#27 I got to say, i am actually a little surprised by that post. I think I was as deep into the thickets with Wins Produced and PER as anybody back then, and I never read that defense by Hollinger.

I stumbled onto that quote when I was trying to mimic PER with a more basic formula.

Most of these models have what I would call a break even point on shooting efficiency. Berri was wrong about PER’s break even point, but he was generally correct that scoring and usage gets more value in PER than in Wins Produced.

I believe using a fixed break even point for measuring how much a player is contributing to the offense is a flaw. I believe if you want to measure a players value to the offense you have to use a more variable analysis that combines efficiency, usage, role, system, teammates, coaching, the defense the player faces, shot selection etc.. Unfortunately, that’s a complex mess that doesn’t translate into numbers very easily. So it gets very subjective and is also prone to error.

I might say I think Porzingis is a better scorer than his TS% indicates and list a bunch of reasons why I think that’s so. There will be resistance to that view because I can’t convert it into a provable number and people are searching for easy answers that don’t seem to exist (at least yet). But I still feel strongly that the factors that impact efficiency (aside from his talents) have been stacked against KP (especially last year). So with some tweaks, better coaching, and better decision making (which is on him), he can become a valuable high usage scorer quite easily. If he also actually improves his skills, he can become VERY valuable.

Jowles, you still refuse to answer for the contradiction between WP and BPM. I’ll say once again that PER is better aligned with BPM-based stats than WP. For a decade you used WP as your personal gold standard,and now you use BPM as a gold standard. Why do you keep dodging this issue?

I agree about PER. I think it also correlates pretty well with a players perceived trade value (which can be different from his actual productivity on the court). That is, if a player has a high PER, GMs are willing to give up more to get him. I think this is much more true for PER than for, say BPM or RPM.

That seems fair to me. NBA GMs, in general, are about where the stat community was roughly 15 years ago. While I mean that as an insult of NBA GMs, I also do mean it as a slight compliment of PER, as PER is a lot better than traditional box score stats. It’s like, say, OPS. MLB GMs eventually became comfortable with OPS. Similarly, NBA GMs are now comfortable with the basics of PER, so that does put them ahead of where they were before the days of PER.

THjr is a top 10 SF in the EC

I mean, there’s only 15 teams in the EC. And they’re not very good. So “top 10 sf in the EC” isn’t really saying much. (You can just as easily say bottom 10 SF in the NBA).

I’ve said it in a jokingly manner because I thought we had buried the idea of PER being any relevant years ago when it became clear it was mostly just reinforcing common sense and overvaluing volume shooting sans efficiency.

Of the 32 players who played 1500 minutes on >25 USG%, Iverson ranked only ahead of Jason Williams (.466), Jordan (.468) and MVP-candidate Marcus Fizer (.482) in TS%. Yet again, he was #2 in the league in FGA and FGM, just 20 FGA behind Antoine Walker, who played in 81 games.

This isn’t a speculative argument about how a hyper-efficient scorer (say, Tyson Chandler) inherently makes it harder for his teammates to score. No evidence has ever been given for that claim. But there’s lots of evidence that chuckers are not productive basketball players.

Either PER builds in a “volume scoring is inherently good” facet or the stat is FUBAR.

In 2015-16, WS48 rated Enes Kanter 11th in the league, despite his obscenely bad defense. Your long-revered WP rates Enes Kanter as a top-10 player in the league that year, better than Kevin Durant, Chris Paul, and LeBron James. And all of those guys were ranked below the immortal Cole Aldrich! Funny though, PER and WS48 also rank Kanter as a superstar. But not BPM or VORP, which rated him somewhat above average on offense (1.7) but absolutely catastrophic on defense (-3.1!) and slightly better than a replacement-level player overall (VORP=0.1). Which stat most correctly captures Kanter’s value?

Heaven forbid that back in the day, anyone came out you with a lame-ass argument about WP like the one you made above.

Iverson should not have been ranked #11 in PER if he was making shots less often than the worst offensive team and doing virtually nothing else of value in the box score. And I’m a guy who thinks that steal rate can be attributed to individual talent.