Did John Hollinger Just Write The Most Important Basketball Article Of Our Generation?
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by user Wade Garrett
This article by ESPN's John Hollinger might be the most important basketball article I've ever read. Let me explain.
There's a famous baseball writer named Bill James. James believed that, when baseball players were evaluated, too much emphasis was placed on one or two specific skills (namely, batting average and fielding percentage for position players, and ERA and wins for pitchers. Over a span of about twenty years, James refined a formula to evaluating a baseball player's overall game, incorporation often-overlooked statistics such as on-base percentage, slugging percentage, stolen base percentage, range factor, and, for pitchers, baserunners allowed per nine innings. What James found was that the very most elite players in the game (as measured by traditional means) finished near the top of his ranking system. However, for a significant number of players, there were significant discrepancy between the perceived value and their ranking under James' system. Eventually, teams realized that, if James' system correctly ranked the best players, but ranked the rest of the league's players in suprsing ways, then there was a potential market in hiring under-valued players away from other teams, and letting other teams sign away your over-valued players.
Hollinger has invented or popularized a number of important basketball statistics, particularly in the area of handicapping a player's statistics based upon the tempo at which his team plays. In his most recent article, he has created a scale on which the future value of every player is represented by a simple number. Generally, solid NBA prospects score 500 or higher. Sure-fire all-stars score in the seven-hundreds. Kevin Durant just scored 870. The next-highest score since the year 2002 was Carmello Anthony, who scored 780. Greg Oden scored 667, while his teammate Michael Conley scored 637. This tells us a couple of things: Durant isn't just a stud, he is potentially a once-in-a-generation talent. Secondly, it emphasizes the degree to which Oden's success is, at least in part, helped by playing with Conley, and, to a lesser extent, Daequan Cook (470).
Its not a perfect system. For one thing, statistics don't reveal as much about a basketball player as they do about a baseball player, due to the team nature of the game. The system is based on black-and-white statistics, and, as Tim Duncan has recently shown us, the players whose statistics most understate their true value are dominant defensive big men (who alter or deter a lot of shots that do not end up in the box score.) Futhermore, an important statistic in Hollinger's system is "Usage Rate," or, in layman's terms, the percentage of possessions that end with the ball in a given player's hands. Players on great teams take fewer shots than they would if they were by far the best player on an otherwise lousy team, and there's no real way to adjust for this, because you can't ever definitively say exactly how many more or less shots a player would take in a different situation. This handicaps, for instance, University of Florida players Joakim Noah, Corey Brewer and Al Horford. All three are thought of as being among the top seven or eight college players in the country, so presumably they each had lower usage rates than they would have if they were carrying the flag for, say, a mid-tier major conference school like Oregon State or West Virginia.
Another significant factor is that Hollinger's formula takes age into account, so that a player who puts up a given stat line at age 19 is considerably more valuable than another player who puts up the same stat-line at, say, age 22. This handicapping makes sense, but not as much sense as it makes in baseball, where everybody, even first-ballot hall of famers, spend several years in the minor leagues before breaking into the Majors. Thus, an older draft pick may very well be in his mid-20's by the time he reaches the majors (like Ryan Howard) and thus have a far shorter productive career than somebody like Ken Griffey Jr. who reached the majors at a younger age than most players are when they are drafted. Baseball is set up to allow players with great tools to hone their skills before being having to face the best competition in the world. on the other hand, in basketball, lottery picks are expected to contribute right away, and more than one talented young player has been run out onto the court before he was ready, only to have the fans turn on him, his confidence destroyed, or suffer serious injury. (In baseball, Darko would have been in the minor leagues until the start of this season - he's still only 21 years old!) With the age handicap, Marvin Williams came out ahead of the older Deron Williams in 2005, but that doesn't change the fact that Marvin is still learning the ropes while Deron is leading his team to the Western Conference Finals. Marvin could easily be playing for another team by the time he reaches his full potential.
Hollinger's is not a perfect system. Having said that, the current drafting process, which relies more on measuring, say, a player's vertical leap and shuttle time in a vacumn, without a ball in his hands, or by watching him take jumpshots in an empty gym without defenders on the court, is deeply flawed, and Hollinger's system is an enormous potential improvement. The important thing is that he put something out there which, presumably, smart people will tweak and refine over the next several years. Hopefully, this will mean fewer expensive busts and quick rebuilding turn-arounds for perpetually bad franchises like the Atlanda Hawks and Memphis Grizzlies.
Wade Garrett lives in Brooklyn, New York. He blogs at www.commonsensedancing.blogspot.com
