Finding Role Players

As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m a pretty big fan of The Wages of Wins (WoW) which suggests that scoring is overrated in the NBA, and things like rebounding and shooting efficiency are underrated. Incorporating these findings is something I try and do with the stats I keep for basketball. I very much try to use objective measures tempered by qualitative judgments.

So, for instance, Jack P showed up very poorly on Win Score, the measure used to simply calculate a player’s performance as he was an incredibly inefficient shooter, and one who’d take a lot of shots. However, we often did better with him on the court because his penetration on offense opened up opportunities, and his man rarely seemed to score on defense. This could be tracked using +/- but I don’t really have that capability so I have to just go off of my judgment.

Anyhow, today on the WoW blog, Dave Berri, one of the authors of the book, discusses how messed up talent evaluation is in the NBA. Basically most players in the NBA are role players, but players are drafted on the basis of the ability to become stars, something most will never become. In other words they’re focusing on the wrong things when evaluating players.

This very much hits home with me. At this point I expect to be coaching two travel teams next year, including one in HP. With my team last year (GL), I had 16 kids try-out. In a group of that size I can do some more time intensive drills which test rebounding, assists, steals, and other things which help teams win games but aren’t shooting and scoring. However, in a large group try-out, evaluating rebounding skills, in particular, is far more difficult and is an obstacle I’ll likely have to over come.

Though maybe I should have more faith in myself, as there is a strong correlation between the grade I gave players on a 1-5 scale and their final rank on the team in terms of rebounds per minute played.

Anyhow, the whole idea of how to structure an evaluation of players that is centered more around finding role players rather than stars and scorers is an interesting one and something I will continue to ponder in the next 3 or so months before I have to conduct tryouts once again.