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[Doc319]

The debate about whether Kobe Bryant is a legit superstar or a
talented but selfish player inspires very strong reactions in
support of both contentions. I have just published an article on
this issue at Hoopshype.com that includes quotes from NBA TV analyst
Fred Carter; I also cite Bob Chaikin's scoring field goal percentage
statistic, which Chaikin himself mentioned recently as an indicator that Bryant is more efficient as a shooter than
his 41% field goal percentage suggests.

The article can be found here:
http://hoopshype.com/columns/kobe_friedman.htm

[Mike G]

While Kobe was out (for 14 G), it seemed the other Lakers' effective shooting went down. Before, Kobe was the lowest of the top 6 guns; now he's about in the middle. This might be interpreted as : Kobe sets up the other guys for high-% opportunities.

Checking 82games.com, it appears everyone on the team does better with Kobe on the floor (excepting Walton):

http://82games.com/0405LALP.HTM

But 2 other guys have similarly positive net effects: Brian Cook and Jumaine Jones. These guys play 18 and 23 MPG, respectively; Cook has played about 55% of his minutes with Kobe, while Jones has only played 431 of his 1023+ with Kobe. When Kobe was out, Jones' minutes soared and he became a starter.

Jones is the highest eff% and lowest-volume shooter (more than half his pts are from 3) of the top 6 Lakers; yet he seems to be Kobe's de facto Replacement. And, he seems to have the same effect on his teammates.

Jumaine is no Kobe, but he'll do in a pinch?

[bchaikin]

now that the season is just about over, just wanted to see what any kobe-bashers had to say. yes the lakers aren't going to make the playoffs, but they lost the best C in the league in shaq and replaced him with chris mihm...

as for kobe? many will cite his FG% of .431 as being his worst in seven seasons, but the reality is that his Scoring FG% (combining 2pters, 3pters, and FTs), despite the absence of shaq, is at a career high for him at .549, due to him taking more 3's than ever before - almost 6 per game - and hitting 34/35% of them, and getting to the line for a career best 10 FTA/g, and hitting 80+% of those. that Scoring FG% is also higher than the Scoring FG%s this season of ray allen, vince carter, michael redd, and jason richardson - as a matter of fact, its the highest Scoring FG% of any SG scoring at least 20 pts/g this season...

others will cite his poorer defense, but my numbers show me he is still a good defender (just not the best defending SG). his rebounding of 7reb/48min is similar to what it's been for most of the past 5 seasons, his shot blocking is as good as it's been the past 5 seasons, and although he's committing 4.0 TO/g, which is high, his touches/min are high (1.6 to 1.7 touches/min) and his rate of 6% turnovers (6 TO per 100 touches) is similar to that of other SGs such as manu ginobili, mike miller, and jerry stackhouse...

he also has passed the ball - per touch - at an identical rate to each of the past three seasons, with 50/51% of his touches...

the only kink i see in his numbers is a career low in steal rate...

[Mike G]

[Kurt]

[Greg D]

Statistically, I admit Kobe is an effective player. But he appears to be a poor leader. I've seen him double and tripled teamed and refuse to give up the ball, take crazy turnaround jumpers, decide not to shoot for a half, to shoot left-handed (ok, it went in) and do other crazy stuff that pissed of PJ, Shaq and his other teammates. This leads to dissension and resentment, hallmarks of the Lakers last year and this year. You don't get your team to make the max effort on D and to do other things that don't necessarily show up in the glory stats when your best player does not play team ball consistently, pouts when others don't pass him the ball or when they miss shots. Like AI, I cannot imagine there are other good or great players who want to play second banana to Kobe. At least for more than one season. Showing up your HOF coach (whether it be PJ or Larry Brown) is no way to lead either.

So like AI, I think Kobe's teams in the future will be doomed unless he matures or management finds just the right kind of player (Kirilenko? Battier? Dampier?) to put up with Kobe's ego driven play. It's not Lamar Odom, that's for sure. But if Antoine Walker can reform himself (a debate for another day) I guess there's hope.

Yes, Kobe was a major factor in three championships. He has great skills, and as Bob C points out, good to great stats. But my limited observation of his play leads me to believe that he is selfish offensively all too often and that this will impair management's ability to surroind him with better players.

I know this is a stat-based site but I do not think every argument of this type can be captured in stats.

[HoopStudies]

[Doc319]

Dean, I take your post to mean that you believe that the two questions that I asked of Bob Chaikin in the Antoine Walker topic--"Do you buy the idea that Walker's leadership/presence may have some value that is not measurable statistically? Or is it your contention that each NBA player is no more and no less than the sum of his simulated statistics?"--are valid issues to be discussed in a statistics forum. Perhaps you would reword my first question to say "not easily measurable statistically." Please indicate if this is a fair appraisal of your views or not.

My point is that Bob stated that Antoine Walker's future dropoff in production is a "fact" but without stating how many games it will take for Walker's numbers to do so and without indicating how (or if) his sim accounts for leadership (and other "intangibles") that many observers consider to be important or at least relevant to evaluating basketball players. This makes his prediction impossible to prove or disprove, which places it in the realm of speculation, as opposed to scientific theory. I'm not trying to discredit his sim or statistical analysis in general; I'm saying that if his sim is scientific then it must conform to the scientific method, which means proposing a specific, testable hypothesis and having the willingness to modify the hypothesis if new evidence is found--in the specific instance of Walker, at some point the sample size of games is not small and a scientist would be willing to adjust his hypothesis if Walker maintains a higher than predicted level of performance. DanR and Dean do this all the time, referring to "noise" and indicating that there is a higher degree of certainty with some stats than with others. Acknowledging the possibility of error and a certain degree of uncertainty would not be a weakness in the sim or its creator--it would be a strength. The Titanic's engineers were 100% certain that they had crafted an unsinkable shift; I prefer my science and engineering with a degree of skepticism and uncertainty.

I have no personal stake in how Walker performs or whether or not Bob's sim is accurate or scientific. I'm not sure what Walker's career suggests about statistical analysis or "leadership." All I am doing--with the Kobe thread and with the Walker thread--is raising questions that I think are worthy of statistical evaluation in order to learn what statistical analysts have observed about these issues. The answer that Walker is "playing for a contract" (one of Bob's early responses) strikes me as practicing psychiatry without a license and the statement that his future production is a "fact" seems to be much bolder than the accepted norm for scientists and researchers. Maybe his future production is 75% certain (or some other percentage, if this can be supported by numerical evidence) but a "fact"? I guess we no longer need to play the games--we can just put the numbers in a sim and post the results in the newspaper.

For Bob to say that I should not question his sim's ability to measure leadership because I cannot do so myself frankly misses the entire point. I am not asserting that I can predict Walker's statistical future so precisely that it is an absolute fact (if that were possible one should do this with the stock market...), so the onus is not on me to demonstrate anything. I am asking questions to determine what is and is not being measured. If leadership (and other "intangibles" like setting screens, "help" defense, etc.) is considered irrelevent, then simply say so and others can decide for themselves if that makes the sim faulty or not (I never said that it does). If leadership is relevant but not measurable, then some kind of margin of error should be included in the analysis--Einstein kept including and removing the so-called "cosmological constant" in one of his formulas; maybe there is a way, as Dean suggests, to account for leadership in some way.

In any case, as DanR mentioned in the Walker thread and Dean points out here, these are indeed relevant questions to consider in a statistical analysis group.

I guess I could have posted this in the Walker thread, but since the "leadership" issue was raised here, with Bob referring to me indirectly, I felt that this was the correct thread in which to place this reply.

For what it's worth, Bob and I agree about Kobe and I cited his shooting percentage numbers in my article about Bryant. Despite the occasional (or not so occasional) venturing into vitriol and hyperbole, I find both this thread and the Walker thread very interesting and I am glad that I started both of these threads in this forum. Bryant and Walker are two players who we will be able to follow for the next several seasons and it will be interesting to see what happens in both of their careers.

--David Friedman
Contributing Editor, Basketball Spotlight
www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/basketball_spotlight

[HoopStudies]

[Doc319]

Dean,

I just went back to Chapter 20 to refresh my memory about what you did regarding leadership. Do you have this year's numbers handy with regard to Kobe and Antoine? Specifically, based on the composition of their teams (the actual games played, discounting players like Divac and George who missed almost all of the season) how do Kobe's and Antoine's W-L records compare to their teams and what does this suggest about their "leadership"? Realizing that you do consider this "soft science," I am still interested if your numbers suggest that Kobe did not "lead" well or if he simply did not have enough talent around him to win consistently (particularly when factoring in the games that he and Odom missed).

What do you think of the contention that the Shaq-Kobe Lakers were built around Shaq and the half court game (lots of three point shooters), so that when Shaq was out the Lakers were not equipped to play the up-tempo game that is best suited to Kobe's skills. Therefore, Kobe does not showup as the "leader" and he indeed was not the leader of those teams, but that with the right personnel around him (a fast breaking team) he would show up as the "leader" by the metric that we are discussing. As a corollary to this idea, maybe Kobe does not show up as a "leader" this year because this Laker roster is still not constructed to properly take advantage of what he does best. Who shows up by your measurement as the Suns' leader--Nash, Amare or somebody else? Is Nash more of a "leader" this year than he was with the Mavs? I interviewed Del Harris recently and asked him why Nash and Nowitzki, who seemed to be such a perfect duo, are each having career years playing apart. His basic reply was that the Phoenix roster is a running squad that best suits Nash's skills, while this year Dallas is a deeper, less predictable team so that teams cannot load up on one or two plays (pick and roll, etc.) to stop Dirk. Here is a link to the interview for those who are interested: http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/basketball_spotlight/115277

This season which players show up as the "best" leaders by the leadership metric you used in Basketball on Paper? Again, I understand that you consider this to be "soft" and inexact; I'm just interested what the numbers show to this point. Your discussion of D-Rob in Basketball on Paper is very interesting.

Also, on a different subject, last year you used Roboscout to predict a Pistons' triumph in the Finals. I know that you are working for the Sonics now and are probably limited in what you can say publicly, but can you share any Roboscout insights/predictions about this year's playoffs?

Thank you for your contributions to this field and to this forum. Specifically, I appreciate your thoughtful replies to this thread.


--David Friedman
Contributing Editor, Basketball Spotlight
www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/basketball_spotlight

[HoopStudies]

[Doc319]

Dean,

Maybe there is an obvious answer to this, but how does Walker have a losing record this year with Boston?

Also, can you shed any light on the Nash/Nowitzki issue or are those among the numbers that you have not crunched yet?

Finally, regarding your "alpha male" concept of leadership, there is a certain logic to this but two questions occur to me: (1) In the ESPN the Magazine article about Walker it is asserted that Pierce was not as successful in this "alpha male" role without Walker's presence on the team. Is there a way to quantify how Walker's ability to set screens, feed the post, relieve Pierce of ball-handling responsibilities, etc. helps Pierce or are all of these effects, if they are significant, going to appear in the "measurables" that you, Bob Chaikin and others are already tracking? (2) There have been "role players" who are considered to be important leaders on their teams even though they were clearly not the "alpha male." I am thinking here specifically of the Bulls' Ron Harper and the Sonics' Nate McMillan. Is the type of "leadership" that these players provided statistically significant in your opinion and is there any way to track it? Does it show up in the way that you chart teams' w-l records vs. individual w-l records?

--David Friedman
Contributing Editor, Basketball Spotlight
www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/basketball_spotlight

[HoopStudies]

[Doc319]

Dean, the Nash/Nowitzki issue is not a big deal--I was just wondering, according to your "alpha male" determination of who the team leader is, how you would categorize these two players last year and this year. Which one was Dallas' leader when they were teammates? Is Nash the "alpha male" on this year's Phoenix team or is it Amare or somebody else? Again, we're talking about your stat of comparing individual wins with team wins and your idea that the individual on the team whose wins most correlate with the team wins is the team leader (I hope that I did not mangle that in my attempt to restate it...)

The way this all relates to the Kobe thread is that I was wondering if maybe this "alpha male" trait is at least somewhat dependent on who one's teammates are. That gets back to Del Harris' quote to the effect that Nash is thriving in Phoenix because he has players who can run the floor very well. I'm wondering if your leadership numbers could shed some light on this--my theory is that if this is true, that maybe Nowitzki shows up as the "alpha male" when he and Nash played together but that Nash shows up as Phoenix's "alpha male" because the style of game suits him even better than Dallas' did. As for Kobe, to get back to your BoP example, maybe he did not show up as the Lakers' "alpha male" when he played with Shaq in part because the roster was filled with players who thrived in the half court set, making threes after Shaq is doubleteamed; I think that Kobe's skills are better suited to an open court game in which he can attack before the defense is set. That seemed to be the source of at least some of the friction with Shaq--Kobe wanting to run and Shaq taking his time to come down court and secure post position. I realize that some of this science is a little "soft," as you say, and that there are some oversimplifications here--Shaq sometimes runs the floor and Kobe can also score (and distribute) in a half court situation.

As for Harper's leadership on what you aptly termed the Horribulls, is their record a reflection on his leadership? To take an extreme example to make the point, if Harper is the greatest leader in the world he still could not lead four guys from the Y to victory against even the worst NBA team. At some point talent--or lack thereof--supercedes leadership. However, when the requisite talent to win is present it still may require the right leadership to get over the top. Portland seemed to have enough talent to win a few years back, but couldn't quite get it done. Harper could not rescue the Horribulls and Walker could not save the Hawks, but Harper seemed to have an importance on the Bulls that was greater than his measurable stats (the games the Bulls lost in the '96 Finals were when he did not play); the anecdotal evidence about Walker this year is that he is having that kind of effect in Boston. Watching Kobe this year it seemed that a lot of his dribble penetrations ended in missed jump shots or dropped passes; he didn't have a dead-eye shooter or a great finisher to convert his passes into field goals.

--David Friedman
Contributing Editor, Basketball Spotlight
www.suite101.com/welcome.cfm/basketball_spotlight

[mtamada]