KG and the new math
Posted on November 19th, 2008 – 11:02 AMBy Michael Rand
Kevin Garnett is coming to town in two days and, thankfully, he has already served his one-game suspension for whacking Andrew Bogut (note: that’s hitting him in the face, not taking him out mob-style). Hopefully, unlike last year, the Target Center faithful will be able to see KG play. He is returning a champion and with a team poised to make another run (another note: you can take our prediction that the Wolves would have a better record than the Celtics when this game rolled around and put it in the Worst Thoughts Hall of Fame, right next to the Cassell and a No. 1 for Jaric trade). In the spirit of Garnett’s arrival, Fasolamatt passes along a very interesting piece from Boston Magazine about Garnett and also the “new NBA math.” The piece gets inside KG, which is always good. At the end, it breaks out a glossary of terms and definitions for new ways to measure NBA players. These are the metrics:
Effective Field Goal Percentage (EFG%): Accounts for the different value between a two-point shot and a three-point shot.
Player Efficiency Rating (PER): Developed by ESPN’s John Hollinger, it crunches box-score stats via a formula that, he says, “adds up the good (points, rebounds, assists) and subtracts the bad (turnovers, missed shots).” The number is then adjusted for a team’s pace of play. The league average is set at 15.
True Shooting Percentage (TS%): Adds free throws to a player’s overall shooting numbers.
Usage Percentage (USG%): Reflects the estimated amount of plays in which a player is involved during his team’s offensive possessions. A high USG% number can show that a player is carrying too big a burden.
Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP): Borrowed from sabermetrics and developed by hoops analyst Kevin Pelton, it evaluates a player as if he were on a team with four statistically average players.
Win Percentage (WIN%): A per-minute breakdown of WARP. (Breaking down contributions by minutes is a key tenet of advanced basketball metrics.)
Wins Produced Per 48 Minutes (WP/48): A metric created by economist David Berri that assigns individual credit for team successes. As with PER, it starts with the box score, which is crunched in a 12-step process that relies on regression analysis. The league average is set at 0.100.
Without delving into the realm of statistical value, which usually makes Brandon and Jon hate us, we invite a discussion on which players in pro sports today (particularly baseball and basketball, which have embraced modern statistical updates) are looked at far differently than they would have been, say, 25 years ago when all we looked at essentially was wins, losses, RBI, ERA, points, rebounds and assists?
And would it surprise you to learn that Al Jefferson is No. 14 in Player Efficiency Rating this year, while Kevin Garnett is No. 63? And finally, is it an eye-opener to note that Kevin Ollie’s PER is almost twice as good as that of Randy Foye or Sebastian Telfair?
4 Responses to "KG and the new math"
If it weren’t for stats Derek Jeter wouldn’t be the most overrated defensive player in the history of the world. He’d also have 7 more groupies and 11 more children.
jama
They’re also fogetting an important stat that NBA players keep track of. NWSW (Number of Women Slept With). It’s compares people like Wilt Chamberlain who slept with 10,000 different women, to people like Sam Cassell who looks like he got punched in the face as a kid (a lot). It also subtracts the number of illegitimate children they had. Wilt: 9989, Sam Cassell: 2, Karl Malone: -45.
Wilt: 9989, Sam Cassell: 2, Karl Malone: -45.
If the stat was “number of ‘little mexican girls’ hunted” it would look like this:
Wilt: 0, Sam Cassell: 0, Karl Malone: 1
“Without delving into the realm of statistical value, which usually makes Brandon and Jon hate us…”
Make that the three of us.
