The Numbers Guy: Shane Battier and the Box Score -- February 19, 2009, by Carl Bialik, Wall Street Journal
...David Berri, the author of the book “The Wages of Wins,” which proposed new and improved NBA stats, pointed out back in 2007 on his blog that the box score revealed Battier’s value as a player. Berri, an economist at Southern Utah University, was prompted at the time by another article about Morey and Battier, in the Houston Press, in which Morey was quoted as saying, “there’s no question that anything in the box score is highly misleading.” (Even before that, the Wall Street Journal’s Russell Adams discussed Morey as part of a look at the NBA’s number crunchers.)
Berri wrote at the time that Battier’s win score has been, over his career, above average. Win score is a Berri-devised measure based entirely on the box score.
Even though Battier didn’t score much, he turned the ball over remarkably rarely, and he is an efficient scorer. “If you look at the entire box score, and consider how these elements relate to wins, you can see Battier is an above-average player,” Berri wrote me in an email this week.
Justin Kubatko, the creator of Basketball-Reference.com, devised his own measure from the box score, which he calls win shares, after a similar measure for baseball invented by Bill James. “Computing WS is not exactly simple, but all you need are basic player and team stats to do it,” Kubatko told me. He added, “From 2005-06 through 2007-08 Battier earned 25.5 WS, the 24th-highest total in the NBA.” Pau Gasol, the best played drafted before Battier in the 2001 NBA draft, has amassed a career total of 67.4 win shares, not much more than Battier’s 52.4. (Not every measure based on traditional stats has Battier better than average; he lags other small forwards in John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating for ESPN.)
Morey didn’t share all of his preferred alternative stats with Lewis, citing the need to retain an edge over his competition. But he did reference plus/minus, a measure of a team’s effectiveness with and without a player on the floor. By Morey’s count, Battier is a +6 for his career, meaning the Rockets’ edge over their opponent is six points per game higher when Battier is playing than when he isn’t. “Plus 6 is enormous,” Morey told Lewis. “It’s the difference between 41 wins and 60 wins.”
...I also asked Winston and Sagarin whether certain players are even more Battier than Battier. That is, who’s a valuable player mostly for his defense — not measured well in the box score — rather than his offense? Among current players, Ben Wallace is the most unbalanced, with a -7 career rating on defense and a -5 rating on offense (negative numbers are good on defense, bad on offense). That wouldn’t surprise most hoops fans, though, as Wallace has excelled in steals, blocks and rebounds and amasses big numbers in the box score-based win shares stat.
Perhaps the best example is Andrew Bogut, the Milwaukee Bucks center whose totals in those categories are pedestrian but whom Winston and Sagarin have as a career -5 on defense, -1 on offense — so six points more valuable on the defensive side of the floor than the offensive side. This year, the difference has been even more dramatic. The Bucks general manager who drafted Bogut is now with the Golden State Warriors, but the Bucks are holding on to the last playoff spot in the East, making them a good story. I look forward to profiles about Bogut’s mysterious value to his team...
) and after some really good picks from some of the posts in this thread... I believe I should alter this just a bit.