FanPost

A Fresh Look at +/- Stats: Terps In-Game Values

As a basketball stat junkie and someone who has often felt short-changed by the "traditional" in-game stats, I have greatly appreciated the emergence of tempo-free stats, Ken Pomeroy, Basketball Prospectus, and the like in  recent years.  And a poster on insidemdsports, UMTerp, has come up with a pretty impressive formula that condenses various stats to provide an overall picture of an individual player's value (unfortunately only available to insiders on that site).  For my part, I have dabbled in tracking various iterations of +/- stats, and this year I have finally kept with it enough to have a pretty decent sample size, now through 13 games and all but one of the Terps' nonconference games.  After playing with different combinations of the teams' performance with a given player on court v off-court, the one I've settled on is the below (in alphabetical order...more discussion after the numbers):

                                           OFF          DEF          TOT

Bowie (13 gms)               -7.55          1.03          -6.51

Gregory (5 gms)              -5.55          3.71          -1.84

Hayes (13 gms)                2.62          0.83           3.45

Milbourne (13 gms)          3.90         -0.20          3.70

Mosley (12 gms)              3.13          2.16           5.29

Padgett (12 gms)             -7.98          1.23         -6.75

Tucker (12 gms)               2.01         -2.64         -0.63

Vasquez (13 gms)             2.34         -2.29          0.05

Williams (13 gms)             1.26         -2.97         -1.72

 

These numbers are essentially the cumulative value of the team's offensive and defensive performance with a player on the court, as a mean of the differences between on-court efficiency/40 minutes and the team's actual performance over 40 minutes.  So,

  • OFF=avg MD offensive efficiency per 40 minutes above or below the overall performance with player x on the court
  • DEF= the same for defensive efficiency, except that the values are reversed to limit confusion (so a positive number is good).
  • TOT= OFF+DEF

 

Some random thoughts on what the numbers show (and don't show):

  • This is definitely not a be-all, end-all stat to measure a player's value...no such number exists, although UMTerps on insidemdsports gets pretty close.  Instead, this provides another statistical angle that can be useful for comparing players against each other.  A margin of error (I would go with about +/- 2) can be assumed.
  • Mosley is the only player who has relatively consistent correlation with the team performing well overall.  Milbourne had a few stinkers in Maui that showed up in these numbers as well, but since then his offensive and defensive numbers have improved dramatically.  Gregory's last few games have brought his numbers up from appalling to just mediocre.
  • Looking deeper into the numbers, the team has struggled against its strongest competition (Top 150 in the kenpom.com rankings) when Bowie and Williams are in the game -- both are close to -10 overall -- while, rather surprisingly, performing better with Padgett in those games (+4.6).  I do think we should brace ourselves for JWill's trial by fire against the numerous talented bigs in the ACC, but Bowie needs to build on his apparent epiphany against UNC-G and start playing better against the big boys.  We've seen him do it in spurts before.

Please discuss, and I welcome any questions or feedback on methodology or what the numbers show.

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