Basketball Statistics Blog

Friday Press Clippings:
Hayes, Adelman, and Morey: Taking Stats Seriously at 'The Dream Shake'

From The Dream Shake By Matt Oalxyz
Download source here: ' Hayes, Adelman, and Morey: Taking Stats Seriously '

"... Now, here is what I mean when I say we should take stats seriously. In some sense, this attitude is created from a failure to really believe what the statistics say.

Adjusted Plus-Minus and a variety of other metrics have consistently shown Chuck to be one of the best defensive players in the league over his career, and they really do mean that. They do not mean this in some nuanced way. They simply mean that, when Chuck is on the court, the Rockets defend better than when he is sitting on the bench.

And so, if one is tempted to say that Chuck will have trouble with Greg Oden, Andrew Bynum, or even guys like Gasol or Dirk (though let me say that everyone is going to have trouble with Dirk and Gasol, though I'd bet smaller, quicker players like Chuck might have an easier time against them, and I think this was born out in the playoffs last year), that temptation ultimately stems from a failure to take what the statistics say seriously. ..."

"... Combine all these variables and what do we have? According to a formula called "Expected Win Probability When Going For It," Pattani believed that the Patriots had an 80.5 chance of winning the game. By punting, they had a 79.0 chance of winning.

So my argument (made on Monday's podcast) that Bill Belichick should have "played the percentages and punted" was technically wrong. Barely. Belichick did play the percentages if you took those percentages at face value.

I am not disputing the numbers or the methods for achieving them. But ..."

"... Here's the issue: the stats say that the payoff was higher by going for it, and they really do say that, and to disregard them because they say something that seems to deny the assumptions you've made about football since your childhood is to utilize statistics merely as a way to confirm your own biases.

If we're going to accept some of what advanced stats have to say, we should be willing to accept what those same stats have to say about more general things. Yes, context matters, and if the statistical analysis keeps going against the grain and contradicting perceived experience, then something may be awry, but we should not jump to that conclusion just because the expected win tables contradict what your high school football coach or John Madden told you about winning games. ..."

"... We're conditioned, perhaps by the experience of the Stats Revolution in baseball, that there's going to be a great deal of resistance among the NBA establishment towards this sort of thinking.

I think, however, that the baseball experience was, for whatever reason, somewhat unique. Maybe it was unique because of the sort of people who own baseball clubs and comment on baseball teams, but in any case baseball statistics developed very differently from basketball stats.

Sabermetrics started with Bill James doing all of his statistics by himself, placing an ad in the Sporting News, and sending out binders of his abstracts to the people who responded to the ad. There was resistance to baseball stats from the start, enough that teams didn't start using computers to look at basic statistics until the mid-80s, and that was only (if I remember right) the White Sox, who employed STATS Inc.

Perhaps because baseball stat geeks went against the established "small ball" recipe for success, they encountered a lot of hostility, but it's not as if this view was unheard of. It was pioneered by Branch Rickey, utilized by Earl Weaver with great success, etc...."

Read more articles in The Dream Shake.

To read Today's 'Press Clippings' in Spanish, click this week above on the 'Español' tab or afterwards click here: ' Un método probabilístico para las clasificaciones estadísticas de jugadores en baloncesto ' por José Antonio Martínez García y Laura Martínez Caro .

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