Representing adjusted +/- you have Winston, who plainly doesn’t understand basketball outside of his own stat. Representing PER you have Hollinger who is either a master internet troll or completely and utterly clueless. And representing win shares you have “professor” Berri who is completely and totally unable to recognize the shortfalls of his stat and wants more than anything to be basketball version of Bill James, whether he’s right or not! How can you take them seriously when the creators/inventors/biggest proponents are so out of touch with reality?

When you have someone like Morey who uses stats and isn’t beholden to them and is more concerned with winning than proving a point, it seems like a strange breath of fresh air.

Could you clarify what you mean here? Shouldn’t Thomas’ performance in Charlotte give us a hint about whether it was Thomas or the rest of the Bulls making their D so good? Likewise, shouldn’t the Bulls’ performance post-Thomas give us a hint about Thomas’ impact? We can’t say anything conclusively, of course, but if Thomas goes into Charlotte and suddenly their defensive rating improves while he’s in the game, that’s suggestive of something, right?

I continue to marvel at how people think that just because you use a stat for an analysis that it’s somehow proclaiming that is the end-all, be-all.

That statement is a reason I cannot stand Berri’s blog (along with Berri’s tone). Win Shares is a useful stat, however, it is not the end all, be all of stats. Berri uses it as such though. He says Player A has a WP48 of 0.105 and Player B has a WP48 of 0.125, so player B is better and completely ignores their role. Which is how he can say, “I don’t have a great story for why Ariza’s efficiency has declined,” when most observers would say, “It’s because he was the 3rd or 4th option on a team and took wide open shots and is now the #1 option on a team and is taking contested jumpers.”

Heck, Morey recognized it and was able to use it to explain why Hayes isn’t as effective as he was last year. If you take a guy that’s effective in certain situations and put him in more situations that are suboptimal, it will make him look worse.

Slightly OT (maybe), but I watched that Darko +36 game, and it’s games like that which illustrate the importance of +/-. The +/- for that game accurately represented the play of the Love-Darko combo (who were crashing the boards, keeping the Thunder away from the rim, and making good passes) as being superior to the Al Jefferson-Ryan Hollins combo, which did none of those things. That’s not to say that +/- can be used to say that Darko is better than Al Jefferson (or even a good player), just that something about the Love-Darko combination worked in that game. And that’s useful information, even if it doesn’t give you a nice list of how “good” each player is.

along the same lines, i also noticed last night you tweeted about how thomas isn’t a jumpshooter (a common sentiment echoed by people who dont watch the bulls every night, or by people who for some reason hate tyrus thomas), but then you go look at his stats, and you see that he shoots 45% on mid range jumpers this year, and was the best midranger jump shooter on the bulls before he left.

As for Tyrus, it’s become pretty clear that fans too heavily invested in his game are just way, way too unrealistic about his positives and negatives. There are Bulls fans who are trying to argue with me that Hakim Warrick is a smarter defender, or that Tyrus showed no passing ability. On the other hand, there are people who are acting like Tyrus wasn’t one of the worst offensive big men in the league.