Archive for February, 2011

Reading yesterday about Dave Duerson's tragic passing made me think about the player similarity system he inspired at PFR, and that in turn caused me to remember a similar system I concocted for basketball players.

Using the methodology I outlined, who are the most comparable players to this year's All-Stars in terms of career quality and shape (through their current age)?

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2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on February 17, 2011:

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The title says it all:

Keeping Score: Sizing Up the All-Stars

Look for it in tomorrow's print edition as well.

The chart on this post about non-passing guards was so popular, I decided to run it for players at all positions (minimum 30 MPG):

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Prompted by some questions in the comments of Monday's post about the playoff predictivity of regular-season W-L vs. elite teams, here's some more raw data on every 2nd-round or later series since the merger:

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How in the cosmos did I miss this the first time around?

Two weeks ago, while I was busy with Super Bowl/Hall of Fame work at PFR, SBNation's Tom Ziller posted a story -- and an awesome graphic -- about the biggest "black holes" (players who never pass) in the NBA.

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From Hoopism, makers of the dunk contest video library and various other neat NBA visualizations, comes an extremely cool Valentine's Day gift for b-ball aficionados:

NBA’s Greatest Shots – Court Location & Video

Despite their high overall marks, apparently neither the Lakers nor the Heat can beat the league's other so-called "elite" teams. Miami is just 6-9 this season against teams in the top 10 in W-L%, and 0-6 against top-5 teams. The Lakers are barely better, going 6-7 vs. top-10 squads and 2-6 against the top 5. Here's a summary of the other teams in the top 10 by either W-L% or point differential:

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Alex Sonty, who writes ChicagoNow's Load O' Bull blog, has been paying close attention to Henry Abbott's TrueHoop posts about Derrick Rose -- specifically, this post about past MVP winners and their teams' rankings in wins. Henry found that team wins were highly correlated with MVP voting, to the point that 19 of the last 20 MVPs came from a team with a top-3 record. This of course is bad news for Rose, as the Bulls are 6th in winning % at the moment.

But Alex was wondering how past winners stack up in a schedule-adjusted margin-of-victory based metric like the Simple Rating System, where the Bulls are 5th. So here's the master list -- every MVP winner, with their team's rank in both WPct and SRS:

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2010-11 NBA power rankings through the games played on February 10, 2011:

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