![]() ![]() Jokic dominates the advanced stats because no one plays the way that he does - and what he does works. They are the same comparisons being made with simple stats, only weighted based on what seems to matter around the league and what correlates most to winning. Photo by Mitchell Leff/Getty ImagesĪdvanced stats are just comparisons. Jokic and Embiid and Giannis are all amazing players in an age of extremely tall MVP contenders. There are great comparisons to be made, because rarely are so many MVP contenders big men rather than guards. Giannis Antetokounmpo is better than both of them in some things, and worse in others. Of course Jokic is a league leader in deflections and has more steals. Jokic’s points + assisted points is higher than Embiid’s, but Embiid has more blocks. Joel Embiid scores more points a game, but also on more shots than Jokic. The impact is there in the box score every night.īut naturally, what you want to value from that box score matters. Most of Jokic’s career has gone that way. That’s a single game, and doesn’t give full scope to his season, but most of the season has gone that way. It means the Nuggets put up 37 more points in his time on the court than the Grizz put up, and since Denver won by 13 points, that means the rest of the Nuggets were a minus-24 in a little over 12 minutes without him. Jokic was plus-37 in on court plus-minus Friday night against the Memphis Grizzlies. That’s valuable, and should be weighted accordingly. Teams have to scrap their entire philosophy to address Nikola Jokic’s impact because what works against other teams does not work against him. Being able to see over and pass around the smaller guards normally tasked with on-ball defense rips standard defensive plans to shreds. Moving the opposing rim protection out into perimeter duty has a huge effect. Should a center get such a bonus from assists, for instance? Is it REALLY all that important where the passes come from, or does a 7 foot center deserve the same “credit” for passing that a 6’2 guard gets? Jokic’s whole career puts another data point in the column that states yes, it is that valuable. The concern with advanced stats is that they all depend on weighting the input correctly. And it’s a demonstration of what the “advanced metrics” are saying in the simple counting stats that box scores have shown for decades. Is it still impressive as hell? Absolutely. Is it an arbitrary club made of round numbers because we like base-10 clean figures? Sure. Wilt (naturally) got close a couple of times, but just didn’t line up his production in all the categories. Jokic last night started his own club, the Jokic Club: 2000 points, 1000 rebounds and 500 assists in one season. There’s a reason that Jokic keeps doing things that only Wilt Chamberlain has done before: they are not things that big men can usually do. It is generally harder for a 6’2 guard to get a lot of rebounds than it is for a 7 footer, so there is more value placed on a guard who can gobble them up.įor nearly all of the pre-Jokic NBA it has been a given that getting assists from a big man is a rare thing, and should be treated as a valuable thing. Assists for centers are weighted more heavily than they are for guards in some of the metrics, just as rebounds for guards are weighted more than they are for centers. Nikola Jokic warps some of the advanced stats. ![]() ![]() We start tracking things that seem valuable so that we can measure the impact of these things on the game we love.Īnd we build these formulas to reflect that impact. The NBA did not start accurately tracking rebounds until after 1950, when someone thought, “Hey, grabbing boards is probably a valuable thing to log, it seems to impact games.” Recording blocks and steals took another TWENTY THREE YEARS. It involves regression and stats work that is above me.Īt their most basic, though, all stats come back to trying to quantify what a player is doing on the floor, and we’ve been trying to figure that out since we first hung peach baskets and tossed a ball through them. I understand generally how most of the advanced stats are created but why those exact numbers and percentages and formulas were picked is a little more opaque to me. I’d just like to go back to the math for a bit, though. The entire city of Philadelphia seems destined to burn mathematics at the stake despite their GM basing a large portion of his decisions on analytics and helping to warp the play of the league around what those analytics say is most valuable. National muckrakers like Nick Wright spout off about “flawed computers” because he has a different favorite for the MVP award. Nikola Jokic is leading the league in nearly every advanced stat, and fans of non-Jokic players get more outraged by this every minute. ![]()
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