And we have to remember that we’re fighting a 24/7 newscycle of ill-conceived narratives, distortions, and conjecture WHILE we fight our own cognitive biases that tell us that Kobe Bryant MUST be a great basketball player if he can even get that crazy fadeaway 3-pointer anywhere NEAR the rim.

I just choose to reconcile my preconceptions with numbers rather than selectively attacking the instances in which the numbers don’t jive with my preconceptions.

Juany8:
As far as the coaching argument, I’ll actually agree with you that the difference between most NBA caliber coaches is small, and perhaps negligible, but there is still a sliding scale of value. Gregg Poppovich/Phil Jackson are a LOT better than someone like Kurt Rambis or Vinny Del Negro. Yet Wins Produced doesn’t even attempt to account for this difference. At the very least you could add some kind of coefficient for coaches (most coaches would have a value of 1, AKA totally average and normal) but of course that would be difficult to account for, which linear regression doesn’t do well with lol

They don’t have a coefficient because not every player benefits from the coaching. On average, though, players outperform their projected WP48 by a sizable margin under Jax. The whole article is in one of the WP books.

Juany8: No what I’m saying is that Dirk is objectively a better basketball player than Kris Humpries. That’s not a subjective opinion, I be

Your “scientific” model consistently spits out that random role players who constantler on his team by the playoffs, just one year after winning Finals MVP).

But again, that’s putting serious pressure on those “decision makers” and “talent evaluators” to be right. And Moneyball pretty conclusively showed us that those very people in the baseball world were wrong. Wrong about a whole lot of things, from stolen base success rate to bunting to OBP and OPS and BA and ERA and wins and losses.

The thing is, the principles of the first wave of “advanced” baseball statistics were common sense shit. OBP is much, much more important than BA, for instance. Or that wins are essentially meaningless when talking pitcher value. Yet for years — decades — they were held as the standard by layman and expert alike.

My point is that if “experts” can be wrong about such a static game as baseball, where the math is easy and the parts easily isolated, why shouldn’t we be totally and unwaveringly suspicious of the “experts” of a game that is much more difficult to evaluate?

These “role players” bounce around teams EXACTLY like the role players bounced around in baseball — this is the exact fucking essence of Billy Beane’s competitive strategy. The argument that WP48 is wrong because it flies in the face of “common sense” is exactly why sabermetrics were so hostilely received in the baseball world. Juwan Howard is, like, a 20 year vet. Manu Ginobili was a 2nd rounder. 30 teams passed on taking him, and he’s arguably the best SG of the Aughts. “Experts” can be and often are wrong.

The Honorable Cock Jowles: Nowitzki was amazing in the Finals. They had a pythag. win estimate of 53 that year; that’s not an “elite” team, most years.

And this happens over and over on this board, but you’re essentially saying that because WP48 does not mesh with your subjective analysis, we should discredit and other “important” people have discredited it.

You “lol” because they made a suggestion based on efficiency and it turned out that they didn’t have to and won the championship anyway. Do you take that as some kind of legitimate evidence for your position?

No what I’m saying is that Dirk is objectively a better basketball player than Kris Humpries. That’s not a subjective opinion, I bet I could ask every single general manager/coach/scout for every single basketball team ever made and they’d probably give you the same response. If you are the ONLY person saying different, it’s more likely that your model is wrong than that of every single intelligent basketball mind in the world. Especially when other analytical models all agree that Dirk is an incredible player.

Your “scientific” model consistently spits out that random role players who constantly bounce around teams are somehow better than established hall of famers. Guess what, if I have to decide between trusting Berri or trusting Gregg Poppovich/Phil Jackson, I’m going with the person who’s proven he knows basketball. This isn’t a case of a stat saying Kobe is worse than players like Wade and Lebron while I argue that he’s better “because he shots tough shots that go in”. This is a case of a stat saying Matt Barnes was a super star last year while Kobe was the worst player on his team (Dirk was also the worst rotation player on his team by the playoffs, just one year after winning Finals MVP).

This is NOT an argument that coaching doesn’t matter. What it says is in that the output of their function, coaching seems to be pretty consistent AMONG COACHES WHO ARE EMPLOYED BY THE LEAGUE.

This does not mean that anyone can coach. It just suggests that most coaches are about equal in value. You may disagree with the distribution of wins among individuals on the teams, but it’s pretty fucking hard to argue that coaches have a significant impact on a box-score-regressed statistic when the data clearly suggest that they don’t. And yeah, I know: anecdote anecdote anecdote, blah blah blah. That’s what the numbers say. That coaching is not a factor that significantly impacts player value, according to WP48.

I could not be a good NBA coach. Almost all of the coaches in the league are “good” in that they are not “bad.” Average is okay, in the NBA.

Where coaches seem to fuck up is in the distribution of minutes. Jeff Green, Nick Young, Brook Lopez — those are some bad fucking players getting serious minutes.

I mean, look what happened to the Nuggets when George Karl wised up and started playing Faried like a starter.

Juany8: They might respect his analytic talents, but I doubt they respond well to some economy professor who insults everyone involved with basketball in order to make a point. I doubt Morey and co. would agree with Berri that coaching is worthless, and Morey has gone on record saying he believes players like Allen Iverson (who he specifically mentioned) are underrated by the general basketball statistics community. Considering he also sidered an average player the year he won the Finals MVP lol), so I doubt Presti and Don Nelson take his work all that seriously, especially since Wages of Wins wrote an article about how the Mavericks would have been better off letting Dirk go instead of Kris Humpries the year they went on to win the championship

Nowitzki was amazing in the Finals. They had a pythag. win estimate of 53 that year; that’s not an “elite” team, most years. You’d be hard pressed to find many champions with that low a total. Again, not saying they were bad, but you act like they won 68 games and Dirk was responsible for it. You also forget that they had one of the most efficient centers of all-time on that team, plus a still-efficient Jason Kidd and Shawn Marion. That team was loaded and were firing on all cylinders in the playoffs.

And this happens over and over on this board, but you’re essentially saying that because WP48 does not mesh with your subjective analysis, we should discredit and other “important” people have discredited it.

You “lol” because they made a suggestion based on efficiency and it turned out that they didn’t have to and won the championship anyway. Do you take that as some kind of legitimate evidence for your position?

Juany8: The real argument is that even if it does happen in basketball, WP is not the answer. There is already far more sophisticated analysis being done by basketball teams who are actually willing to invest time and money into it. If Morey, Sam Presti, and Don Nelson still make mistakes with their evaluations, it seems painfully obvious the answer to basketball analysis is not found freely on the internet. Ignoring interaction effects between players in basketball is just dumb, especially when you analysis of defense basically says that since it can’t be measured, every player on a team was an equal defender since defense is a 5 man activity. Anyone who thinks offense is a 1 man activity doesn’t know how to watch basketball

Defense is not calculated evenly. You can find “Opponent WP48 by position” on the Points over Par website.

Z-man: I think the argument is more that it hasn’t happened yet (to the degree that it has in basebal) and less that it can’t happen.

Of course it hasn’t happened to the degree that it has in baseball. But we see these high volume scorers getting big contracts still. My contention has been to find undervalued players through WP48 and sign them to contracts rather than signing max players like Amar’e and Carmelo and hoping that they transform into the superstars they’ve never been.

You know, two years ago I called Amar’e's contract a terrible one, and that he was a waste of $20M a year that we’d eventually be pining to ship out for peanuts. I said this because the WP48 projections were not very good for him, and the injuries and the cost, and all that. Well, are we there yet?

Brian Cronin:
While I definitely agree about not following WP religiously (I personally just never cite it period), I think the impulse to go too far the other way and just shit on Berri is foolish, as well. I guarantee you that all three of those GMs you mentioned think very highly of Berri and the work he has done. They’ve just obviously gone past him with their own, more advanced, stats. But the work Berri has done is well-respected by most basketball GMs.

They might respect his analytic talents, but I doubt they respond well to some economy professor who insults everyone involved with basketball in order to make a point. I doubt Morey and co. would agree with Berri that coaching is worthless, and Morey has gone on record saying he believes players like Allen Iverson (who he specifically mentioned) are underrated by the general basketball statistics community. Considering he also made a huge push to acquire Melo, Berri would probably call Morey an outright idiot. There’s also the fact that Wins Produced rated Dirk and Westbrook as a pretty mediocre players last year (Dirk was considered an average player the year he won the Finals MVP lol), so I doubt Presti and Don Nelson take his work all that seriously, especially since Wages of Wins wrote an article about how the Mavericks would have been better off letting Dirk go instead of Kris Humpries the year they went on to win the championship