The Keltner List is a series of subjective questions formulated by famed sabermetrician Bill James used to help assess whether or not a player deserves to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Although the system was designed to evaluate baseball players, with a few minor tweaks it can also be used to assess the Hall-worthiness of basketball players. Today I will assess the Hall of Fame chances of Manu Ginobili.
In his excellent book The Politics of Glory, Bill James outlined what he called the Hall of Fame Standards Test. In a nutshell, the system awards points to players for various accomplishments: hitting .300, winning 300 games, etc. James designed the system such that the average Hall of Famer had a score of 50.
I wanted to develop a similar system for basketball, but immediately ran into a problem. The election process for the baseball Hall of Fame is very different from that of the basketball Hall of Fame, the biggest difference being that the basketball Hall of Fame honors players based on their college, international, and/or professional accomplishments, while the baseball Hall of Fame honors players based solely on their professional careers.
Back in September 2013 I took a look at the value of an NBA lottery pick, but one thing that always bugged me about that analysis was that there was an inherent assumption that all drafts are created equal. In other words, the expected value of the number one pick was always the same regardless of the talent available. This is, of course, demonstrably false, so I wanted to come up with a way to account for this quirk.
Last night we almost saw two amazing comebacks in the NBA playoffs:
Those games got me thinking: What was the greatest comeback in NBA playoff history?
Continue reading The Greatest Comebacks in NBA Playoff History
A few years ago I developed a method for identifying the leading candidates for the Most Improved Player (MIP) award. Since the winner of the award for the 2013-14 season will be announced soon, I thought it might be interesting to revisit this topic. I’ve made some minor tweaks to the method since it was first conceived, so let me outline the process before reporting this season’s results.
About six weeks ago I wrote about the biggest fluke scoring performances in NBA history. This past Friday night we had a new name to add to the mix: Corey Brewer, who’s stunning 51-point performance bested his previous career high by 22 points.
Please read the blog post linked above for complete details, but just to summarize a player’s “fluke” score is determined using the following formula:
(Pts – Avg)2 / Avg
where “Avg” is the player’s season scoring average.
Continue reading The Biggest Fluke Scoring Performances in NBA History (Update)
The Keltner List is a series of subjective questions formulated by famed sabermetrician Bill James used to help assess whether or not a player deserves to be elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Although the system was designed to evaluate baseball players, with a few minor tweaks it can also be used to assess the Hall-worthiness of basketball players. Today I will assess the Hall of Fame chances of Dikembe Mutombo, who will be eligible for election for the first time in 2015.
Horace Grant had a career year in 1991-92, averaging 14.2 points and 10.0 rebounds per game, shooting a career-high .578 from the field, and he was one of just six players with at least 100 steals and at least 100 blocks.
On the surface those numbers appear to be good, not great, yet he finished the season third in the NBA with 14.1 win shares, and his average of .237 win shares per 48 minutes was good for third as well.
How did this happen? How did a player like Grant manage to contribute so much to the bottom line?
My favorite contemporary writer, the incomparable Bill James, has used the “In a Box” concept in several of his books. Basically what James does is choose a topic (e.g., a baseball manager) and then makes an idiosyncratic list of the topic’s defining features. I think the format works well for a blog post, so today I would like to put the the 1980s NBA “In a Box”.
When I was a kid, I can remember looking at a basketball encyclopedia and being amazed by some of the statistics from the 1960s:
And the list goes on.
I was born in the 1970s, but the decade I most closely identify with my childhood is the 1980s. We had Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and later Michael Jordan, but I can remember thinking “These guys are good, but they must not be that good. Their numbers aren’t close to those put up by guys like Chamberlain, Russell, and Robertson.”