APBRmetrics

[Dan Rosenbaum]

[jkubatko]

[NickS]

Justin, about the study you described, even after you control for age you're going to have a selection bias for players that are recovering from injury. Look at AI this season, his minutes and productivity are up from last season but both can be explained by an increase in health.

You might mitigate this by comparing production in the season in which minutes increased with the average production from the previous 3 seasons.

On a related note, I wonder if there is any way to find people who's PER increased while their minutes decreased.

If one believes that production/minute should decrease as playing time increases it would seem logical that there should be players that would gain in efficiency when they lose minutes.

Obviously most players that lose minutes do so because they aren't playing as well. But there must be examples of players that have a back-up or starter at the same position that has a similar PER allowing the coach to adjust minutes.

An obvious example would be Jamison moving from a starter in GS to a bench player in Dallas but 1 sample does not a study make. Is there any way to isolate criteria to search for these players?

[NickS]

[jkubatko]

[jkubatko]

[NickS]

[NickS]

[Mike G]

Between '66 and '71, player minutes increased by an average of 8% per player per year. There are 86 instances of players whose minutes increased by 50% from one year to the next, and 42 cases of players' minutes dropping below 2/3 of the previous year.

Of the big minute-losers, 28/42 (.667) also had reduced PAR rates (simple pts+reb+ast, per minute). Their average age was 29.4, while the average age for the 14 other guys (whose minutes were reduced while PAR increased) was 27.5 .

Meanwhile, of the 86 MPG big-gainers, we have 47 whose PAR improved (.547). These win-win guys' average age was 26.2. The 39 players who responded negatively to big minute gains avg age was also 26.2 .

There was about a 1.1% average annual decline in league-wide PAR in this interval. This could be factored into the analysis. However, I still think the enormous dilution of talent that goes with expansion should swamp such a small effect. By 1971, almost half the league was expansion teams.

[NickS]

Another query for Justin.

I was thinking about the categories of people that have their minutes decreased or increased by 50% and that tells us something (I'm becoming more and more convinced that players don't, as a rule, lose efficiency by adding minutes) but doesn't really describe manu ginobili.

Can you do a query for all players that played between 26-31 mpg and had a win % over 65%? I'd just be curious to see a list and see if there are any comparisons to be made.

I can think of a couple examples.

Danny Fortson (98-99) had foul problems limit his minutes
Reggie Miller (02-03,03-04) was on the tail end of his career
Michael Redd (02-03) was playing behind ray allen

I don't know why Adrian Dantley (87-8 didn't play more.

Anyway, it would be interesting to see a list of names.

[gabefarkas]

regarding the PER differences for the increased minutes guys, i'm curious to see if there's a pattern by the amount or % of minutes by which they were increased.

for example, if someone went from 5 mpg to 15 mpg (ie, Mike Sweetney), was their PER increase different than if they went from 10 mpg to 35 mpg (ie, Zach Randolph)?

[jkubatko]

[gabefarkas]

Justin - is there any chance I can get the raw data for that? the specific per difference for the 1 with -22, for both with -20, for all 7 with -18, etc?

i am curious to run some correlative stuff with the data....

[Kevin Pelton]

That's pretty remarkably linear.

[HoopStudies]