I appreciate your concerns about APM, and I’ve addressed the bulk of them – e.g., “trade secret,” non-linear player-by-player interaction effects, etc. – elsewhere: http://www.82games.com/ilardi2.htm. Stay tuned, as further clarifications will follow in upcoming 48MOH posts/articles.

- Steve Ilardi

Not to mention there’s a kind of hidden assumption in computing any version of APM, and that’s that APM adds linearly. In other words, if you have a team with five APM = 0 players, you’ll tie the opponents, on average. Replace one of those with an APM = +5, and you’ll outscore the average opponent by a certain amount (typically either 1 or 5, depending on the precise formulation of the APM). Replace two of them with an APM = +5, and you’ll double the margin. And so on.

Except that it’s not clear that that’s actually so. Not only is it implicit in the use of APM, it’s also thickly involved in the computation of APM. And because it’s a natural expectation of the way APM works, it’s not so easy to notice. But once you notice it, you wonder if it’s really been firmly established. Got a blog post on it here:

http://thenullhypodermic.blogspot.com/2009/10/adjusted-plus-or-minus-more-or-less.html

PER is sort of the flip side of APM. APM is non-constructive in that it purports to tell you which players contribute most to winning, but can’t tell you why or how. PER is constructive; it’s an explicit linear combination of basic statistics. However, it doesn’t have APM’s appealing characteristic of short-circuiting the whole “which statistics are really all that important to winning” thing (the spectre of non-linearity notwithstanding). Got a blog post about that, too:

http://thenullhypodermic.blogspot.com/2009/06/superstars-and-per.html

Sorry if that seems like link-spamming. But the careful use of statistics is a big bugaboo with me and I think the points I make there are pretty relevant to the discussion.

Is it possible that the other team slacks off when
Durant is not in the game since he is really the Thunder’s only established scorer and playmaker? I think so.

Durant is the future and I would pick him to start a team with over anyother player not named Lebron!!!

About Advanced Stats: no one offers them as a replacement for the things we see with our eyes; they’re offered to help us better understand those things, correct misconceptions, and add to the what we already know. I’m sure you know this, but we’re not pitching a big bag of numbers as gospel truth apart from other types of evaluation. In that regard, we’re not subtracting anything from what we already do. We’re just adding another layer.

I’m intrigued by the fairly recent statistical revolution going on in basketball, although skeptical at times. I don’t always buy what Hollinger is selling. Correlating numbers to the team I love the most is going to be great.

Any other wrinkles in the works?

Keep up the good work!

fantastic addition the the blog, guys. welcome Dr. Ilardi and i look forward to future insight!