Posted by Knight:
The question is: Did we really need this study to know who is a good defender or not? No. It's just a guy who has too much time and too many numbers on his hands. He admits that stats don't tell the whole story--it's just his hobby to do this kind of stuff, I don't think it matters a great deal but it's interesting to see the results.
The obvious advantage of using statistics is that it gives us an objective and
quantified way to understand players' strengths and weaknesses. Stats can't give us every last detail, and every method for ranking players along certain metrics probably has some sort of flaw or another-- they're not perfect. But for the things they measure, they are much, much more reliable than subjective opinions. Subjective judgments are made by averaging out numerous observed details over time, but the human brain is prone to making errors in the process-- inappropriately weighting some details as more or less important than they should be, completely missing or forgetting other details, distorting still other details based on tacit, subconscious expectations and biases that might not be valid-- and on and on and on. Statistical analysis of the numbers does not suffer from these problems.
As for the list Rosenbaum produced, no, you probably didn't need anyone to tell you that Kidd is among the best PG defenders. But did you need this study to learn that Raja Bell is in fact an extremely overrated defensive player? I bet my bottom dollar that you did.
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8/4/2005 10:48 PM
