Shot selection

[Alex Wang <awang@mit.edu>]

I hope this is my last post on this topic and that Mr. Lee will respect 
my wishes not to be included in his posts. I'll only post again to 
defend myself from further personal insults. 

The original post was an estimate of how many points Walker is costing 
the Celtics from his "bad shot selection", i.e. putting up many low 
percentage shots and thus shooting a low percentage. If he chooses his 
shots well (i.e. takes high percentage shots), his shooting percentage 
will increase. The question, as someone said, is to decide what standard 
to hold Walker to; that is, how well would he have to shoot to be declared
to have "average shot selection". And this is really a subjective issue.
So every estimate is based on some subjective assumptions and numbers;
the goal is to choose reasonable ones. I've chosen numbers and assumptions
that I felt were reasonable (not "random") and others have used different
ones. 

In any case, I don't feel that any of our estimates deserve to be berated 
as "ridiculous" with no justification (especially by someone who professes
to be unable to comprehend the explanation) which is how this "discussion" 
began.

I concur that it would be impossible to measure via box scores (and 
difficult to even define) some universal "points lost" statistic related 
to every event in every game. That, of course, was never my point.

Alex

> 
> Date: Mon, 2 Mar 1998 10:00:06 -0500
> From: Ryan.Lee@parexel.com (Ryan Lee)
> Subject: If Alex Wang is a teacher at MIT, Tisdale should be....
> 
>      the inventor of mathematics.  Again Mr. Wang throws in several 
>      percentages and spews out a few statistical terms ( probability, 
>      averages, etc. ) to make his case.  Forgive me if your MIT explanation 
>      is beyond human comprehension but Tisdale's explanation was more 
>      concise and 100 times simpler than your throwing in random 
>      percentages.  If Mr. Wang is such an expert in probability then I find 
>      it interesting that he did not use any probability theory whatsoever 
>      to make his case.  The reason why I said earlier that you cannot 
>      simply use percentages to analyze this Walker thing is because you 
>      would have to take every event (steal, block, dunk, etc.) in every 
>      game into account.  That is why you never see "numbers of points lost" 
>      statistics in any sports broadcast because it's too complex to get a 
>      precise number for.  The more I think about it nobody can estimate the 
>      C's lost points just by using simple arithmetic or statistics.  This 
>      is something for college professors to handle.
>      Cheers!
>      
>      R
>