This Week In Cleveland Sports 2/28/08
Feb 28th, 2008 by cleveland
Trades, Free Agency, Ses, BK, Rodelli and Barrell. If DA doesn’t sign, it will be a terrible mistake for him.
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Aaron: I was not aware of basketball efficiency ratings until you mentioned them in this week’s podcast. It’s an interesting and complicated statistic, especially the version designed by ESPN’s John Hollinger, which even takes into account a team’s pace of play (fast-break, etc). Critics say good as his system is, it still doesn’t include such intangibles as leadership, durability, etc. And it doesn’t reflect defense beyond blocks, steals and fouls. So defenders who simply shut down their assigned man and either hold them to a low field goal percentage or prevent them from getting off shots at all aren’t fairly rated. Maybe in your baseball coverage you could take a look at Bill James and Sabermetrics, which questions some of baseball’s accepted measures of skill (batting average, etc.) According to Terry Pluto, the Indians put a lot of emphasis on OPS (on-base plus slugging), which is one Sabermetrics number. I wonder what stats teams like the Tigers look at.
Efficiency is by no means a “perfect” stat, as there is not a perfect stat out there. It is a pretty good general number that reflects a players value on the court. Almost all of the time, the teams with the highest efficiency rating of all their players combined also have the best records. I’ve been saying this for a while, but anyone who doesn’t know about OPS and other Sabermetric baseball stats needs to read Bill James’ Abstract or the book “Moneyball”, which is a little easier to digest. You may never look at another batting average again.