Time Sensitive Material: Open Immediately

2015-11-23 Off By Tom Pestak

I’m planning to do a larger piece that requires a lot of stats.  It’s going to feature Delly, but the purpose is to examine how we consume basketball and how basketball culture colors our vision.  I included a survey at the end of the Bucks recap and the answers were phenomenal.  I love the readers here – you guys are the best.

Anyway, since I am lazy and haven’t used my computer programming skills to create database scrapers that give me the data I want when I want, I still spend an inordinate amount of time copying and pasting data from NBA.com or Bball-ref.

I wanted a list of raw plus-minus to date for the 2015-2016 Season.  I found it here.

I used that list and then went to NBA.com’s Team/Player Matchup Dashboard for every. single. player up to Porzingis (#31 in raw PM). Why?  Because I wanted to know more than just raw plus-minus.  Specifically, I wanted to see the NET plus-minus.  This can be a bit more instructive as to how necessary or valuable a player is (also, how bad his backup is).  Let’s take two players and make some generalizations.  Right now, Festus Ezeli is 20th in the NBA with a PM of 81.  When Festus is on the bench, the Warriors PM is 135.  If “Festus on the Bench” could be quantified as a player, he would be the 6th best player in the NBA by raw plus minus.  So it’s safe to say that if Festus missed a few weeks with a sprained ankle or something, the Warriors would continue their assault on the rest of the NBA.  Contrast that with Detroit PF Marcus Morris, (traditionally perceived as the lesser of the Morris Twins) who boasts a PM of 107, higher but certainly comparable to Ezeli.  For some reason or another, when the Pistons have trotted out lineups sans Marcus Morris, they’ve given up 100 more points than they’ve scored.  In just 142 minutes!  That is…wow.

Now, it’s early in the season and raw plus-minus has the potential to be very biased, and at this juncture, random.  This data could suffer from collinearity, sample size, uneven schedule, garbage time…basically anything and everything could skew the results in some way.  This is a great primer on PM and methods to improve it.

But it also reflects some truth.  These players’ teams have done exceptionally well when they are one of the five players in the lineup.  That matters.  In fact, it matters more than anything else if you really stop and think about it.  Once your roster is assembled and the long grind of the season commences, the goal of every team is to outscore the other five guys on the floor until the outcome as been decided.  But we don’t really absorb basketball that way.  Other than Papa John, does anyone decide whether or not they like a pizza by going into the kitchen and trying all the raw ingredients ala carte without ever eating a few slices after it’s finished baking?  The reality is that basketball is a free flowing game, so if we view players like ingredients with just a few characteristics (Points, Rebounds, Assists, Steals, and Blocks, etc) we can develop a blind spot for so many of the nuances of the game, particularly the chemistry between players, and Defense, which box score stats reflect poorly.

We have a tendency to assume that players with prolific stat lines or efficient shooting percentages are the guaranteers of winning basketball.  And on the flip side, we assume that players with a broken jumper, or those much maligned power forwards that are “struggling to fit in” must be hurting the bottom line.  And that’s not always true.

So I’m posting these stats as a palette cleanser.  By the time I write the main piece these will have changed.  But it’s useful as a backdrop of sorts.

Data in Google Doc Spreadsheet

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