Sunday, May 28, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell Says KG Rocks

Thanks to Henry at True Hoop for the link and explanation of Malcolm Gladwell's blog discussion on "The Wages Of Wins." The book is by economists who, according to Gladwell, argue that

traditional talent evaluation over-rates the importance of points scored, and under-rates the importance of turnovers, rebounds and scoring percentage. Wages of Wins also obliterates the so-called NBA Efficiency rating, which is the official algorithm used by the league and many basketball experts to rank the statistical performance of players. The Efficiency rating, they argue, makes the same error. It dramatically over-rewards players who take lots and lots of shots.

The authors say that value should be accorded to NBA players based on what they term a Win Score, the number of wins for which an individual player is responsible in a season.

According to this system, Kevin Garnett has been the best player in the league for the last five years, "hands down."

One of the authors explains that what this means is that every year Garnett gets better and better, and every day the quality of the players that Kevin McHale surrounds him with gets worse and worse.

Poor Ricky Davis. Win Score rankings list him as the 10th most overrated player in the league.

posted by Lil Dice @ 5/28/2006 09:44:00 PM Comments: 0