"Lies, Damned Lies, and Obama (response to Battier article)

Teams can get their money's worth selecting a Battier type player looking further down the draft where it's much more cost effective.

I still don't see how a team got their money's worth when his play is cut from the cloth of many undrafted or sub 15 picks found later in the draft.

 

Correct. Absolutely nobody was projecting NBA superstardom for Battier. He was never much of a scorer, not even at Duke--I don't believe he ever even led his college team in scoring--he won the Player of the Year award based upon his reputation as the nation's best defensive player, because 01 was an unusually weak year for POY candidates, and because of those "intangibles" that tend to get associated with him.

And the idea that the No. 6 pick should be a franchise-turning superstar is ahistorical nonsense. The No. 6 pick never produces superstars. About once a decade it might produce a second tier all-star like Roy or Antoine Walker. But, other than that, it's produced a bunch of journeymen and quite a few outright busts. Battier has been better than the vast majority of guys picked in his draft position.

 

Oh, so now we've left the entire "new stats that measure a player's worth" and gone back to the unquantifiable "I can just see it when I watch him." That's not what the Lewis piece is about. At this point you're not arguing against the critique, or for the Lewis profile. You're just arguing. I watch him play too. I see a roleplayer no more valuable than several other roleplayers.

*sigh*

religion called, and it wants you to give back its tactic for skirting debate and avoiding showing any evidence.

Is this what it has come to?

It's impossible to quantify it. Precisely why it's so easy to dismiss. At the NBA level, you can hve the players who have "chemistry." I'll take the players who are better.

Also, I know Don Mattingly is one of the 10 best baseball players I ever saw play. You know why? Because he was my favorite player, and I just know. You don't get it? Then you don't get it. You can name 50 players off the top of your head with better numbers? Well, that's because his effect on those 80s Yankees teams isn't quantifiable. It's like totally intangible and stuff. The guy was smart, spoke well, and avoided the other flashier, less intangibly good players. He once kept George Steinbrenner on hold for 12 minutes because he was principled like that. Stats can't tell the whole story with Donny, only intuitive goodness-detection can.

See how that works?

 

I'd be more impressed by Mattingly's intangibles if the Yanks had actually won a damn thing during his tenure.

(yes, I know you weren't espousing his greatness, but I've heard that line of bull about him before)

I'm not sure if it's a measure of the greatness of this site, or of the sadness of sports journalism, that Shane Battier, nothing more than a very nice role player on a good team, is getting so much debate. He either brings something that helps elevate teams, or he keeps getting lucky. Houston wasn't exactly barren of actual high-level talent when he arrived.

And, because Stoney's point about the 6th pick never producing superstars intrigued me, past No. 6 picks, presented without comment:

1989: Stacey King
1990: Felton Spencer
1991: Doug Smith
1992: Tom Gugliotta
1993: Calbert Cheaney
1994: Sharone Wright
1995: Bryant Reeves
1996: Antoine Walker
1997: Ron Mercer
1998: Robert Traylor
1999: Wally Szczerbiak
2000: DerMarr Johnson
2001: The Greatest Bench Player In The History of The NBA
2002: Dajuan Wagner
2003: Chris Kaman
2004: Josh Childress
2005: Martell Webster
2006: Brandon Roy
2007: Yi Jianlian
2008: Danilo Gallinari

 

And what exactly have Battier's teams won?

 

The salary for the #6 pick was somewhere around $2.6 million dollars while lower tier players who carry similar skill sets to Shane Battier are paid half that salary and less. So I REALLY can't buy into belief that the #6 pick doesn't have expectations tied to them when they're paid premium dollars when selected that high.

 

You're kidding, right? This whole thing started with the people who didn't like the article dismissing new stats that measure a player's worth. They (and I assume you're one of them) essentially said, "I don't care about these new metrics. I don't care if the Rockets have new measurements that show Battier has a far greater effect on a game than his conventional stats would suggest. I've seen him play, and he's not that good." So how can you now criticize someone else who says, "I've seen him play and he is that good"? They're just playing by your rules, where opinion trumps statistical analysis. How can you reject all the quantifiable evidence that doesn't support your view and then criticize someone for not providing quantifiable evidence?

 

You're being awfully argumentative.
But you brought up baseball, which is barely a team sport and tried to compare to basketball, which is the ultimate team sport
You either get that, or you don't.

 

More games than they won before he got there, and more than they won after he left.

 

What is this quantifiable evidence you're referring to, because the ones used in Lewis' piece are egregiously flawed.

 

Did you catch this paragraph:

One well-known statistic the Rockets’ front office pays attention to is plus-minus, which simply measures what happens to the score when any given player is on the court. In its crude form, plus-minus is hardly perfect: a player who finds himself on the same team with the world’s four best basketball players, and who plays only when they do, will have a plus-minus that looks pretty good, even if it says little about his play. Morey says that he and his staff can adjust for these potential distortions — though he is coy about how they do it — and render plus-minus a useful measure of a player’s effect on a basketball game. A good player might be a plus 3 — that is, his team averages 3 points more per game than its opponent when he is on the floor. In his best season, the superstar point guard Steve Nash was a plus 14.5. At the time of the Lakers game, Battier was a plus 10, which put him in the company of Dwight Howard and Kevin Garnett, both perennial All-Stars. For his career he’s a plus 6. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey says. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.”

 

I have no problem with those statistical measures if it also lean heavily in favor of players like Sebastian Telfair, his cousin Steph and jamal Tinsley.

I didn't mention all of those three names because they're from Brooklyn like me, but I'm just saying.