11-09-2021, 02:27 PM
(11-09-2021, 02:11 PM)Kammrath Wrote: Of course people will use performance in a lot of ways in basketball.
Do you really not believe that the ultimate "performance" metric in basketball is winning?
I think "performance" is almost always used as a more generalized concept than "point differential," and that when people mean only "point differential" or "wins and losses," that's what they say.
No, I don't. Winning can be affected by many things not having to do with performance -- injuries, scheduling, conditions, poor officiating, heck, unlucky bounces.
Winning also does not equate to point differentials except on a one-game basis. If point differentials were all that mattered, we would determine titles and playoff seedings by point differentials, not win-loss record. We could also determine the best players in the season, 1-450, by sorting them by +/-.
There are stars who end up with poor +/-s, because they play on bad teams. Yet, good teams then hire them because of their excellent overall performance. They don't dismiss them as players who can't impact winning because of their +/-, or because their team didn't have a winning record.
+/- is one of a number of available statistical tools. Statistical tools help evaluate performance. They don't define performance. +/- is not a number that tells you anything about how, or how well, someone plays. Even a stat that does tell you something about how the player's performance (FT%, for example) only gives you a small piece of the story.
If stats told us everything, we wouldn't even need to watch the games. We could just look at the stat sheet and know everything about what happened. There's a reason they play the games.