Re: [Celtics' Stuff ] Do Point Guards Develop Differently?

[Celtic4Hire@xxxxxxx]

Excellent, excellent analysis and research. This guy obviously doesn't have a 
job and has too much time on his hands. It is a shame because he looks like a 
talented individual who could make some money in the real world. I enjoyed 
the article....

DJessen33

<< From HOOPSWORLD.com
 Do Point Guards Develop Differently?
 By Kevin Pelton
 Feb 27, 2004, 00:30
 
 
 Two seasons ago, the Spurs fan Web site SpursReport.com had a regular 
feature comparing the statistics of San Antonio rookie point guard Tony Parker with 
the rookie statistics of several of the league's top point guards, players 
like John Stockton and Gary Payton. Surprisingly, the site found that Parker's 
numbers compared quite favorably indeed with these legends. (I later threw 
together a similar list of the mediocre rookie statistics of some All-Star point 
guards for this Supersonics.com article cautioning fans against expecting too 
much too soon from the Sonics' Luke Ridnour.) 
 
 Or was it surprising? 
 
 Point guard, after all, is reputed to be the toughest position for young 
players to learn in the NBA. At the same time, while several All-Star point 
guards improved dramatically over their rookie numbers, many players who went on to 
do little of anything had similar rookie statistics. So maybe, my thinking 
has recently gone, rookie statistics just don't tell us very much about what a 
point guard is going to end up becoming. 
 
 Alas, conventional wisdom tends not to hold much sway in "Page 23", so I 
decided to study the issue of point guard development in more depth. 
 
 The first question to be asked is, "Do rookie point guards really struggle 
relative to other rookies?" 
 
 This is not necessarily an easy question to answer. My primary method was to 
look at how many point guards were amongst the top ten rookies each season 
dating back to 1995-96 by my VORP (Value Over Replacement Player) rating. I 
compiled these lists for a column last season comparing last year's rookie class 
to its predecessors. 
 
 By far, point guard is the least-represented position amongst this group, 
with just 11 point guards in eight seasons (the expectation would be 16). The 
next lowest position was centers, with 15 players. 
 
 However, this could represent a bias in my rating system. Veteran point 
guards have, in my opinion, been rated fairly, but I'm a biased observer. For a 
control, I went to the All-Rookie teams over that same span -- which also 
feature ten players, chosen without regard to position. 17 point guards have made 
either first- or second-team All-Rookie, slightly above the expectation and tied 
for third with small forwards. Some of these selections were dubious (unless 
you're a big Tyus Edney or J.R. Bremer fan), but that's a point against 
conventional wisdom. 
 
 The evidence, however, is pretty overwhelming when we look ahead of time at 
the next portion of my study and evaluate the relative per-minute performance 
(again, by my formula) of rookie point guards versus all rookies. Limiting the 
sample to players who played at least 500 minutes as rookies and played in 
the NBA at least one other season (the second part becomes important later), 
rookie PGs have an average efficiency of .451, as compared to .466 for all 
rookies. By my formula, that's about the difference this season between David 
Wesley, and his backup, Steve Smith. 
 
 (As an aside, I should mention that starting with that study, I'm not using 
players "listed" as point guards, as my relevant spreadsheet has no such 
designation. Instead, I defined point guards as players 6-2 or under and those with 
ratings of 2.50 or greater in my passing rating. Though there were some 
mistakes, the vast majority of players were correctly placed and I'm not sure this 
method is any worse than guessing which position a player "really" played, 
often a questionable process. 80 of the 395 players who meet the initial 
qualifications were deemed point guards.) 
 
 Despite the All-Rookie voting -- which occasionally is tough to justify 
statistically -- I think it is safe to conclude that point guards struggle more 
than other rookies, which allows us to move on to asking, "Do point guards 
develop more than other rookies?" 
 
 Let us return, then, to the sample of 395 players who played at least 500 
minutes as rookies, were rookies in the 1989-90 season or more recently, and 
played at least one other NBA season. Here, their rookie and sophomore seasons 
are compared (again using the per-minute efficiency rating): 
 
 
 Group   Year1  Year2
 Overall  .466   .472
 PGs      .451   .464The point guards, by this method, improve more than 
twice as much as all rookies (despite the fact that they are included in this 
measure). While their lower initial efficiency explains some of this -- my studies 
have confirmed the conventional wisdom that regression to the mean causes bad 
players to improve more than better ones -- this is strong evidence for point 
guard development. 
 
 Another way to look at the issue is to see what percentage of players 
improved from their first season to their second season. This reduces the impact any 
one player can have. 66.3% of the point guards improved, as compared to 57.7% 
of all rookies. 
 
 In addition to looking at the development from year one to year two, I also 
wanted to take a longer-term look. I chose to use season five, as early 
entrants should be developed by this point and most players should be entering their 
prime. Let's repeat the calculations for players with at least five years of 
NBA experience: 
 
 
 Group   Year1  Year5
 Overall  .473   .468
 PGs      .455   .463Point guards don't improve very much -- in fact, the 53 
players are, on average, worse than the second-year point guards. However, the 
250 total players actually decline on a per-minute basis from their rookie 
seasons to their fifth years. In part, this is because of anomalies like 
Gheorghe Muresan, who posted an efficiency of zero, his excuse being that he only 
played one minute during his fifth season. At the same time, it also reflects the 
point I made last week when discussing this year's sophomore class -- that 
rookies just don't improve as much on a per-minute basis as we tend to believe. 
 
 There's another piece of information here, I think. You'll notice a larger 
difference between the rookie performance of all players who last five years 
and the total population than there is for point guards. I think this may 
indicate that rookie performance is a better indicator of long-term success for 
players other than point guards. 
 
 To negate the impact of the Muresan-esque flukes, let's look at the 
percentage of players who improved. Despite the average decline, 51.8% of all rookies 
improved by their fifth years. But here the point guards dominate -- a full 
64.2% of them were better in year five than in their rookie seasons. 
 
 Overall, I feel confident in concluding that point guards develop more than 
rookies at other positions. There is another part of this question, however, 
and that is whether rookie performance indeed means less than point guards than 
for other rookies. 
 
 To answer this aspect of the question, I decided to look at the variability 
of the relationship between the player's rookie performance and that in years 
two and five. I did that in two ways, by calculating the correlations and the 
average squared errors. Here is that table: 
 
 
             Year 2         Year 5
 Group      r     MSE     r     MSE
 Overall  .592  1477.5  .320  4665.1
 PGs      .591  1244.5  .150  6332.3What do these numbers mean? 
Correlation(r) measures the strength of the relationship between two sets of numbers; a 
high correlation means that the two sets are closely related, a small correlation 
means little or no relationship at all. As would be expected, the 
correlations with second-year performance are reasonably strong; the year-five 
correlations not very strong at all. The relevant information is that the correlation in 
year five for point guards is less than half that of all players. In other 
words, knowledge of how a point guard performed as a rookie doesn't tell us very 
much about what he's going to be like four years later. 
 
 Mean squared error is another way of looking at the issue that provides a 
harsher penalty for big changes by squaring the difference between year two or 
year five efficiency and that in year one. (Technical note: I multiplied the 
efficiencies by 1000 before squaring to get more manageable numbers.) As a 
result, I could have gotten much more accurate results by removing guys who played 
only a handful of minutes in year two or year five, but the big issue is point 
guards relative to overall positions, not the size of the numbers (which have 
little power of language anyways). 
 
 Surprisingly, point guards actually show as less variable in year two. By 
year five, however, the same difference as evident as with correlation -- the 
average squared error is nearly 50% larger than for all players, a huge 
difference. 
 
 The conclusion, in this case as throughout this column, is that conventional 
wisdom is correct. Point guards are worse as rookies, they improve more, and 
their improvement is less predictable than at other positions. I've argued in 
the past that NBA observers are too slow in updating their evaluations of 
players to reflect their performance early in their NBA careers, but that may not 
be the case with point guards. We should be slower to come to judgments on 
point guards, and give them more of an opportunity to prove themselves. 
 
 "The Page 23 Club"
 One of the unfortunate things about this column is that, because of my 
schedule, I can't commit myself to a specific day or time for publishing columns. 
To help my readers, I'm starting an e-mail list. If you want, you'll receive an 
e-mail whenever a new column is up with an introduction to the column and a 
link. If you're interested, e-mail me at kpelton@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx and let me 
know. I will, of course, make every effort to protect the privacy of your e-mail 
address.  >>