ACC Scorekeepers - Who's generous giving assists?

[riverside6]

Beware of numbers ahead! Warning: Stats follow!

Did everyone read Ken Pomeroy's article titled Hometown Scoring (http://www.basketballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=14)? Here's the main point from it...


"With biased errors, unlike random errors, there are ways to sort out where the biases exist, and whom those errors benefit. In this case, we can compare how often a team is credited with an assist at home to how often they get an assist away from home. Since scorekeepers are largely the same people at each home game, we can single out which teams have scorekeepers that ration assists like they're gold and those that make even the most selfish players look like Steve Nash."

Pomeroy makes an interesting point, so in my latest article I looked at the same thing for the ACC teams (http://www.scacchoops.com/forms/tt_NewsBreaker_External.asp?NB=917), and also expanded upon Pomeroy's thoughts by looking strictly at home court's.

In general, Duke's assist percentage (Assists/FGs * 100) was higher at home than on the road despite having a scorekeeper that was slightly under the league average.

Dang typos, and I can't change the title! ARGH.

[mapei]

But wouldn't we expect teams to have more assists at home even under an unbiased system given that teams win more (scoring more points), on average, at home than away? Do the stats control for that?

[CDu]

But wouldn't we expect teams to have more assists at home even under an unbiased system given that teams win more (scoring more points), on average, at home than away? Do the stats control for that?

The measure quoted in the thread was assist percentage (assists/fg * 100), not total assists. The percentage measure itself controls in large measure for the likelihood of more points being scored at home. Holding all else equal, we'd expect an increase in points to have a linear increase equivalent for both assists and FGs, meaning the ratio would stay the same. So a significantly different ratio of assists to FGs (i.e., different assist percentage) would indicate that something else is influencing assist stats.

[sandinmyshoes]

It's early and I just glanced over the article, but is it for just ACC games or all games? It would seem the penchant all teams have for scheduling some at home patsies could skew the assists a little bit?

[mepanchin]

There's also really no correlation between assist rate and winning. Last year the teams with the highest assist rates were Northwestern, Michigan State, West Virginia, Lamar, Pitt, Texas Pan American, Hawaii, Brown, Nebraska and Air Force . Not exactly title contenders.

[riverside6]

It's early and I just glanced over the article, but is it for just ACC games or all games? It would seem the penchant all teams have for scheduling some at home patsies could skew the assists a little bit?
It is for all games, not just conference games. Just for you, here's the same graphs just for conference games (http://www.scacchoops.com/forms/query.asp).


There's also really no correlation between assist rate and winning. Last year the teams with the highest assist rates were Northwestern, Michigan State, West Virginia, Lamar, Pitt, Texas Pan American, Hawaii, Brown, Nebraska and Air Force . Not exactly title contenders.

You are absolutely correct, but it does show that just because Player A averages 7.0 assists per game and Player B averages 5 assists per game, it doesn't mean that Player A is the better point guard.