Comments on: Emptying the Sloan Notebook

By: What Can I Say?

What Can I Say? — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 18:58:43 +0000

This is crazy!

Kevin Pritchard (Portland GM) on the definition of an assist: “If you ask 30 different scorekeepers, you get 30 different answers.”

I used to “trip” watching Kevin Garnett play and be handing dimes out and then look in the Box Score scratching my head. Where are the assists?

LOL @ Gerald Green. Mark Cuban is a little cocky SOB. Actually, he isn’t all that little.

Tom Gugliota sucks. I don’t know or care to know his plus/minus either.

I vaguely remember hearing an NBA on NBC announcer reporting that Darell Armstrong drinks a ton of coffee before the games when he played in Orlando. Sugar Rush

Great stuff.

By: cmoney

cmoney — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:47:59 +0000

the stat world largely scoffs at the idea of an “assist”. It’s a fairly meaningless stat. Just like all shots aren’t created equal, neither are all assists. A discrete alley oop or an expertly run 2v1 break, that’s a lot of value. Swinging it to a guy who buries a contested 20 footer isn’t really a good thing. Plus there’s the problem of passes that lead to drawn fouls and FTs.

For advanced stats guys to make use of passing data, they’d need the type of shots they lead to, they’d need to count FTs, etc.. it probably just isn’t worth it. For instance, with someone like Nash, it’s not the gawdy assist #s that make him so valuable. If you dig a little deeper, you see how much his team’s eFG% improves when he’s on the floor. That’s a far better indicator of value.

By: DeVelaine

DeVelaine — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:48:07 +0000

The “shields” are rebounds. This took some playing with Google Translate to figure out, however. Looks like they’re trying to call them “boards,” and depending on the translator, the same word can be used for board, shield, and panel.

By: Throwing some dimes: Gerald Green’s a moron : Celtics Town

Throwing some dimes: Gerald Green’s a moron : Celtics Town — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:01:41 +0000

[...] Celtics Hub’s Zach Lowe went to the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Cuban: “Some guys in our sport are morons. You want to dump them on another team.” Cuban said [...]

By: jonathan

jonathan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:42:37 +0000

“This isn’t about basketball, but I found it interesting, even if some might find it obvious: During the PED panel, Dr. Kim Blair, director of the MIT Center for Sports Innovation, said the NASA-engineered Speedo swimming suits that caused such an uproar at the ‘08 Olympics helped lesser swimmers more than good ones. “It had a leveling effect,” he said.”

I feel the exact same principle applies to the recent rule changed that have led to small and quick point guards putting up numbers we haven’t seen in years. And on a wider level, it’s helped the second tier players look like stars. Kobe, Lebron, Wade, etc would be great in any era. Danny Granger would not.