dk7th wrote:you mean like the pacers did?

No answer?

dk7th wrote:they game planned for carmelo anthony. they knew that they could hound him into even worse shooting efficiency, they knew he could not/would not pass the ball, they knew he could not/would not try to make plays for others, they knew he would try to force shots at the rim.

celtics did much the same thing for bryant in 2008 with similar results.

it's easy to game plan for hero ball in the playoffs when the opponent almost always has a superior defense.

I ran the same test for shooting that I ran for rebounds. For the 2008-09 season, I ran regression for each of the five positions. Each row of the regression was a single team for that year, and I checked how each position's shooting (measured by eFG%) affected the average of the other four positions (the simple average, not weighted by attempts).

It turns out that there is a strong positive correlation in shooting percentage among teammates. If one teammate shoots accurately, the rest of the team gets carried along.

Here are the numbers (updated, see end of post):

PG: slope 0.30, correlation 0.63
SG: slope 0.40, correlation 0.62
SF: slope 0.26, correlation 0.27
PF: slope 0.28, correlation 0.27
-C: slope 0.27, correlation 0.43

To read one line off the chart: for every one percentage point increase in shooting percentage by the SF (say, from 47% to 48%), you saw an increase of 0.26% in each of his teammates (say, from 47% to 47.26%).

The coefficients are a lot more important than they look at first glance, because they represent a change in the average of all four teammates. Suppose all five teammates took the same number of shots (which they don't, but never mind right now). That means that when the SF makes one extra field goal, each teammate also makes an extra 0.26, for a team team total of 1.04 extra field goals.

That's a huge effect.

And, it makes sense, if my logic is right (correct me if I'm wrong). Suppose you have a team where everyone has a talent of .450, but then you get a new guy on the team (player X) with a talent of .550. You're going to want him to shoot more often than the other players. For instance, if X and another guy are equally open for a roughly equal shot, you're going to want to give the ball to X. Even if Y is a little more open than X, you'll figure that X will still outshoot Y -- maybe not .550 to .450, but, in this situation, maybe .500 to .450. So X gets the ball more often.

But, then, the defense will concentrate a little more on X, and a little less on the .450 guys. That means X might see his percentage drop from .550 to .500, say. But the extra attention to X creates more open shots for the .450 guys, and they improve to (say) .480 each
Most of the new statistics simply treat FG% as if it's solely the achievement of the player taking the shot, when, it seems, it is very significantly influenced by his teammates.

his entire argument breaks down because of these flawed suppositions. you can't create a vacuum scenario for statistical analysis. the real world contains air

dk7th wrote:you can't suppose the things he is supposing and make an argument from there. equal number of shots has no bearing on the knicks situation whatsoever. no team has 5 players who take the same number of shots, especially the knicks. his saying "never mind right now" is precisely where his reasoning breaks down. you have to create statistics that somehow reflect the phenomena they are supposed to represent, not try to make the phenomena you witness somehow conform to your suppositions and the statistical model that stems from it. a supposition is a premise, and if the premise has no bearing on the real world then why try to use it?

and what does shooting "accurately" mean when the player who takes the most shots actually misses the most shots as well, which is actually what takes place with carmelo anthony? think about it: doesn't missing more shots than all your teammates drag down their shooting accuracy? he's a volume shooter who gets his points by taking way more shots than his teammates without adding anything else to the game.

his second supposition about everyone shooting the same "45%" is equally vacuous (and what is this "same talent of .450 mean?!? annoying): where is it written except by this guy that the player who shoots 55% automatically deserves to take the most shots? by that measure we should be getting chandler the ball early and often. when has melo shot that much better than the other 4 players on the floor? TS% the story becomes even more weighted away from melo and his loyal "supporting cast."

only people hell bent on justifying the type of basketball that anthony excels at can come up with these ****mamie scenarios.

lastly, the writer is advocating "action at a distance" which in this case asserts that melo's alleged accurate shooting elevates other players shooting without those inconvenient and obscure skills like "playmaking" and "ball movement." many people around here advocate this sort of magical thinking and fantasizing, to wit: "melo's mere presence on the floor frees up other players for better shots."

Sabermetric basketball statistics are too flawed to work

You know all those player evaluation statistics in basketball, like "Wins Produced," "Player Evaluation Rating," and so forth? I don't think they work. I've been thinking about it, and I don't think I trust any of them enough put much faith in their results.

That's the opposite of how I feel about baseball. For baseball, if the sportswriter consensus is that player A is an excellent offensive player, but it turns out his OPS is a mediocre .700, I'm going to trust OPS. But, for basketball, if the sportswriters say a guy's good, but his "Wins Produced" is just average, I might be inclined to trust the sportswriters.

I don't think the stats work well enough to be useful.

I'm willing to be proven wrong. A lot of basketball analysts, all of whom know a lot more about basketball than I do (and many of whom are a lot smarter than I am), will disagree. I know they'll disagree because they do, in fact, use the stats. So, there are probably arguments I haven't considered. Let me know what those are, and let me know if you think my own logic is flawed.