{"id":1516,"date":"2009-02-17T04:53:26","date_gmt":"2009-02-17T09:53:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/?p=1516"},"modified":"2009-02-17T04:53:26","modified_gmt":"2009-02-17T09:53:26","slug":"quest-for-statistics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/archives\/1516","title":{"rendered":"Quest for Statistics"},"content":{"rendered":"

Statistics, and the quest for meaningful<\/em> statistics, in basketball. Baseball may have the most dubious statistics, but because of the dynamic of the game, in basketball you can amass impressive personal statistics in a way that hurts the team, e.g. the box score shows you scored 20, but that doesn’t indicate if it was on 10-of-20 shooting or 10-of-30, and doesn’t say whether a missed shot was at the expense of a teammate who had a much better opportunity.<\/p>\n

The No-Stats All-Star<\/a><\/p>\n

[T]he big challenge on any basketball court is to measure the right things. The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team\u2019s elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn\u2019t historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure \u2014 points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots \u2014 and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. (\u201cSomeone created the box score,\u201d Morey says, \u201cand he should be shot.\u201d) How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player\u2019s value as a rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team<\/em> getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player\u2019s zone.<\/p>\n

There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team\u2019s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what\u2019s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. \u201cThere is no way to selfishly get across home plate,\u201d as Morey puts it. \u201cIf instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team \u2014 that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can\u2019t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.\u201d In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Statistics, and the quest for meaningful statistics, in basketball. Baseball may have the most dubious statistics, but because of the dynamic of the game, in basketball you can amass impressive personal statistics in a way that hurts the team, e.g. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-math","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1516\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.scienceforums.net\/swansont\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}