For me, I personally think a lot of advanced metrics fail to hit the mark for me, but I totally reject win shares, even though I think it’s a cool idea in theory. Fundamentally, my problem is that it fails to account for the team structure around a measured player as well as the strength of teams they play, and, as such, it results in some pretty strange outcomes.
For instance, the leader in playoff win shares in 2020 was Anthony Davis over Lebron James. Lebron had splits of 27.6/10.8/8.8 with 1.2 steals and 0.9 blocks. AD had splits of 27.7/9.7/3.5 with 1.2 steals and 1.4 blocks. Their stats are almost identical, but Lebron had significantly more assists, yet he has a slightly lower total win shares and WS/48. I feel like this is weird considering the general consensus after the bubble was Lebron was the clear cut best player that postseason, especially after winning Finals MVP.
A more egregious example in my mind is 2011. That year, Lebron led the league in total playoff win shares, even though he ended up losing the Finals to Dirk Nowitzki, who, himself, may have had one of the single greatest postseason runs ever, beating Kobe and the defending champion Lakers, the Duncan trio Spurs, and the Heatles all in a singular postseason, all without being on a team without a ton of talent. Wouldn’t being one of the primary stars on a championship team bias the stat towards him getting more win shares? Shouldn’t that be the case given what the stat intends to observe? And how can Lebron have such a high amount when he’s sharing the court with 2 other great players?
What about you guys? Are there advanced metrics that you think miss the mark in their attempts to further an understanding of the game?
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Plus/minus is noisy as hell. Defensive WS too
All of em.
I’m sure they can be good when used correctly, but people don’t know how to use them correctly.
Win Shares are the best we can do for players before 1973-74. But there are better all-in-one stats, for sure. Win Shares is especially suspect when measuring defense, but then most stats are suspect when measuring defense, even the advanced stats.
PER has absolutely no reason to exist except that it came before many other advanced stats and was well publicized by ESPN. But there are many better stats that cover the same time period. PER gives too much credit to inefficient volume shooters. If someone cites PER as their advanced stat of choice, I know they aren’t to be taken seriously.
All of the all-in-one stats have flaws. None of them should be taken as gospel without examining what it does and does not measure. But if it produces surprising results, the key is to examine why the results are surprising. Maybe there’s a player we’ve overlooked – or maybe it’s a flaw with the stat.
Even True Shooting Percentage, which is pretty trustworthy, assumes that 0.44 is an estimation of how many possessions one free throw is worth, which is an approximation. Furthermore, a great True Shooting Percentage on wide open uncontested catch-and-shoot shots is different from the same or maybe even a slightly worse True Shooting Percentage off the dribble on heavily contested shots.
So context still matters. Someone who plays with Jokic and benefits from his passes may not be nearly as efficient on a lesser team.
I agree with your point on TS. At this point in the development of the nba, how do we not have an actual points per possession metric? A 3 and a 2 + 1 Ft are the same. A 2 and a 2 + 1 missed FT and 2 made FTs are the same. Etc. But TS rates those differently. It should be so easy to record and tabluate but instead we have to guess.
i mean they do have it, it’s just under pay-walled tracking data
any of the ones like per that are based only on box score stats. going off purely box score stats is already stupid but even if you were doing that i feel like per and stats like it often still do a shit job
Any defensive stat and any stat that primarily uses Box Score to determine overall impact
Anything that was made up in the last 5 years and has a name. Like RAPTOR, LEBRON, KOBE or whatever else some nerds come up with that we’re supposed to suddenly care is important
Pretty much all of them are fatally flawed for the same reason: they’re reliant on the box score or on plus/minus to some degree, and those two things do a pretty terrible job of capturing on-court value, especially on defense. You can’t boil basketball down to a single number the way you can with baseball.
I actually don’t think it was consensus that LeBron was the best player that postseason. In the Finals yes for sure, but watching all those games as a Lakers fan I felt like AD was the driving force through much of the first three series.
Anyway, to answer the question: any one of them. I think if you just look at VORP, or WS, or BPM, or PER, you’re gonna get a sort of warped view of things. But what I like is to aggregate all of the advanced stats. If you look at all four of the ones I just mentioned and see what players have led the league in all four of them multiple times, it’s like Jordan, LeBron, Kareem, Wilt. So obviously the total picture they paint is accurate, but if you just look at one of them by itself you might walk away thinking Stockton or AD are top 5 players ever
Anthony Davis was by far the better defender though so are you including the other half of basketball?
True Shooting…
It’s a pseudo stat invented used to argue that James Harden is way better than he is.
PER and DBPM are useless. Everything else is at least useful as a starting point to get a general idea of things, but shouldn’t be used by itself.
I also don’t think using most advanced stats over the course of a single playoff run are using them in the way they were intended.