Posted by tomverve:

Here's some info about PER:

http://forumblueandgold.blogspot.com/2004/12/what-are-those-numbers.html
http://basketball-reference.com/about/per.html

The stats fishmike cites are NY's PER this season, by position, minus opposition PER, by position. This essentially compares how NY's position players are stacking up against the comp-- it counts both offense and defense. It is clear that NY is getting killed at both forward positions-- not only because opponent Fs are doing well against us, but also because out Fs have been supbar on offense themselves. KT has been solid shooting the midrange J and rebounding, but his style hurts his PER-- almost no inside shots, almost no FTs. No explanation needed for TT.

Tomverve - Thanks, I Looked at the sites. I've always liked "Bill James" - less so now that he's working for the redsox - but I haven't read any of the basketball stat books.

A couple of quick comments:

Measuring defense is harder then measuring offense and I think the stat guys in baseball are just starting to get a handle on it - and I think it's easier then basketball so I personally wouldn't put too much weight on a measure of defensive statistics. (Nor do I see a lot of defense factored into these equations - at least after a quick look.)

Measuring anything in basketball is going to be harder. Because the way the game flows it is hard to "pull out" individual contributions.
A great passer (or setter of picks) on a team with lousey shooters. Won't get the assits or the contributions to +/- he deserves essentially being penalized for his team mates. But a good team requires some good shooters. So is the player worth less to the team? Or is it that in order for the team to improve it needs to acquire players that can take advantage of his skills?

Same for a great help defender. Any good team needs to play good help defense. But if only one player on the floor does it the teams defense is many cases is gonna be worse. So this "good" defense player makes his teams defense worse - but ultimately for the team to be good they need to acquire more players like him not trade him because of a bad +/-.

I like stats and per is a sophisticated stat and I think as applied to a team probably gives accurate measures of the team - but stats applied to individual players in basketball are more problematic then in sports like baseball (and in my opinion it's only relatively recently that they've come out with good stats for measuring baseball players.)