run is luck, and overall, most can't, else casinos wouldn't be able to provide all those free drinks and comp'd rooms for people to come and lose money.
why do u always make things personal man
i mean you think that kellenna azabuike is a better player than JRich because he has a tiny bit better fg%
no.. i wouldn't say that the screwdriver was a horrible invention because you couldn't use it to drink soup.
by Proof on Dec 9, 2007 10:30 PM PST up reply actions
why you always take things out of context
The reason why it's "personal", is that for some reason you feel the need to reduce my analysis to "overusing stats", when in fact I have never relied solely on them and have never contended that anyone should rely solely on them.
If you had actually read anything I wrote (doubtful), you'd know I demand a combination of scouting and statistics to come up with more complete, objective conclusions.
But you're right "because you said so" or because you "feel" or "think" so? I don't accept that as proof, because it isn't.
Taking the Biedrins example...he's not effective merely because of his ast:to ratio. I've seen him make good passes; Nellie USES him in the high post, so HE must have seen some passing as well; I then look to assts and to's to verify what i've seen, and it jives. After that I look around to see if any other scouting reports or observations correlate. When all those line up, then hey, I can say pretty confidently that Biedrins is gonna work in the high post...and lo and behold, i'm right.
It's alot more accurate to do ^that^ than what some people here (not necessarily you), who attacked me for saying Biedrins = good in the high post because "OMG BIEDRINS IN THE HIGH POST? LOLZ! OZ IS NUTS!"...which is pretty much the level of comments that I see around here.
24 > 23
WE NEED A BACKUP POINT GUARD
AIM: Jetforze
by OptionZero @ Golden State Of Mind on Dec 10, 2007 10:46 AM PST up reply actions
bro
im basically gonna take that "if you had actually read anything i wrote" line and throw it right back at you
I give specific examples. i mainly draw conclusions from watching. yeah you are more stat oriented. I guess we disagree on some things.
man how bout Al harrington lately he is doin nothin
by Proof on Dec 12, 2007 11:31 PM PST up reply actions
Relevance of the ratio in big men
KG - 1.66
Yao- .58
Shaq- about 1
Andris about 1
POB about 1
Karl Malone about 1
to me it has some relevence, but you couldn't look at this stat and say andris biedrins is as good in the high post or as efficient of a distributor of as shaq or malone. KG is a stand out and obviously he is a superstar.
I will rephrase what i said earlier. I think that this stat is most relevent in judging players who handle the ball and distribute a lot. Nash and Baron are some of the best distributors in the league and they take care of the ball so their ratio will be higher than most.
by Proof on Dec 9, 2007 10:49 PM PST up reply actions
That's why I posted the PG numbers above
Nash has more turnovers than anyone in the NBA accept Allen Iverson. Baron has the 16th most.
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 10, 2007 1:57 AM PST up reply actions
wow
12 assists
ratio of something like 3.4
pace of play
he has the ball in his hands every possession and he looks to create just about every possession
by travisl212 on Dec 12, 2007 11:18 PM PST up reply actions
relevant.
while this
straight g
well, sort of
May just be that elite bigs get the ball a bunch, but they also tend to have better than 1 A:to ratios, so it's clear that not only do they tend to find other players, but that they also take pretty good care of the ball in the process. I suspect if you gave me nothing but a PF or C's A:tO ratio and average assists per game, it wouldn't be too tough to identify the bigs considered very good or better with just this measure. Would it be perfect? No, but it's not something to overlook.
by jae on Dec 9, 2007 6:43 PM PST up reply actions
yeah that's
straight g
Passing
Guards don't grab as many rebounds and because of where most take most of their shots, they don't score as efficiently. As a consequence, they need to do other things if they're going to help their team. Passing and playmaking is absolutely one of these things.
Still, as far as the team is concerned, an assist from a center is just as useful as an assist from a guard. Getting a center who (turnovers constant) averages more than 3 apg vs one who averages less than one is as useful as having a point guard who averages nearly 10 assists per game rather than one who averages about 7.
just one stat
Sabermetrics, titles, etc.
On topic: BSD, it seems like your main issue is with the combining of two stats that aren't intrinsically related. Philosophically I agree with you, but it must be said that what makes stats useful, particularly among fans on blogs like this one, is not just their accuracy or statistical rigor but also their simplicity and recognizability. Not everyone is JAE; not everyone has the time, patience, or aptitude to sit and analyze a whole pile of numbers. For better or worse, casual fans like to distill things to one number, even if means losing a lot of the subtlety and nuance that a full spreadsheet might give.
Back to the baseball analogy (always useful since statistical analysis in baseball is so far advanced of what it is in hoops): OPS has some of the same logical flaws as A/T ratio -- why do we add these two percentages, for example, and why do we count base hits twice? But because it's a simple number with a baseline that the average fan understands (1.000 = excellent) it's become pretty useful. By and large it's consistent and predictive, and by and large it correlates pretty well to wins.
Obviously it's an imperfect metric -- OPS+ adjusts for ballpark factors, and VORP and WARP take into account position, etc. Still, it's miles more meaningful than "batting average," the old standard bearer; and like batting average, it has a kind of beauty in its simplicity. A clever 9 year-old can take a pile of boxscores and a Mongol no. 2 pencil and work out OPS. Then he can list a whole bunch of players; and at a glance, get a pretty good, quick-and-dirty sense of who's the most valuable, in the fifteen minutes before he runs off to little league practice. In our fast-paced sound-bite world, these things have inherent value.
Sorry, I think I may have swerved a bit off topic. Cliff notes version: like TD/Interception ratio or OPS, Assist/Turnover ratio is statistically kind of silly but
- Not willfully misleading.
- Meaningful enough.
- Simple, recognizable, and easy to calculate and understand.
My quest was to find out why these two
The lay reasoning that JB initially and, subsequently, JAE have come up with is that it takes a positive and negative thing that a primary ball handler does and gives you a quick and dirty idea of whether or not the player has a positive affect on the team's chances of winning.
The other explanation is that a higher A/TO Ratio seems to correlate with higher win totals. But that still does not answer my two basic questions:
- Why are these two statistics presented as a ratio? What is the logic behind that?
- Does the A/TO Ratio tell you anything more than if you were to just look at a team's or player's Assist numbers and Turnover numbers without presenting them as a ratio?
Batting Average is just too incomplete a statistic to evaluate a player's offensive ability. So much so, that I don't think it has a peer in basketball. Maybe PPG.
I have a hard time believing that. How on earth does he make the Zito signing? Any A's fan could have told him that Zito was a durable but middle of the rotation guy and had been for years. That may have been one of the top 10 stupidest signing ever. He also put himself in the position to have a broken down Ray Durham, Pedro Feliz and a declining Omar Visquel (who he just he re-signed!). No, I don't think Brian Sabean looks at VORP or WARP2 or even OBP (see three above listed). He and his Magic 8-ball have no need for an of that crap. I'm glad he's in charge of the team I loathe.
Anyhow, I know there are some incomplete or mis leading (W-L Record) baseball statistics, but I can't think of anything like A/TO Ratio.
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 10, 2007 1:51 AM PST reply actions
scoring
If you want to take stats, some correlate well with wins. "Wins produced" and adjusted +/- seem to be pretty good such that if you remove guys high in this category, the team suffers more often than not. PER also correlates, but the correlation isn't as clean. If you got to draft of present NBA players straight according to PER vs. straight according to Wins Produced, you'd usually find the Wins Produced ranked players winning more. If you went by points per game, you'd do far, far worse.
Points per game is much batting average. It's not completely useless by any stretch, but it's dramatically overvalued in popularity contests and paychecks. It's generally an indicator of value (0.350 hitters are worth more than .250 hitters like 20ppg scorers are generally worth more than 10ppg scorers) but it's imprecise because how someone scores is as important if not more important than the point total. I don't mean jumpers vs. dunks, but total shot attempts to get your points does matter because each shot you take is one that someone else on the team didn't take. If someone takes 18 shots to get their 20, they're probably not doing as much for their team as the guy who takes 6 shots to get 10. The 12 shots passed up are going to be taken by someone else and the average NBA player will have a return of more than a point per FG attempt. Obviously this varies from team to team and your teammates' abilities come into play here, but I suspect far, far more often the high volume low efficiency scorers are given a free pass assuming they have to shoot so much because other guys wouldn't make the shots. When it comes down to it though, when such guys get hurt, it's generally the case that team scoring doesn't suffer much if any at all.
Anecdotally, we can look at Philly last year when Iverson's shots got spread around once he was traded and the team didn't find a problem scoring more efficiently in his absence. Another classic case was Olajuwon's 91 broken face injury. When Larry Smith replaced him in the lineup, the team didn't miss a beat scoring (or winning) with everyone else picking up the Dream's shots and making them at about the same rate they had when they took fewer shots. This is anecdote and it's not always the case, but it happens quite often that teams weather the loss of a star scorer.
Scoring Efficiency
24 > 23
WE NEED A BACKUP POINT GUARD
AIM: Jetforze
by OptionZero @ Golden State Of Mind on Dec 10, 2007 10:49 AM PST up reply actions
Is this better?
I brought this up above
As for Kosta, I don't think anyone outside of the Warriors organization has any idea as to why they signed him to that deal.
by bloodsweatndonuts on Dec 10, 2007 3:02 PM PST up reply actions
I would like to see.
Charge/Blocking Foul ratio.
Steals/Got ankles broken ratio.
Technicals/Help opposing player up after a hard foul ratio.
by WingStop Warrior on Dec 10, 2007 3:47 PM PST reply actions
Comments For This Post Are Closed
Secondary Sidebar
User Tools
"UNSTOPPABLE BABY!"
Golden State Warriors rookie Marc Jackson to the Mavericks' bench, after hitting a lay-up during a 29-point loss (2000)
FanPosts
Community blog posts and discussion.
Recommended FanPosts
Recent FanPosts
Featured Stories
Most Commented
In Association With
Ball Don't Lie - NBA - Yahoo! Sport
- Days of NBA Lives: Wherein Roy Hibbert tap-dances to Maine
- Grizzlies Valentine’s Day cards are the key to love
- Kevin Love would like the NBA to take the MLB’s approach on All-Star games
- Kobe Bryant fires a few hilarious salvos at Jeremy Lin
- Brandon Jennings states the obvious regarding his 2014 free agency, everyone goes nuts
Certain photos copyright © 2012 by Associated Press or Getty Images. Any commercial use or distribution without the express written consent of Associated Press and Getty Images is strictly prohibited.
