In these comments, do not look for the usual huge amount of detail and proof that you see in the ordinary releases here at Nuggets 1. Some of this is more like everyday conversation than like top quality sports writing. On the other hand, some of the comments do include some detailed reasoning and proof that I pride myself on in the regular reports.
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JULY 2008 FORUM COMMENTARY ON THE NUGGETS, ESPECIALLY ABOUT THEIR MISTAKES
To be even more clear about ESPN, they have a summary per time statistic on their site called the Hollinger Player Efficiency Rating. I think mine is at least slightly better, but who knows for sure, because the Hollinger formulas are literally a secret to one extent or another, whereas whatever I do is always out in the open.
Traditionally, the Hollinger p.e.r. is only available to those who pay for the "ESPN Insider" membership. So by definition, ESPN reserved their one and only combination, per time measurement for only those who pay for "inside" status, which, by definition would be folks who are not your average run of the mill basketball watchers. They knew that the average man on the street doesn't give a damn about being alerted in advance that JR Smith or TJ Ford are both going to be quality starters soon in the NBA, and that they are currently being underrated. But they also knew that the insiders would want to know that.
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No, you have it backwards, and you agree with me on the age thing. I'm saying that younger players normally have lower ratings than older all else held constant, so when you look at a younger player's rating, you should mentally give them some kind of a bonus, not penalize them.
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Someone was still very upset about the high rating of T.J. Ford:
Okay answer my question
So you're saying TJ Ford is better than Chauncey Billups, Jason Kidd, Tony Parker, and Jose Calderon (who he couldn't even start over last season)?
My response to him was:
You don't think the per time measure has any value, so for you the answer is no, TJ Ford was not better than those players in 2007-08, because (a) he didn't do anywhere near as much as they did and (b) there must have been a valid reason why his playing time was what it was, which is one reason why no per time measure is needed.
So for you the answer is no and for me (and the Indiana Pacers, laugh out loud, it is yes. Both you and I get to go on with our business with no changes in our thinking necessary, because I am out there on the horizon looking at things that have seldom if ever been looked at in basketball before, and you choose not to go there.
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When I went to APBR, all of my nerd alert warning bells were going off at once, and I quickly said to myself: most of the people here don't ultimately give a damn about whether what they do is a close reflection of reality or not. Believe me, I know all too much about the academic mindset, and how the elegance of the proof is more important than whether the product is useful and reflects reality well or not. Academic payrolls are determined much more by style than by reality based substance. The distinction reminds me of Karl, for whom style is more important than result or reality. No, I am definitely not an APBR type of guy.
But if I did go there and was trashed, I would be flattered.
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There is someone here trying to confuse things regarding ESPN and Hollinger. Is he doing it for the hell of it? I don't know exactly why.
ESPN to my knowledge does NOT have the Hollinger formulas on their site, whether you are an insider or not, so no one who goes to ESPN, which is a whole, hell of a lot of people, can find out how Hollinger comes up with his numbers. Only a tiny minority will ever find where the formulas are squirreled away on the net, which is the way ESPN likes it. Because if you actually start looking at the formulas, you say to yourself, if you are me anyway, "My God, how could a sports game justify all of this mathematical razzmatazz, which would take at least an 8 hour work day to evaluate and determine whether it is valid or not, and maybe much more than 8 hours."
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The guy who was really upset about the high T.J. Ford rating raised the peace pipe and I responded as follows:
You don't have to believe the Real Player Ratings are worth anything to potentially still be reading my other stuff. Look in my Nuggets game breakdowns, I put in both the basic ratings, which is total production in the game not adjusted for time, and the Real Player Ratings, which are the basic ratings adjusted for time. You can ignore one or both of them as you want.
All I am saying is that both are potentially useful to different kinds of people, both for games and for the season as a whole. If you want the actual production, you sure as hell don't need me. You can go to ESPN or, if you don't like their public formula (or the secret Hollinger formula) then you can go somewhere else. Or you can say the hell with all the formulas, because every big time basketball watcher knows, very roughly at least, how the players rank, without checking any stats at all anywhere anyway. And you may decide it just doesn't matter who is slightly better than who, because in the playoffs these slight differences don't amount to much. (Maybe TJ Ford is going to be a playoff flop, laugh out loud.
Does it really matter much where TJ Ford or Leon Powe or JR Smith ranked in the Real Player Ratings? They matter to me, because I have a way of thinking that makes these ratings important to me. It matters to some of my readers, who were too timid to appear here, or who don't know I have this habit of posting here. They should matter to front offices, such as those of the Pacers and the Nuggets.
But for many fans, it can't matter too much, because it is a hard reality that neither TJ Ford nor JR Smith played for major minutes last year, and neither started much. Therefore, since they didn't play much, they were not all that good. It's indisputable. And that is about as true as saying that, per minute, they were much better than most know. Each is equally true.
In fact, different ways of thinking don't usually mean that one is right and one is wrong, unless you are talking about obvious things like inflicting bodily harm and stuff like that.
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At APBR, they spend most of their time trying to figure out why their formulas don't work, laugh out loud. The ones running the forum and presenting the models and formulas are academics, who are paid for the correctness of their mathematics and their scientific reasoning, not for whether their formulas can be used in a real world setting or not.
I went their once and it was a joke. There were basketball models on parade that were like the Hindenburg blimp, doomed to blow up in the real world.
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Instead of being like a blimp, the straightforward but comprehensive ESPN/Miggets 1 model is more like a bicycle. It's only slightly complicated, it generally works reliably, it does most of the time get you where you want to go, and it saves you a lot of time that you would otherwise spend going through other statistics (or it saves you a lot of gas money, laugh out loud.)
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Only needed once, about an hour, and that was enough for me to decide to NOT highlight the APBR site in my bookmarks. Sorry, academics and sports do not directly mix.
The kind of academics you see there is intended to teach people how to think. I already know how to mathematically and scientifically think and reason, so I don't need to be taught what they are teaching. My job is to allow people who themselves know how to scientifically think consider new ways of looking at and evaluating basketball, managements, teams, and players. I don't need complicated models and formulas to do that; relatively simple models and formulas are all that is needed for the job.
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Only needed once, about an hour, and that was enough for me to decide to NOT highlight the APBR site in my bookmarks. Sorry, academics and sports do not directly mix.
The kind of academics you see there is intended to teach people how to think. I already know how to mathematically and scientifically think and reason, so I don't need to be taught what they are teaching. My job is to allow people who themselves know how to scientifically think to consider new ways of looking at and evaluating basketball, managements, teams, and players. I don't need complicated models and formulas to do that.
