Comment by hardwaregeek
2 years ago
It’s like Draymond Green. Individually his statistics suck. He’s jokingly called Mr Triple Single (a triple double is a major achievement, a triple single not so much). But he’s such a fantastic defensive coordinator and playmaker that his impact metrics on the team are massive. Like practically comparable to Steph, his more lauded teammate, in some stretches.
A common refrain in basketball is that people forget it’s a team sport. Doesn’t matter how good you are individually if your team sucks (see Michael Jordan in 1988 or Lebron most of his career). Similarly programming is a team sport. Individual stats are not the same as team success.
And similarly to sports, there are devs who understand this, and devs who actively refuse to do things like pair, mob, or collaborate and just want to be handed work pellets so they can pick up their headphones and go to la-la land.
I don’t expect predigested tasks, and I’m fine with participating in broad strokes planning. But I need peace and quiet when I’m trying to concentrate on writing the code.
That's a fair point, but it also wasn't my point.
That impact should show up in the plus/minus score?
https://www.espn.com/nba/statistics/rpm
For 2022/23 Green ranks 38. His defensive impact is very high but it is offset by his negative offensive impact.
Yeah that's what I meant by impact metrics. In the 2015-2017 playoff runs Green's impact is almost on-par with Curry. But for most people who watch basketball, they just look at the box score and don't look at advanced stats.
Not even just playoffs either, I think his rank in that three year RAPM range was fourth or something staggering, after Curry, Lebron, and I think Kawhi? My go-to RAPM site that did all the calculations was taken down so can’t currently cite the numbers
Standard plus minus is pretty crude since it obviously doesn’t filter out any context, and the ones that do[0] tend to be a better reflection of a player’s impact in their given role, not their overall quality, which is something that drives me up a wall with the nba analytics crowd.
It’s easy to fall victim to the McNamara fallacy (I’ve certainly been guilty of it), before you start understanding the innumerable intricacies in the domain. And basketball is the only domain I probably know better than 99% of HNers lol.
That being said, GP’s general point about Draymond is very true. Yes he’s one of the best defensive players of all time and one of the smartest as well. I think the main point is his incredible self awareness (yes get the jokes off). On defense it’s more subtle, such as not over committing and leaving his man etc but on offense is where it’s obvious. As his own shooting has fallen off a cliff, more and more when he’s dribbling unguarded he frantically looks around for Steph or klay to flow into a dribble hand off to pry them free for a shot.
He’s talked extensively about the criticism he’s faced for lack of shot attempts, with his rational being why would he ever shoot if he can instead try to get Steph a shot. He’s also mentioned if Klay hasn’t touched the ball in a few possessions, he makes sure to get Klay the ball with at least a decent look; otherwise the next time Klay gets the ball he’s shooting it regardless of how bad the shot is. He also frequently pushes the break[1] to catch the defense off guard and before they can set up.
He is still a negative offensively, but why I appreciate draymond so much is for the above reasons and the myriad other subtleties he does to maximize his benefit to the team and diminish the detrimental elements of his.
And lastly, standard plus minus is still a hell of a lot better than box score garbage, I don’t mean to crap on it.
[0]: https://squared2020.com/2017/09/18/deep-dive-on-regularized-...
[1]: http://stats.inpredictable.com/nba/onoff.php?season=2022&tea...
(Steph actually ranked higher than Dray last year in pace (seconds per possession) on/off which is why separating Draymond himself is so difficult. Their relationship is certainly symbiotic, but Draymond is the one that optimizes for best interplay of their skills)
Came here to say something similar.
In this case, Tim from the blog post is a football defender or a linebacker if you're an American. Measuring them based on the amount of goals they scored or a touchdowns they caught is stupid. Instead they're stopping costly errors and providing the foundation that allows others to go on and score. You're probably not going to win very much if you field 11 strikers or 11 wide receivers.