Behind the Numbers

IN THE END, it was Andre Miller who drove me over the edge. Miller is a nice little point guard out of Utah who's in his third year with the Cleveland Cavaliers. He averages 15.8 points and 10 assists per game; he makes good decisions.

But last Friday, the Wall Street Journal's Allen Barra suggested that Miller is the third-best player in the National Basketball Association.

It wasn't the nuttiest thing Barra has come up with. He writes a column in the Weekend Journal (easily the best newspaper section in America) called "By the Numbers," where he pores over sports statistics and tries to divine truths. Barra is part of a larger sect of sportswriters, led by baseball numbers guru Bill James, who in recent years have attempted to de-mystify sports through statistical analysis. It's fun and it makes for good conversation, but it's also frequently ridiculous.

Barra's celebration of Andre Miller wasn't the first time he'd confused a good player with a great one. At last year's NBA All-Star break, Barra chided fans for their selections for the Eastern Conference team, claiming that Miller, Jerry Stackhouse, Marcus Camby, Elton Brand, and Jahidi White--Jahidi White!--should have been All-Stars.

Where does he get this stuff? From the numbers. Barra determines a basketball player's worth by examining his HGS stats. The HGS (HoopStats Grading System) calculates a score for players based on--take a deep breath--(Field Goals Made x 1.4) + (Blocked Shots x 1.4) + (Free Throws Made x 1) + (Assists x 1) + (Steals x 1) + (Offensive Rebounds x 0.85) + (Defensive Rebounds x 0.5) - (Turnovers x 0.8) - (Field Goals Missed x 0.6) all divided by minutes played, and then multiplied by 48.

Barra places his faith in the HGS alone, because, as he says, "If you are doing something to make your team win, you are leaving a paper trail that will reveal it." Which, of course, is quite insane. For instance, all of Barra's "overlooked" All-Stars last year, with the exception of Camby, played for cellar-dwelling teams. And I could go on and on and on about how the HGS favors big men because it places so much emphasis on shooting percentages and blocked shots and counts two-pointers and three-pointers the same way. But I won't.

The purest proof of the HGS's worthlessness is the results. At the end of last season, Barra wrote a paean to Shaquille O'Neal asserting that Shaq was the obvious pick for Most Valuable Player because he had the highest HGS score. And HGS aside, you could make a reasonable argument that he was the MVP, since his Lakers won the NBA championship, but it's worth looking further down Barra's MVP list: In third place is Karl Malone, in fifth is David Robinson, ninth is John Stockton, eleventh is Elton Brand. Andre Miller clocked in at thirteenth.

Malone couldn't get his team out of the first round of the playoffs, even with the help of Stockton. Robinson is over the hill. Brand, a promising young forward, was on a Chicago Bulls team that finished the season 15-67, raising the question: His marvelous HGS score aside, how valuable was he? Would the Bulls have lost 68 games without him?

And absent from Barra's list entirely was Allen Iverson, the Philadelphia '76er shooting guard who led his team to the second-best record in the league and the NBA Finals. Barra dismissively noted that Iverson didn't even crack the top 15 HGS scores. Iverson went on to win the MVP award.

In another telling column, Barra argued that Hakeem Olajuwon, the great Nigerian center, is the best player in NBA history, saying, "With a switch of supporting casts, Mr. Olajuwon's team probably would have won about the same number of games, and probably the same number of championships as Michael Jordan's."

Statistically, Olajuwon may be the best center of the modern era, but to argue that the talent of his Rockets teams was inferior to Jordan's Bulls is nonsense (see "The Third Coming"). After Jordan's retirement, the Bulls were exposed as a group of men barely capable of making an NBA roster, while Olajuwon's teammates, particularly Robert Horry and Sam Cassell, have gone on to great success without him. In other words, Jordan's supporting cast only looked great because he made them great.