The Most Advanced Stat I Can Think Of ...

With all this talk of "advanced statistics" lately with the MIT Sloan Analytics conference, and the rising use of individual basketball statistics in everyday basketball arguments, I feel I must re-emphasize my position.

The way individual basketball statistics are kept do not make sense.

What is a made basket in basketball? It can be a highly individual campaign, fully crafted by one player. Or it can be a "made" by two players, half made by the assisting player, and the other half crediting to the scorer for making the shot. So far so good. Solo points made get credited to the scorer, and an assist given to the passer. Great. But, what if there were three players involved in making that basket happen? If you know how basketball works, you know this happens pretty frequently. What if there are four players that contributed? You can have up to ten players (rarely), including the defenders, involved the making of a basket. And the same goes for a missed shot! Yet when a player makes a basket, he gets all the credit, and every one else on the court gets zero, except maybe for the passer, who gets an assist. And the allocation can change for every basket depending on how it was created. This is an allocation problem, and it's a huge problem in individual basketball statistics. The same thing goes for rebounds and steals!

Which is why I have no problem with team statistics, because you have no allocation problems. The team scores, the team rebounds, the team defends as a single unit. You only need to worry about adjusting for pace and other minor details. Clean.

Like a double rainbow, what does it all mean? See after the jump ...

So then I usually get the "Well then it's all subjective! You're just trying to take the stats out because they're facts that go against your precious Kobe!" Then I have to repeat that yes, they are facts, but the conclusions you are making off of them are completely skewed. I can deal with the outcomes if the process makes sense, but it doesn't. And yes, it is subjective, as it is dependent upon your grasp of how winning basketball is played, not upon your understanding of simple arithmetic. So poof! There go your arguments based on stats. I respect much more someone who tells me how Kobe's hands are smaller than other greats, resulting in a diminished ability to finish compared to other greats (seriously, have you seen how Dr. J could palm the ball? And the english MJ could get on a layup with a flick of his wrist?). So, we're left with these qualitative comparisons, and that's fine by me.

But then I got to thinking, what current stat can I actually believe in, one that makes sense, one that can be compared...

If you guessed FT%, that would be a really good guess, and technically right, because a FT has been taken the same way for at least the last 40 years, 15 feet from the hoop, unguarded, on a 10 foot high rim. Awesome stat to compare players with.

But that's not the stat I'm thinking of for today.

I'm thinking of minutes played. Such a simple stat. But so meaningful, because every minute you play is a validation that you are on the court doing the right things. Actually, let me qualify that: minutes played on a winning team. If you are playing minutes on a winning team, that means you are doing winning things, and if you play the most minutes on that team, it stands to reason that you have the most ability to influence that team, the team which is winning like Charlie Sheen. It makes sense that the players playing the most minutes on a winning team are most responsible for the winning-ness of that team. Tiger Blood! Of course, there can be exceptions, but if a player had that much impact in fewer minutes, but barring injuries, and foul trouble, wouldn't he be playing more? The stamp of a winning player is that he plays the bulk of the minutes for a winning team. He's out there doing winning things. Winning, winning, winning. You don't have allocation problems with minutes played, the credit goes all to the player for earning those minutes. It just makes sense. It even makes more sense in terms of "most valuable". Because your best player may not be the guys who plays the most minutes. But do you want to know your most valuable player was for a particular season? Who played the most minutes for your team? That's who. Whether it's because his backup was unreliable, or because he was that good, the coach needed him out there to play more than any other player.

So, I decided to take a look at the playoff minutes played for the every NBA champion since 1980. I limited the list to those players that played more than 15% of their team's minutes. Why 15%? No reason, it just seemed like there was a natural demarcation there, where the next player dropped off.

If it's not clear, this is a bit tongue-in-cheek. Of course, there are problem with just using minutes, but since people want so badly to use individual statistics, minutes seems to be the least sucky of all the individual stats. The assumption is that you want to win, and that you play because you are contributing to winning. But there are always exceptions, and other reasons for the distribution of minutes. Still, it was fun to look at the numbers.

I found out some surprising things, and some not so surprising things:

• Only one team had 4 players play more than 15% of the minutes, the 79-80 Lakers
• Only Magic, Dwade and Duncan have led title teams without another player playing 15% of the minutes
• Kobe led the Lakers in 4 of 5 of their title playoff runs (Shaq was the first)
  
• Tim Duncan led the Spurs in 3 of 4 of their title runs (Parker was the last)
• Robert Horry played more than 15% of the minutes on 2 title teams
• James Worthy played the most minutes for the 1987 champs
• "Unsung Heroes" (in my mind, underrated when considering how minutes they played):Avery Johnson, Ron Artest, Norm Nixon, Tiny Archibald, Horace Grant)
• Bird played the highest % of his teams minutes for the 1981 Celtics
• Only Kobe played more than 18% of a champ's minutes in more than two seasons (2001,2002)
  

Playoff Minutes on a Championship Team