Over the summer, a blogger named John Pudner — who does his work over at the Marquette blog Cracked Sidewalks — came up with a new metric that he termed “Value Add“. For those that are statistically-inclined, you can find the precise breakdown of what exactly “Value Add” means and how it is determined, but, essentially, it is the college basketball equivalent to the baseball’s Wins Over Replacement (WAR). in layman’s (read: NBC Blogger’s) terms, it is a stat to determine how much better a team is with a given player on the court instead of a regular Joe Schlub.
The post got plenty play over the summer and was embraced by the mainstream King of the Stat Geeks himself, Luke Winn. Yesterday morning, Pudner finally ran the numbers for this season and gave us the 200 most valuable players in the country.
And it should come as no surprise that Kentucky’s Anthony Davis checked in at No. 1.
What did come as a surprise, however, was the rest of the list.
I’ve been touting the play of Jae Crowder for a long time, and I haven’t been alone. He’s as well-rounded as any player in the country, and it shows. Crowder is the second-most valuable player in the country. He’s followed by West Virginia’s Kevin Jones, Damian Lillard of Weber State and Cody Zeller of Indiana.
Jordan Taylor, who was the nation’s most valuable player in 2011, is sixth while Player of the Year favorite, Thomas Robinson, checks in at seventh. Jared Sullinger is eight while John Shurna and Aaron Craft round out the top ten.
After the top ten is where the numbers start to get a little weird. Like, for example, how Shabazz Napier is the 11th most valuable player in the country, nearly 30 spots ahead of Mike Moser and Isaiah Canaan? Michael Kidd-Gilchrist is all the way down at 61st?
I’m not going to nitpick at the numbers too much. This really is some terrific work by Pudner and our friends over at Cracked Sidewalks. And who knows, maybe Shabazz Napier actually is more valuable to UConn than Kidd-Gilchrist is to Kentucky.
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- dracko19 - Feb 23, 2012 at 11:40 AM
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Pudner needs a new spreadsheet that correctly adds rows. Look at his list and you will find several flaws. That list should be completely reworked.
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- jpudner - Feb 23, 2012 at 3:57 PM
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Thats for the chance to clarify. Below the table is the explanation for the credit received by top point guards and perimeter defenders, since those are the two items Value Add cannot calculate. When a players total is 1 or more higher than the total of the other numbers, it is because he falls into one of those two categories. When it’s just a matter of being 0.1 off, that is simply rounding.
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- dracko19 - Feb 24, 2012 at 7:15 PM
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Really? You’re adding value percentages because point guards dribble up the floor? And you add more to guys that another service says are great vs. Guys your system says is great…just so they look better in your rankings??? That seems like a pretty cockeyed way to get your stats to line up right. Why not rank point guards value based on assists/turnover rate, +\- rate on points scored/given up, etc. You know…stats that actually matter and can be tracked per player and per team without phony % bonuses?
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- dracko19 - Feb 24, 2012 at 7:19 PM
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And by the way, if you are valuing point guards higher with bonuses due to dribbling up the floor, setting up the offense, assists, etc, then Draymond Green should be #1 on your list since he does all that to AND leads his team in points and rebounding.
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- jpudner - Feb 26, 2012 at 3:18 PM
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Really appreciate the feedback, but it’s easy to show why your suggestion of just using assists to turnovers to determine the best point guards does not always work. If you used it right now on the NBA, then the top point guards in the league in order would be; 1) Jose Calderon, 2, Matt Bonner, SA, 3, Chris Paul, LAC, 4, Lou Williams, PHI, 5, Tony Parker, SA, 6, Tony Battie, PHI (Battie has a 3-to-1 asst to turnover).
The problem is your 6th best point guard in the league is a 6-11, 240 pound, 36 year old who has his college’s record for blocked shots. This doesn’t mean that some assumption based on assists to turnovers is not part of the way to identify good point guards, but you can’t just double count them, because the impact of turnovers and assists are already accounted for in the system, as is every other stat we have. The important thing to understand when you go deeply into the stats is what you CANNOT measure, and then the hard part is accounting for it. The things we cannot measure are point guard play, because point guards have many more opportunities for turnovers than a center who just catches and turns to shoot. Some of his 50 trips a game may be “walking” the ball up the court, but he will face full court, three quarter and half court traps sometime, and have to make the first pass that often doesn’t get an assist but avoids a turnover that a center would have if he had to dribble up the court. Likewise, a perimeter defender doesn’t get a stat for forcing a bad shot – the center underneath gets a stat for grabbing the rebound on the bad shot, which is often the much easier of the two. You could also suggest just going with the best steals guys and assuming they are the top perimeter defenders, but on many teams one player is the best on-ball defense and he forces bad passes that are picked off by another guard.
Due to these two factors AFTER you measure all the stats, most front line players show more value than most guards, and assuming coaches are keeping their jobs by putting the best 5 players on the court in most cases, we need to estimate the extra value these guys have that are keeping them playing as opposes to putting together a starting lineup of all centers and power forwards. Do keep the criticism, comments, coming though, they really do help me with these evaluations and you did make me took another look at Green, as you can see from my post today:
http://www.crackedsidewalks.com/2012/02/jae-crowder-is-not-2nd-best-college.html
