Re: Athlon Sports on scoring efficiency

[Alexander Wang <awang@MIT.EDU>]

Tom,

A key point that might be confusing some people is that if you draw a foul 
and miss your shot (which happens most of the time you're fouled), you are 
not credited with a missed field goal attempt! So for instance, let's say 
Paul over the course of five possessions draws four fouls, hitting six FT, 
and hits a FG. His line is 1-1 FG, 6-8 FT. His pts/fga is a marvelous 8.0! 
Over the same five possessions, Ray Allen hits two three pointers and three 
dunks. His line is 5-5 FG, 0-0 FT, and 2.4 pts/fga. Now the weird thing is 
that Ray scored 12 points and Paul scored 8 in five possessions each, but 
Paul's "efficiency" is three times as high. I think drawing fouls is a 
great thing too but I think that this example shows why pts/fga frequently 
has nothing to do with what most of us would associate with efficiency, 
which is how many points a player tends to get each time he gets the ball.

Now the point you make about the "free" shot attempts that guys like Miller 
and Pierce get by tossing up a field goal after getting the foul is valid. 
There's a flaw in counting a FTA as half a shot in the case where the ball 
goes in (for a possible three point play) because it should only have been 
one FGA total, but it'll look like a FGA+FTA on the stat sheet. When they 
miss, it works OK because no FGA shows up on the stat sheet. The only way 
to do it accurately is to actually keep track of what actually happened 
each game with shooting fouls. But I think in most cases, the player does 
not convert the field goal, and the error is a FTA attempt for each time 
this happens. In contrast, pts/fga essentially has an error of a FTA every 
time a "regular" FTA is taken, which is huge.

Alex