Shots have been fired. 538 recently released a post on Kobe that linked us a few times. Apparently, we who criticize Kobe are stuck in 2008. There is irony in this, as one of our favorite mantras when discussing Kobe's performance is that, well, it's no longer 2008.
What's the usage? More Kobe!
Those of you who know us know that our history with Neil Paine is not exactly one of harmony and agreement, so it is no surprise to me that he linked to a lot of our writing here:
Obsessed with efficiency over context, many in the field downplayed the value of Kobe’s greatest skill — relentless, tireless scoring — and went so far as to suggest that an average player could have notched as many points if given the same number of opportunities. (Note: This is, and always was, insane.)
It's interesting that 538 (a site for geeks if ever there was one) goes for the same type of weak disparagements that we hear all the time. Whenever we bring out numbers that say the player in the most commercials isn't the most valuable, we hear a lot of stuff along the lines of: "watch the game", "Pay attention to context", etc.
Kobe's high-volume average output performance last night brought up a classic point we've made over and over - high-volume average efficiency players aren't very valuable (it's worth noting that our analysis has always found Kobe very valuable -- but not because of his shooting). Of course, the way we're interpreted is by that we must be saying that we think you should replace Kobe with an average player that takes 30+ shots a game, and you'd be just fine. However, it's possible that we recognize that coaches do not, in fact, tend to let average players take 25 shots a night. Maybe, instead, what we were saying is that, for all those Kobe shots, if you replaced each and every one of them with a shot from some random player, that random player would probably shoot at...you know...average efficiency?
The deeply held belief is that all of Kobe's shots are tied to shot creation. But there's pretty much no such thing as shot creation. In the history of the NBA, has a volume shooter gotten injured, or traded away, or sat out, and seen his (former) team's field goal attempts dwindle? If we posit an alternate universe where Kobe shoots half as much as he did, is it not perfectly reasonable to assume that some other players would shoot those shots (i.e. his team would still get the same number of possessions)?
The amazing time-traveling Russell Westbrook
Neil goes on to explain that the same logic that had some of us "underrating" Kobe would also blind us to Russell Westbrook.
In a lot of ways, we have Bryant to thank for the tools we have available to appreciate the full contribution of stars — like Russell Westbrook — who would have slipped through the cracks during that first wave of basketball analytics, because those tools were at least in part developed to make sense of Kobe.
Or, you know, maybe it really can be true that Russell was overrated (very good but not superstar good) for a few years, and took a performance leap about 2-3 years ago. It's not like we can look at the trajectory of his career and see his numbers getting dramatically better. Those extra assists and rebounds (per48) are just geeks ignoring context, right? I know it's more fun to pretend that you were right all along, that Westbrook is really exactly the same player he was five years ago, that we "efficiency over context" nerds were just too dumb to see it, but, well, I call bullshit. The truth is that Russell Westbrook has gotten much better recently -- our 2012 critiques of Russell Westbrook were not referring to the current MVP-candidate version of that player.
But what if everything was different?
The insanity (see what I did there?) doesn't end there:
But others — such as his No. 4 overall ranking by offensive RPM in the same data set — confirmed that the true benefits of Kobe’s game were being masked by box score metrics wearing true-shooting blinders. Had today’s most cutting-edge metrics — like SportVU’s ability to track a shot’s difficulty (not just its efficiency) — existed during Bryant’s prime, we’d be able to interrogate questions like whether Kobe is the “best difficult-shot-maker” ever.
Oh my! We're back to believing that more difficult shots are worth more points? Now, THAT feels like a 2008 analytics thought! When the Lakers won Kobe's last game, did the scorekeepers add an extra 10 points because many of Kobe's shots were difficult? Or did they record shots by 1,2, or 3 points depending on the type? The irony of Neil's article is that it attempts to explain how some of us (I think he might be talking about us, he wasn't very subtle) are trapped in the past, beholden to the boxscore. Of course, some of us at this site love the new data. In part because it can show things like that Usage doesn't correlate well with how much players hold the ball. Or that defense isn't as cut and dry as tying it to the individual. All we're saying is we're excited about the present and future of data analysis. We hope that many of the silly 2008 "analytics" arguments are a thing of the past in the near future.