Basketball Statistics Blog

Basketball Statistician's Digest:
The State of the Art: Evaluating APBRMetrics

From Basketball Prospectus By Kevin Pelton
Download source here: ' The State of the Art: Evaluating APBRMetrics '

"... Ultimately, the discussion seems to center largely on the two questions that were the focal point of my columns five years ago:

 • Can we boil a basketball player's value down to a single number?
 • What better describes a player's value: his individual statistics or plus-minus data describing his impact on the team? ..."

"... With the benefit of hindsight, the way baseball teams ignored the sabermetric revolution for years and years turned out to be a blessing in disguise, allowing a growing community to freely advance on each other's work. By the time a large number of teams got wise to the value of statistical analysis, sabermetrics was entrenched to the point where it could easily survive teams poaching some of the best talent. ..."

"... Everyone involved agrees that it would be ideal to use a dynamic method of player valuation that takes into account a player's teammates and his role. Figuring out how to turn this into reality has proven much more challenging, and this remains an area with the potential for huge advances in our understanding. ..."

"... Each system has its merits and its supporters, and certainly I think that my own WARP system is useful. However, the discussion tends to be charged and subjective when frankly I'm not sure the differences are all that noteworthy. Past a certain threshold of reasonableness, each method is probably about equally useful. The danger lies in the true believers who take any one of them to be gospel and ignore its shortcomings and blind spots. These systems are one tool to rate players, not an evaluation in and of themselves. ..."

"... Ultimately, I feel like there are areas of the game that are simply too subtle to be quantified at the individual level, like a player's positioning. If being at the right place at the right time forces an opponent to pass the ball out for a more difficult contested shot, that's virtually impossible to track. Where it does show up is at the team level, which is why I feel that even with more detailed statistics at our disposal there will still be value to looking at plus-minus numbers. ..."

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