Wiggins rebounding

[Q12543 [enjin:6621299]]

Well, I did say a healthy dose of observation is needed, so I hope you aren't implying that I think a player can be fully assessed by stats alone.

But observation by itself is flawed too because our brains are capable of processing only so much and we all have our own built-in biases that can cloud what value we place on what we observe.

[Carlos Danger]

Abe, that is goofy indeed. The only explanation I have is that if you suck and play a lot of minutes (like Kobe), you do more damage to your team than if you suck and hardly play at all (like Tyus). But I don't know enough about the math behind the stat to know if that's a factor or not.

I think once a big enough sample size of games and minutes are accumulated, the stat does start to make more sense.

I believe you are right on the money with your explanation. It would have been nice if the author of that article had bothered to investigate (aka ask an expert for a explanation) and then explained it to his readers in a dumbed down format we could all understand. But yeah - pretty much everyone on this board understands how to manipulate numbers and the dangers of small sample size. We all do it when we need to make our points! :-) There is no one magic stat that works 100% of the time when evaluating players. But I do like Win Shares, PER and VORP myself. Generally speaking if you are doing well in those metrics, you are playing good basketball. But again - there certainly will always be anomalies.

[AbeVigodaLive]

Well, I did say a healthy dose of observation is needed, so I hope you aren't implying that I think a player can be fully assessed by stats alone.

But observation by itself is flawed too because our brains are capable of processing only so much and we all have our own built-in biases that can cloud what value we place on what we observe.

No. I was being a bit satirical... but not toward you. I think you do a pretty solid job of using stats and observation to state your case.