PPWS: Points Per Weighted Shot

[Ruckus]

Thanks for making me feel retarded. I appreciate it.

[Guest]

The left shows Josh's stats in relation to the rest of the league. I would guess the band-aid looking thing is the middle 50% of the league with the strip in the middle being the mean or median. So Josh is in the upper 25% for ppg and the lower 25% in ft%. The actual range may not be what I said, it could be the upper 12.5% or something else. But I am pretty confident that is what the left stats mean.

I watched a bit of the Clippers and thought that Blake and Josh and probably similar shooters, but that the media loves Blake a lot more. So my thought was "they shoot about the same, but when Josh shoots it is a bad but when Blake does the laud his work ethic and how his shot is improving". The conclusion? http://vorped.com/bball/index.php/player/page/1096-Blake-Griffin No, not at all. Josh is better from the left side long 2, comparable at the right side long 2 and not even close just about everywhere else.

My big take-away is about the left side graphic. Josh and Blake play the same position, but their confidence intervals for each statistic are not the same. Specifically, you can tell that Blake has a larger interval for 3-pointers than Josh. I think this guy is adjusting each interval based upon the frequency of each stat. Blake shoots a lot less than Josh from 3, thus he gets a larger interval.

I also noticed this guy has posted some open source code that collects NBA play-by-play data (https://github.com/kpascual/nbascrape). I am not familiar with the program he is using with this code, but that could be some very valuable data! Maybe this discussion will go over towards the lounge, but every statistic the guy on vorped.com/bball/ uses is extremely simple. Really, the only thing he is adding is the visualization (and collecting the data). It would be pretty cool to use his data to look at questions about the Hawks.

[ag82]

Blake gets a little more freedom for good reason.

FG% .546

OWS 5.3

PER 23.7

Josh

FG% .457

OWS (-.3)

PER 17.5

So sure blake is just a bad a shooter as Josh from the outside, but he doesn't do it consistently. He relies on the things he's good at and takes the occasional jumper. Regardless of the shots he's taking, he's converting at an efficient rate. Josh just doesn't. Blake contributes positively on offense to his team, Josh, negatively. That's why.

[DJlaysitup]

The thing that skews these statistics - as far as how they apply to winning and losing - is that some guys are smart (especially role players) and only take smart shots.

This, for the most part, is a good thing. But...if those shots can be decreased by increased defensive pressure (like in the playoffs)...the value goes out the window. Efficiency doesn't matter as much if you can't get your shot off.

So, effectively, these are just regular season statistics.