This is not true of the basketball situation – in fact it is precisely what is in question. An analogous question might be whether the apples will *continue* to be good if we radically ramp up production?

(This is perhaps getting far afield from the subject at hand, but Occam’s Razor gets used far too often in these types of arguments. There are many instances in which Occam’s Razor is not a particularly useful principle — for example, evolutionary biology.)

I just find so improbable that only players who get better are the ones that happen to get more minutes. In the NBA there are so many injuries, trades, bad GMs, and bad coaches that the cumulative effect of all of those lead me to believe that can’t be true. Someone out there is give more minutes to a player because he has to, not because he wants to.

Combine this with the studies that show that players don’t decline with greater minutes, and I think the evidence is overwhelming in favor of the consistency of per-minute stats. Mind you I don’t think this is irrefutable, but I’ve yet to see the body of work to show the contrary.

In other words, if players that don’t improve (and looking at per minute stats – player’s don’t improve all that often – so this should be a majority of players) did get worse with increased minutes it should be seen statistically somewhere. But I’ve yet to see it.

Since I used an apple example before, I’ll use another one here.

Farmer Joe claims all of his apples are delicious during the month of May. You doubt this, because you’ve had bad apples in the past. So you go to Joe’s farm on May 1st. Joe tells you to pick any 10 apples you want. You comply and eat them all. They are all delicious.

So Joe asks you if you believe his claim that he only has tasty apples on his farm in May. You reply “Nope – I must have only picked the tasty apples by chance.”

While it’s possible that Joe’s farm has apples that aren’t tasty, so far there is no evidence for it. In fact it’s unlikely for you to pick 10 apples without having one average/mediocre/poor one. It would be impossible for you to eat all the apples on his farm – and that would be the only way to be 100% sure of his claim.

However just because we can’t disprove his claim, doesn’t mean we can’t reasonably believe it to be true. Occam’s razor tells us Joe is probably right, since that is the simplest solution is most likely the right one. And without evidence of the contrary that’s the one that makes the most sense.

Guilty. Live and learn.

just that how much a player has to carry their team really affects them and is hard to quantify. Lee has basically been playing garbage time all season, zero pressure. if you really think he could be a top 3 player for a 50 win team, I’m just going to have to politely disagree. but it’s pretty hard to tell either way, given the bunch of bozos he plays with.

“Plus, they actually had a better record this year than last…”

deceptive because they made the Indiana deal in the middle of last season (so it was a different team after mid-January), plus at the end of last year, they were rolling, whereas this year they ran out of steam about a month earlier.

I didn’t really mean to pick on Camby especially. He’s probably going to be Defensive Player of the Year, however, and that’s going too far IMHO.

Caleb made the very good point that many GMs would take David Lee right now, because he fits better on their team. I totally agree with that. I was arguing that, in a vacuum, a talent evaluator would take West over Lee almost 100% of the time. (You can build around West, who can get his own shot and has demonstrated an ability to score in the 4th quarter of tight games.) But sure, if you *already have* a star, Lee fits right in to lots of different kinds of situations. What makes him so valuable is that he can be successful without the ball.

Team chemistry is tricky stuff. I argue with friends all the time when we try to decide who we would play on an “all-star” team. If you have David Robinson, you can put him on almost any team, because although he can score 20 a game very efficiently, he doesn’t demand to do so. If you have Charles Barkley, your team revolves around Charles Barkley. Magic can be Magic with almost anyone, but you can’t put Dominique on a team of superstars because he needs the ball. The Knicks have basically proved the point this year by putting a bunch of talented scorers on the floor this year who couldn’t play together if Moses commanded it.

Frank –

I think you are right about the limitations of the study. BUT… it would be awfully hard for a sizable trend of part-time players doing worse, when thrust into full-time roles, to be buried in these results. It’s a fairly big sample.

A few stipulations — of course it is going to be an even more reliable predictor when the increase is small (e.g. 27 mpg to 33, versus large)… and of course it won’t be true for ALL players.

Hypothesis time. What type of player do you suspect would NOT maintain production, given more minutes? (I don’t think this would be true of anyone, but if it were, I’d guess older players.)