Re: Athlon Sports on scoring efficiency

["Jim Meninno" <jam@london.com>]

----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander Wang" <awang@MIT.EDU>

> 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!

Hi Alex.  Tom will have to answer this himself, but I'm pretty sure he
understands this.  His argument seems based on the fact that free throws
have other advantages, "Foul shots are the most efficient type of offense -
no one can stop you but yourself" (Isn't that accounted for by free throw
shooting percentages and, hence, points scored?) and "Unless there is a
terrible defensive breakdown there is no chance for an opposition fast
break" (are we going to start evaluating all shots and the opportunities
they provide the other team when calculating "scoring efficiency"?). The
funny thing is that neither of us have ever said that getting to the line is
not a very effective way for teams to score points.   Frankly, I don't think
players that get to the line need the unfair statistical advantage of not
counting their attempts at getting to the line as attempts to score.

> 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.

That's a great example that illustrates perfectly the fatal flaw of this
"statistic".  And, I'll go one step further.

Tom claims that the Athlon method of calculating the percentage of games in
which a player exceeds a given PTS/FGA ratio "minimizes the distorting
effects of 'outliers' - those performances that are transcendentally good or
pathetically awful ."  Well, that's might be what it tries to do, but it
could actually do the exact opposite.  For instance, a player who
consistently averages just under the arbitrary cut off level ends up with a
rating of 0.000, even though he is extremely consistent.  A player who
averages just over the completely made up, useless, silly, absurd cut off
half the time and shoots 0-127 in the other 50% of his games, ends up with a
rating of 0.500, which I'm pretty sure is quite a bit higher than 0.000.

Look, I think we both went out of our way to say that we agreed with the
validity of trying to measure the number of points that a player scores each
time he attempts to score.  I can only think that anyone who reads what we
wrote and asks the question "How do you account for Shaq's and Paul's higher
scoring efficiency if it is not related to their consistently higher
shooting percentages and consistent ability to get to the foul line?" is
simply looking for an argument. Of course it's RELATED to those things, how
could it not be?  It's just that the Athlon statistic is a piss poor way of
measuring it.

Jim