Suffice it to say, he was 90% FT for most of the season (or close to it). Ill amend by saying “he got to the line alot and shot well from the stripe”. Better?

Since guards handle the ball much more than others (especially PGs)being tied for 3rd worst on the team means nothing. Steve Nash led the Suns in turnovers. Meaningless stat. Leonardo Barbosa was 4th. A more valid point might be that Francis turned the ball over on a per minute basis more than any other player (which could refute my statement) but instead you pointed out that he was “tied for 3rd worst on the team”.

He shot 40% from the field, which is by anyone’s standards incredibly mediocre. Who cares if he is tied for 2nd in 3 pt shooting? the whole team shot mediocre from 3.

If you are going to criticize using stats, at least back them up with something that makes sense.

So okay, he turned the ball over more than I realized on a per minute basis.

Thanks for helping me conclude that Francis was awful and good riddance.

We agree on that right?

82%

“And he didnt turn the ball over that much.”

Tied for 3rd worst on the team.

“But his outside shooting was mediocre at best.”

Tied for 2nd best in 3 point shooting%.

As for the 95%, I believe we’re talking about Oliver’s 4 factors, which is actually 8 factors if you’re separating offense and defense. What box score stats is WOW using to measure defense on an individual level? If it’s just defensive rebounds, blocks, and steals, then there’s a big problem with how WOW assigns defensive credit because shooting (eFG%) is the most important of all the factors.

Again, no need to discuss it here. You can find my email address easily and we can take it offline. If it bears fruit, I’m willing to publish some of the ideas/concepts here.

I may have missed it, but did KB offer a grade for the Knicks as a team? If so, I’d have to assume it was somewhere between a D and a C-.

That said, the average grades of the players would have to result in the team grade. Figure James’ F washes out Lee’s A. Everybody else then gets graded against the curve. Certainly Francis isn’t going to be graded higher than the team overall. He was a pariah who his own GM who traded for him months earlier regreted having on the team.

Francis being on the team at all gets an F. He didn’t play well enough to justify any part of the trade. He came in with an F, he should leave with an F (along with his the dude that brought him here).

Owen – the grade isn?t entirely based on performance. There?s a level of expectation as well. In other words, pretend Collins is taking NBA 101, while Francis is taking 400 level classes.

Absolutely.

Like what we said about Collins at the time, if a veteran put up numbers like Collins, he wouldn’t even BE in the league.

Point differential, i.e. the net of offensive and defensive efficiency, explains 95% of team wins. If you know how many points a team scored and allowed per game, you can estimate how many games they won with 95% accuracy. That was Oliver and Hollinger.

What they did at the team level, Berri does with individual stats. And he has found that just by looking at the box score statistics he can explain team wins with the same high 95% level of accuracy. He can look at a team’s box score and estimate its wins very closely. This suggests that box score statistics actually are a very credible tool for analyzing basketball and explaining why taams win games. Berri concludes the following in his “A Defense of Box Score Statistics” post.

“All of this leads me to what may seem ? in some circles ? to a bold statement. I think the box score statistics tracked for players in the NBA are more valuable than the box score statistics tracked for baseball players (which I don?t think anyone has suggested we abandon). As we note in The Wages of Wins, basketball players are more consistent than baseball or football players across time. To illustrate, there is about a 0.6 correlation between a baseball player?s OPS in the current season and what the player did last season. For basketball players, though, Win Score per minute has a 0.8 correlation from season-to-season. In other words, the box score statistics in the NBA have greater predictive power than the box score statistics tracked in baseball.”

I have debated the WOW extensively on other boards with a lot of people who haven’t read the book. I was unsuccessful. Here too. At this point I am not really trying to do it anymore, or to oversell it. I am just trying to add his perspective on top of everything else, because I think its interesting and helpful, especially to a Knicks fan.

I think his work makes it a lot easier to understand why the Knicks have been so bad for so long. And I honestly agree with his suggestions for what we ought to do to get better – i.e. play Lee, Richardson, and Balkman, get rid of Curry. His approach really seems to make a lot more sense than anything Isaiah has done or unfortunately is likely to do.