APBRmetrics

Hello,
My name is Lee Richardson and this is my first post on the site. I'm a college statistics major and am pretty obsessed with basketball statistics. I just finished reading basketball on paper and it was the best/most interesting book I've ever read.
Today my roommates and I were arguing over Kobe Bryant's effect this year. I was trying to tell them that someone taking nearly four more shots per game and 200 more than anyone else in the league at this point was not playing very efficient basketball. With his offensive rating being 104 (195th on basketball reference, not filtered for games played)and shooting 42.1 %, I couldn't understand how they were justifying the amount of shots he was taking and extreme usage rate (36.5%), which is 4% higher than anyone else in the league not named Brooke Lopez or Charlie Villenueva. The main argument they were making was that "who else do they have on the perimeter to score", but I find it tough to explain how he shoots nearly as many shots Bynum and Gasol combined (Offensive ratings of 113 and 111, respectively).
I would love to hear peoples thoughts on this topic, as well as things I could say to further convince my roommates. It is truly amazing to me how someone can shoot this much and not be called out by the coaching staff. I find it baffling that coach Brown has put up with so many low percentage fall-away jumpshots this year when Andrew Bynum and Pau Gasol shooting a much higher percentage (Bynum at around 58 %, Gasol at 50 %). I have been thinking a lot about how someone can shoot so much and still get away with it. However, I do recognize that it is Kobe, a freakishly competitive player who is more famous and respected than anyone else in basektball. This topic is truly fascinating to me, and I would love to hear other peoples input and thoguhts that I have not thought about yet.

First, don't get hung up on FG%. That's almost a useless statistic when comparing players with different means of scoring.
Effective FG% incorporates 3-point FG, counting them as 1.5 FG made. Kobe makes some 3's, Gasol and Bynum do not.
Kobe also gets 7.5 FTA per 36 min., and he makes 85% of them. Those other guys get a lot less, and they don't hit them as well.

This brings us to "true shooting percent", which is defined as Pts/(2*FGA + .88*FTA)
In this shooting-efficiency metric, it's Bynum .613, Gasol .552, Kobe .518
Other Lakers' perimeter scorers and their TS% this year: Fisher .479, Blake .476, Metta .438, Goudelock .487.

They've had 3 reliable scorers all year, and 2 of them are centers.
It would of course be nice if they could get the ball more to Gasol and Bynum, without forcing a lot of turnovers. I don't know how to determine the number of TO resulting from (but not necessarily charged against) those 2 players.

Kobe has 3.4 TO/36, and some of these are gotten while attempting to feed Bynum or Gasol.
Probably fewer of theirs are from trying to get the ball to Kobe.
Those two bigs total 4.7 TO/36 min.

You can step thru FG%, eFG% and TS% but for scoring efficiency I want to get to or start with, offensive rating / efficiency and 104 is not good.

Still the Lakers offense is 4.5 points better with him on the court than off. Though his back-up is a rookie picked 46th.

Non-prior informed RAPM has Kobe's positive impact on offense at +1.5, a bit more than half of what the prior-informed estimates, so there is at least an appearance of slippage on offensive impact this season. It is by far smaller than any prior-informed rating for him for the period we have ratings.

So I generally agree with Lee's interpretation.

Could Bynum and Gasol handle more usage well? I don't know how to answer well without more research. Bynum is at his career high for usage for a season, so it would new territory, from a seasonal standpoint. Gasol is near the low of his seasonal usage range. He could handle more usage well in the past. Not as sure about now. Would want to look at game level data.

Lakers 10-9 when Kobe takes 25+ shots this season. 22-11 when he takes less. Not a simple cause and effect of course, but interesting, probably relevant.

Lakers 8-5 when Bynum gets 15+ shots, 24-15 when he doesn't.
Lakers 10-6 when Gasol gets 15+ shots, 22-14 when he doesn't.
A small difference in winning trend compared to Bryant's data. The inter-player comparison when achieving the standard is not statistically significant but Kobe's on/off comparison might be more significant. One could look multi-year and improve the sample size and accuracy / relevance some.

Lee, you might be interested in Evan's post (and possibly my replies) in the usage & efficiency by top dogs thread I just posted.

Ok great, thanks for directing me to that. I love this website it is so cool finding a place where people talk about this

Where do you guys go to find all of this information? Do you just copy it and move it into your own computer on excel or R? I've been using basketball reference but I am not too efficient with it at all

I got all that off the Lakers' page: http://www.basketball-reference.com/teams/LAL/2012.html

What I don't know how to wring out of b-r.com is how to get splits for Gasol with and without Bynum in the lineup. When Bynum missed a lot of games for several years, Gasol was a huge scorer; when Bynum plays, Gasol has less of a role.

I realize ORtg rolls up turnovers with the shooting, but aren't offensive rebounds also in there?
Not all TO are the result of attempts to score, so that's a bit confounding.

If Kobe effectively makes 52%, and these guys rebound 20% of the misses -- is that worse than Gasol taking 56% shots, while Kobe and Bynum rebound 15% of his misses?

Having two centers there to rebound and put back Kobe's misses may actually be the best offense the Lakers can run right now.
Kobe gets to concentrate on what he does best -- score from anywhere, any time -- and he wants to be the NBA's all-time leading scorer.

This year's leaders in ORtg: Tyson Chandler, Novak, Bonner, Paul, Ryan Anderson, Harden, Brandan Wright, Faried, Ginobili, Biedrins, Dunleavy, James Jones, DeAndre, Korver, Mike Miller, Chris Andersen, Collison, Sefolosha, Ilyasova, Kawhi Leonard.
http://bkref.com/tiny/HTcfE

A couple of offensive geniuses who could shoot more, some defensive specialists, put-back artists ... Not a lot, if any, who should (or could) shoot more.

Most seem to play alongside true offensive stars, and they're 4th or 5th options at all times.
They don't get many turnovers and/or they don't miss many shots.
They may not hurt their teams' offenses, but they also may not enhance them much.

Lee, another good site is basketballvalue.com. There you can find all kinds of useful things to play around with, but especially play-by-play data. You may eventually want to write your own code (like I do) to create your own stats from it.

The offensive rating is calculated as:
(Points Produced / Individual Possessions) x 100
Where points produced are effected by Field Goals, Free Throws, Assists, and offensive rebounds while individual possesions include all scoring possesions plus missed shots the defense rebounds, and turnovers. So it seems like the chances that Gasol and Bynum rebound Kobe's shot is factored into the offensive ratings made by Oliver. I'm pretty sure it is similar to how the team rating is determined:
100 x Pts / (Tm FGA + .04 x Tm FTA - 1.07 x (Tm ORB / (Tm ORB + Tm DRB)) x (Tm FGA - Tm FG) + Tm TO)
Except replacing all of the team values with individual values.

So the rating for individual players is similar to the efficiency ratings of PP100 possesions for teams. Kobe's rating implies that he would score about 104 points per 100 possesions, while Gasol and Bynum would post 112 and 113 points per 100 possesions. It is also true that Gasol and Bynum need to be set up more than bryant, who can create his own shot much better.

I agree that this rating does tend to favor post players who only shoot higher percentage shots and 3 point shooters who have there numbers increased because the 3's make there shots count for more points. Hense this is why we see Tyson chandler who is leading the league in TS% at the top followed by a lot of either outside shooters or posts who score mainly lay ins. This rating does look very highly upon chris paul, who seems to know when to pick his spots better than most players in the league, which speaks highly of his decision making. Also, you wonder what Harden's numbers wuold be like without the presense of durant and westbrook, who combine for about 65 % of the possesions while they are on the floor.

So the Offensive rating is effected by what type of player you are and what type of role you play in the offense. However, if you look at players with similar usage rates to Kobe (Which is hard, seeing as he is 4 % higher than anyone else in the league), Westbrook(110), Wade(114), Lebron(117), Durant(115), Carmelo(103), Rose(115), D-Will(107), with the exception of Carmelo, he is low in efficiency relative to players with similar usage rates.

What this tells me is that Kobe is taking too many poor shots, and if he cut down these difficult shots(Which would be hard for him, since he really wants to be the NBA all time leading scorer), his efficiency would rise and the Lakers would be playing at a more optimal level. This is not to say he is not a great player, but I don't think his mentality of trying to rack up as many points as possible is best for the team. Who knows, maybe he does in fact realize this, and come playoff time we will see his usage rate drop (unless it's the last shot of the game, I couldn't see him passing on a chance at a glory shot).

I'm not a Kobe fan, and in fact he may be my least favorite player of all time.
When a player gets an OReb, he is credited with -1 possession used. If he scores on a putback, he has scored without using a possession. In this case, that helps Bynum and Gasol several times per game, and Kobe was just the enabler. He doesn't get an assist, but the result is the same.

The Lakers are rather unique, in that they have 3 great players and no other good players. Matt Barnes may be near average, and everyone else is really weak.
Well, now they have Sessions, and that may change the whole dynamic; even though he wasn't starting for one of the league's worst teams, he may thrive in LA; he's been on fire.

Even if Kobe passed up 6 shots per game, and even if the ball got to one of the other 2 or 3 good players 5 of those times, I don't see an improvement of more than 1 PPG, just from the math. It's about as likely that the Lakers do worse if he does that. He's a tireless shooter, and the Lakers need someone to shoot it.

Mike G wrote:What I don't know how to wring out of b-r.com is how to get splits for Gasol with and without Bynum in the lineup. When Bynum missed a lot of games for several years, Gasol was a huge scorer; when Bynum plays, Gasol has less of a role.

You can use the Players vs. Player analysis tool on NBA.com to get splits for a player when another player is on or off the floor. It works for teammates and opponents. Only goes back to last year, though, and it doesn't provide full box-score statistics.

http://www.nba.com/advancedstats/player ... 2;season=r

Well, that's great. Thanks, deepak.
Last year and this year, both Gasol and Bynum have had better numbers when both are on the floor.
In 2010, Gasol's numbers were rather depressed by Bynum's presence.
I guess they've been working together somewhat better.

Kobe leads the league in games this season with below 40% FG% and 15+ FGA. No surprise really.