Danny ChaiI highly recommend this blog post by Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink and The Tipping Point, two books I have been too lazy to read. It deals with a way to assess the value of NBA players using available statistics. I’ve always been bothered by how people throw around basketball statistics, it’s never felt quite right. It’s not a quite a zero sum game, but it’s not like baseball, where a players stats are largely independent of his teammates. In basketball, if you chuck up 40 shots a game, you are taking away opportunities from your teammates. So it seems to me that one’s teammates has a huge bearing on a player’s stats.
Apparently if you use this method, you can accurately predict a team’s wins plus or minus less than 2 games. That’s pretty good.
Anyway, what caught my eye was his list of overrated/underrated players based on traditional player rankings. The most underrated player? Josh Childress. Go Cardinal.