Originally Posted by
whereinthehellami
I'm reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis right now and it is interesting how missleading some statistics are in baseball (fielding precentage, RBIs). The work that Bill James did to revolutionize statistics for baseball is amazing. Has anyone done this for basketball? It seems that basketball could use some new stats and a field simliar to sabermetrics. where is basketball's VORP, OBP?
Which basketball statistic is overrated? I've always thought that blocks are somewhat misleading when you consider that many shot blockers block the ball out of bounds. maybe a stat that tracked down the blocks that result in a change of possesion would be more informative.
One really simple one is raw fg%, because it weights 2 point field goals and 3 point field goals the same, even though one is, quite obviously, worth 50% more. For example, during their senior seasons, Shelden shot 57.8%, while Redick shot 47%. But they both scored 1.16 points per shot (Shelden was a touch better, but only slightly).
That's why efg% is better than raw fg% - it equalizes all shots from the field. The efg%'s for JJ and Shelden were 57.7% and 58.0%, respectively, much closer than the raw fg% would lead you to believe.
Not that this is revolutionary or anything, but it would at least allow guards to compete for fg% titles.
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