With any trade rumors in any sport, players are critiqued and their values are estimated by anyone and everyone. How much is this player worth to this team? In this case, we are all wondering how much the Pelicans will ask for in return if they do end up trading Davis. One of the methods for calculating his value that I have seen used is this thing called Player Efficiency Rating, known for short as PER. Davis has the third best PER of all time, behind only Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Therefore, it seems like the Pelicans should be asking for a ton in return for him, at least according to this rating.
Basketball isn't the only sport where new metrics like this are being used to grade players. It actually started with sabermetrics in baseball, and what is supposed to be the greatest evaluation of a player ever created, Wins Above Replacement, otherwise known as WAR. That way of thinking now has spread to many other sports. This new-fangled numbers are supposed to be better ways of measuring the values of players than old-fashioned things like batting average or points scored per game.
For the most part, people fall into one of two categories when it comes to these relatively modern measurements. You either hate them or you love them. I always thought things like WAR and PER were stupid. They seemed like random numbers that supposedly told us who the best players were, but nobody knew how to calculate them. You just said Mike Trout had a WAR of this number or Anthony Davis had a PER of this number and that was it. That was all you needed to prove their values.
So since I have seen so many people use Davis' PER as a way to show how good and valuable he is, I decided to actually look up just how to calculate the PER of a player. After I looked up how to do it, I no longer think it is stupid. I now think it is absolutely ridiculous and far stupider than I ever could have imagined.
Basketball-reference.com has a breakdown of how to calculate the PER of any player, and you can look it up there, but to help me make my point, I want to write it here as well. This is how you calculate PER:
(1/MP) x [3P + (2/3) x AST + (2-factor x (team AST/team FG)) x FG + (FT x 0.5 x (1+(1-(team AST/team FG)) + (2/3) x (team AST/team FG))) - VOP x TOV - VOP x DRB% x (FGA-FG) - VOP x 0.44 x (0.44 + (0.56 x DRB%)) x (FTA-FT) + VOP x (1-DRB%) x (TRB-ORB) + VOP x DRB% x ORB + VOP x STL + VOP x DRB% x BLK - PF x ((lg FT/lg PF) - 0.44 x (lg FTA/lg PF) x VOP)]
Come on. I knew it was stupid, but I didn't think it was that stupid.
Then, in case you don't know what all of those abbreviations mean, you can find that out in John Hollinger's book, which is on sale on Amazon.com for $19.95.
Being a basketball fan, I can figure out what most of those abbreviations mean, but I have no idea what a VOP is, and I don't know what lg Free Throws are as opposed to just regular Free Throws. Also, the 0.44 and 0.56 have to correspond to something similar since they add up to exactly 1, but I don't know what that correspondence is.
At the end of it all, what I need to calculate the PER of a basketball player is a large list of statistics, a spreadsheet to input that formula into, at least about 10 minutes, and also $19.95. Stop it. Get the hell out of here with that idiotic nonsense of a statistic.
I looked at the list of all-time leaders in PER, which is supposedly one of the best ways we have to equally compare players across the entire sport. It rates Amar'e Stoudemire and Andre Drummond higher than Hall of Famers Bob Lanier and Allen Iverson, and it rates Greg Monroe and someone named John Brisker higher than Kevin McHale and Steve Nash. Anyone who has ever seen five minutes of basketball can tell you that makes absolutely zero sense.
I researched how to calculate WAR in baseball, and the formula was pretty similar to the PER formula. Long and full of a whole bunch of signs and variables and symbols.
I remember when the Cleveland Browns hired a bunch of guys to run their front office who were from the baseball world but supposedly great with this analytics. It didn't matter that baseball wasn't the same sport as football. They were all so smart that it wouldn't matter. Then what happened over a two year span in Cleveland? The Browns went 1-31 and everyone got fired.
In the late 1990's and early 2000's, Billy Beane and the Oakland Athletics were famous for their "moneyball" philosophies. Oakland was unable to spend as much money as some teams from bigger markets, but we were told that their mathematicians and thrifty geeks had all the answers. What happened to those teams? They would lose every season to the Yankees or Red Sox or other teams with big payrolls.
The point of all of this is I hate these metrics and equations that are supposed to be the definitive ways to evaluate players. WAR is supposed to say how many wins any given player is worth to a team as opposed to if a replacement level player were in the same spot. So my team will win more games with Mookie Betts in the lineup than it will if I put Brock Holt there? Really? Wow, what an earth-shattering discovery that is!
Can Mookie Betts hit 30 home runs and drive in 100 runs? Yes. Can Brock Holt do that? No.
Anthony Davis can go out there every night, score 20 points, grab 10 rebounds, and play great defense. I don't care what his efficiency rating per adjusted 48 minutes is.
Davis is a great player, and it will take a lot for the Pelicans to trade him. It's simple. Just don't try to show me his value based on some number that you can't even calculate yourself. Even if you have the time to plug all those VOP's and lgFTA's into a spreadsheet and that $19.95 for John Hollinger's book, I still don't care.
Daily NFL Update: Super Bowl Sunday is literally only hours away now. That's pretty much all that needs to be said.
Daily Rangers Update: After a nice road win in New Jersey capped off by a Mika Zibanejad hat trick, the Rangers will have a serious test tonight against the Tampa Bay Lightning, who have been the best team in the league this season pretty much from day one.
Daily NBA Update: The Bucks, Raptors, Nuggets, and Warriors continue to impress at the top of the standings. On the other end of the spectrum, the race to the bottom of the standings and the number one pick are on as well, with the frontrunners right now being the Cavs, Knicks, Suns, and Bulls.
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