Why can't basketball stats nerds separate the superstars from the ball hogs?
By Dave Johns
...The statisticization of basketball is a relatively new enterprise. Its modern incarnation is usually traced to Dean Oliver, a Ph.D.-trained statistician who started scrutinizing the game on a per-possession basis in the 1990s and derived the so-called "Four Factors" that make for hoops success: shooting, turnovers, rebounds, and free throws. After the publication of Moneyball, Michael Lewis' best-selling 2003 book on the numerical analysis of baseball, basketball stat-heads redoubled their efforts. Their hunt for a definitive, all-in-one performance metric—something analogous to baseball's wins above replacement, perhaps—yielded an array of competing stats, including: Efficiency, a simple tally that adds up a player's successes (like points) and subtracts his failures (like turnovers); Player Efficiency Rating, a more complex figure that assigns weights to these individual measures; and Wins Produced, a stat that assesses how various performance parameters correlate with team wins and then divvies up credit to players. These well-known measures are only the beginning: Today, the Internet is awash with stats sites seeking to describe basketball player talent in a more accurate, mathematical way...[continued]
