In Pursuit of the Truth: An Attempt to Explain My Fascination with Advanced Stats

As my twelve or so followers-and anyone who knows me-know, I am entirely on the sabermetrics bandwagon.  I’ve never really though about why this is; I just know that I have been ever since my dad introduced me to Bill James as a young boy.  Once I finally understood James’s real purpose, I have never looked back.  And now, I’m trying to understand the reason that I am still enamored with it to this day, rather than dismissing it and moving on.

People seeking the truth.  I think that this explains/can be explained by our search for and diversity of religions, and our faith in our own opinions.  For me, I love the truth, and tend to be very stubborn and defensive.  My morality also tends to be very black-and-white.

Ever since I was five or six years old, I have loved sports statistics.  I would obsess over box scores, and create imaginary people with stat lines for many sports.  At first, it was simply the basics-like points per game, at bats, batting average, etc.

However, I eventually discovered Bill James.  When reading his work, it simply made so much sense.  Once we have discovered something, we tend to be curious and want to learn more.  As such, I would try to calculate Runs Created and his other statistics for various players.   I also picked up Baseball Prospectus’s work, and briefly joined SABR.

At this point, my basketball awareness had still not developed past the basic stats and the abysmal excuse for an advanced stat, Player Efficiency Rating (PER).  Then, when doing research for an estimation of NBA player peaking, I stumbled across http://www.basketball-reference.com’s Win Shares.  A few months later, when looking for flaws in PER, I discovered the Wages of Wins, and consequently, Wins Produced.  It took me a while to convert, but I did because its methodology seemed both correct and reasonable, even if some of its conclusions were a bit funky.

The fact that I was even researching player peak age is a testament to the depth of my search for the truth.  If we all try to discover a little truth, eventually our understanding will be exponentially expanded.  Wins Produced isn’t perfect, but people are working to fix that and discover more truth.  This pursuit is why we love advanced stats, and we have statistics at all.  We simply want to understand what we are seeing.  As someone-I can’t remember exactly who, although I think it was Dave Berri-once said, “Statistics are about separating the player from the team.”  Merry Christmas, everyone!  Thank you for reading, please comment, and please come back.

The Sad State of Rugby Stats

As evidenced in my posts “Sports That I Want to Watch During These Olympic Games”, “I Can’t Believe Bill Simmons Has Watched More Handball Than I Have.  Darn NBC!”, and “How the NBA Can Exploit the China Market, or, How the Cricketers Have Gotten to Me”, I enjoy weird and obscure-by American standards-sports.  This fascination has extended into rugby union; over the past couple days, I have been watching old games from both the full, fifteen-a-side and Sevens varieties on YouTube.  (Note that I don’t care what Mark Cuban says; I like Sevens better.)  I find this game to be interesting, and while watching an England-France match from the last Six Nations Tournament, I decided to look up rugby stats.  The Six Nations Tournament is an annual competition between Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, Italy, and France.  France, England, and Ireland are the dominant competitors, followed by Wales, with Scotland and Italy taking distant back seats.  It is the main annual rugby union competition in the Northern Hemisphere.  Back to the article.

When I was looking up these rugby stats on ESPN Scrum, I could only find data related to appearances, scores, and game result on player pages.  That was it.  This is simply not enough.  The only sports that I know well enough where the statistics are this…bare are hockey and cricket.  For hockey, at least they keep track of penalty minutes, assists, and hits, while cricket’s run and wicket-based statistics are actually satisfactory; only fielding is not adequately represented.  Water polo, field hockey, and team handball would also apply-I think-but I do not have enough familiarity with these sports to really judge.  However, with rugby union’s current database, it would be impossible to create a meaningful Wins Produced-esque single-number stat, which is a shame.

In fact, rugby union seems more likely to lend itself to advanced stats than hockey.  There are several measurable aspects to the game, such as tackling, passing, and penalties.  In fact, they even do on an individual level, but this data is not attributed on a level beyond the game-by-game.  You can’t even click on a player’s profile from the area where these stats are kept.  The Daily Telegraph, a major English newspaper, doesn’t even have that data!  I subscribe to the theory that with enough data and a rudimentary understanding of the sport, you can create, at the very least, the framework for a Wins Produced-style stat.  (Maybe I’ll write an article about that one of these days.)  However, the data collection is so haphazard that this would be impossible without a serious, mind-numbing effort.  Rugby League, an entirely different 13-a-side game created from a split on professionalism, is in the same boat.  May this be corrected by some intrepid individual willing to take on a herculean task.  Thank you for reading, please comment, and please come back.

 

The C/D Fallacy, Also Known As the Underrating of Richard Jefferson

In the world of American education, a “C” grade, ranging from 70-79.9%, is regarded as average.  Below that, and you fail; above that, and it’s a good grade.  In my experience, failure was relatively uncommon, but I was lucky to spend much of my time with smart kids.  When I was being brought up, “C’s” were bad because a “C” implied being on the verge of failure.  In the realm of the Wages of Wins and Wins Produced, being at all below average is a bad thing.  At this moment in time, playng more than a couple below-average players is somewhat inexcusable considering the sheer numbers of good players out there.  However, for that very reason, we (and I consider myself to be strongly in this camp) tend to underrate below-average players, ridiculing them as being useless.  This just is not true.

In his book Win Shares, one of Bill James’s concerns with Pete Palmer’s Linear Weights, an often-used metric at the time of the book’s publication, is that it assumed that a below-average player had negative value, and that, by extension, is worse than a player who never reached the big leagues.  While Wins Produced suffers from this to some degree-a player who is far from average as last season’s LeBron James in the opposite direction would produce -.158 Wins Per 48 Minutes-this is not the issue that I want to address.  (In fact, I have no proof in either direction; read my Mission Statement for details.)  The issue that I truly want to address is more in line with the Linear Weights issue; namely, it is our perception that any player who produces at a below-average rate is useless, rather than just any player who is a little more than one standard deviation away.  (See http://joshweil.blogspot.com for standard deviations information.)

Back to the analogy about grades, we Wins Produced people tend to view basketball players under this metric similarly to how Americans view our system of letter grades.  If we set a 75%, smack-dab in the middle of the “C” range, as being perfectly average, simple extrapolation implies that a 70%, the low end of the passing range, is a player with a WP48 of .070, assuming that a WP48 of .250 is equal to 100% and each percentage point is equal to .006 Wins Per 48 Minutes.  (Remember that the average player at each position according to Wins Produced…produces roughly .1 Wins every 48 minutes.)  As a result, a “D” would be between .010 and .070 WP48, and an “F” would be below .010.  Naturally, this completely disregards the Normal Distribution Curve, but this aligns with our perceptions more or less.  Therefore, in our view any player who produces less than .070 Wins Per 48 Minutes is not “passing” and should be quickly discarded.  And this might be feasible because of the great divide in the NBA between building the “best” team and the most productive team.  (I will again reference my article from Labor Day, “Good Can Be Bad: Production vs. Skill in the NBA.”)  However…

When the time comes that NBA teams “shape up” and start following the principles outlined in Wins Produced, creating a team with that sort of benchmark would be highly…ill-advised because of the extreme difficulty in finding replacements.  As James says in the introduction of Win Shares, “If you used Linear Weights…almost every group of players would have an average value near zero.”  The whole point of Win Shares is that below-average players have value.  By definition, only about half of the data points in any sample can be above average.  And even though my analogy has set the minimum passing rate at .070 Wins Per 48 Minutes, who really wants a “C”?  The answer is only the people who know that they cannot obtain anything higher.  And shooting for a “B” and “A” is entirely admirable, but in a situation such as the NBA, the numbers of “B’s” and “A’s” is finite, akin to a teacher who does grade on a curve.

Therefore, we have to accept that below-average players have value.  Not even improved evaluation of players from outside the current database can fix that because the average changes with every new set of data points.  Since any replacement level- or average-based system is going to fluctuate based on the strength of the sample size, nothing short of a highway robbery-level fudge factor can allow everyone to have average or above-average players.  It simply defies mathematics.  So we need to stop calling these players useless, myself most of all, and accept that, eventually if not now, those Wins Produced totals with a “0” in the tenths place are going to have mean something.  Thank you for reading, please comment, and please come back.

P.S. I mention Richard Jefferson because he has had below-average seasons in four of the last six campaigns, yet no season has dipped below a level of .050 wins.  He is often considered overpaid, and rightfully so, and washed-up, which seems to be a bit less accurate.  Interestingly, his boost from playing with the Spurs appears a good deal lower than most player’s.

Josh Childress, Picking Machine, and the Introduction of Hatteberg’s Elbow

In the book and the movie Moneyball, Scott Hatteberg is a catcher who is cast aside because he has permanent nerve damage in his elbow, rendering him unable to ever catch again.  However, the Oakland A’s recognize his ability to get on base, convert him to first base, and he plays for seven more seasons at about an average level, making roughly $11.5 million in the process.  Hatteberg is probably the most recognizable, analytically driven part of Beane’s early years of success; his role in the story turned an otherwise forgettable player into a legend.

Hatteberg was cast aside for two reasons: his inability to play his position and the fact that one of his greatest skills, reaching base, was not regarded as important by baseball’s decision-makers at the time.  In the NBA today, Josh Childress is a lot like Scott Hatteberg.  Teams do not value him, and, as a result, he has playing for Brooklyn while being paid the veteran’s minimum for his NBA-service time: $854,839.  At the league-average win value of about $1.7 million, the season where he had the lowest net production was worth $3,740,000.  That was last season, when he only played in 491 minutes.  His most valuable was in 2007-08, when he played in 2,274 minutes for Atlanta and produced wins worth $23,630,000 at the league-average win value.  That year, only 10 players produced more wins than he did, and all 10 of them played more minutes.  That is also more than the maximum player salary.  Full stop.

So what happened?  Why isn’t Josh Childress a household name on the level of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant, the latter of whom produced .2 fewer wins in 918 fewer minutes in 2007-08 and was one rung lower on the total wins ladder.  His play has regressed, but it’s still well above a star level; give him those 2,274 minutes last year, and he would have produced over $17.5 million worth of wins.  I have two hypotheses:

1. Hatteberg’s Skill: Childress’s greatest assets-smart shot choices, high rebounding numbers for a swingman, and a low turnover rate-are all undervalued assets, at least the way he does them.  (That is, not in a flashy way like Durant, who has the first two skills.)
2. Hatteberg’s Elbow: Now, unlike Hatte, Childress did not suffer a catastrophic injury.  Instead, he dared to challenge the system, but the system beat him.

First, Hatteberg’s Skill.  Childress is an incredibly smart guy.  First of all, he played his college ball at Stanford, which is no dummy school.  Second of all, look at his shot chart from last year.  (Note. I will be using data available on Childress’s www.basketball-reference.com page.  Unlike the Wins Produced data, this includes play-off information.)  In that aforementioned 2007-08 season, Mr. Childress took 615 shots.  Of these, a whopping 451 (73.3%) were at the rim, from where he shot 64.7%, and 62 (10%) from behind the arc, from where he shot a solid 35.5%.  These are the most efficient shots in the game because of the increased rate of success and extra point garnered, respectively.  Lay-ups also lead to free throws, and Childress shot 275 times from the charity strip at an 80.7% rate.  As a shooting guard with his playing time, these rates are fairly average.  On the other side of the coin, he only took 29 shots (4.7%) from 16-23 feet.  These are the least efficient shots in the game because of both the distance from the rim and the fact that they’re worth the same number of points as a lay-up.  In contrast with his current brand of basketball, his Usage Rate (percentage of team’s possessions used) was 15.8%; the average player’s usage rate is, by nature, 20%.  He averaged 1.57 Points Per Shot, which is a whopping 30.8% higher than the average player at the 2-guard spot over the course of his career.  Meanwhile, only Amare Stoudemire had a higher True Shooting Percentage than Childress.  True Shooting Percentage is essentially field goal percentage, but it takes into account both free throws and a 3-pointer’s added value.  The rest of the top 10?  Amare, Steve Nash, infamously low-Usage centers Andris Biedrins and Tyson Chandler, 3-point shooter Mike Miller, Dwight Howard, Chauncey Billups, Kevin Martin, and the immortal big man Mikki Moore.  It goes without saying that any shooting metric is likely to overvalue big men because of their closer proximity to the basket.  I have yet to mention his phenomenal offensive rebounding-3.7 boards per 48, more than 3 times that of the average shooting guard-or his turnovers, which were only 77.8% that of the average shooting guard.

Childress’s play has not fallen off in the past two years, but his play time has.  In the 2010-11 and 2011-12 seasons, Childress played a grand total of 1,386 minutes.  However, he has played exceptionally well, and he continues to make good decisions.  In those two seasons, he has taken 312 shots; 210 of them (67.3%) were at the rim, and he made 68.6% of those.   He was only 5-40 (12.5%) from beyond the arc, but he only took 10 shots from between 10 and 23 feet, converting on 3 of them.  His rebounding rates were as good as ever, and his turnovers per 48 minutes were a third that of the average shooting guard last year.  Differences that drastic just don’t happen.  However, Childress has been shooting less efficiently, and his Points Per Shot decreased to being only 84.1% that of the average shooting guard.  However, Childress’s troubles were entirely caused by lack of skill; last year, he only attempted two free throws, missing them both.  How a player shoot 40 lay-ups and a total of 58 shots at the rim while only shooting TWO FREE THROWS is beyond me, but it wastes Childress’s efficient free throw shooting and has to be the result of some inadvertent bias on the part of the referees.  The previous year, the difference wasn’t nearly as abysmal, but it was still far from his previous levels.  His Usage Rate also dropped to 10.1% last year from 14.2% the year before, yet his shot totals at the rim were not entirely out of whack with what his career level was.  I blame small sample size.

Now, it might seem interesting that I entirely skipped Childress’s 2008-09 and 2009-10 campaigns.  For the vast majority of ballplayers worthy enough to receive this sort of breakdown, this could be just a comparison between his best and then most recent seasons and nothing more.  While the first part is true with Childress as well, the second part is far from fact.  The reason I left out those two seasons thus far is that Childress spent those seasons playing in Greece.

I mentioned that Childress went to Stanford, meaning that he has to be a smart guy.  Well, after his eye-popping 2007-08 season, Childress was eligible for Restricted Free Agency.  This means that he could sign an offer sheet with any other NBA team, but his current team, the Hawks, had three days to match whatever he agreed to, or not.  However, the Hawks do not have the ability to match a contract the player signs with a foreign team.

That’s where Greek club Olympiacos Piraeus.  They offered him a three year, $20 million after taxes deal with opt-out clauses after each season.  This is the biggest contract a European team has ever tabled.  According to Childress’s Wikipedia page (sketchy, I know, but still), this worth the same as a 3 year, $32 million NBA contract.  Furthermore, he got a house and a car, and he automatically got a Nike shoe contract as a result of the team’s agreement with the company.  Childress had been offered a 5-year, $33 million contract before taxes with the Hawks, but this deal was obviously more lucrative.  Naturally, he took Olympiacos’s offer.

Childress spent two years in Greece.  According to www.draftexpress.com, Childress’s Win Score (a simplified version of Wins Produced) in the Greek league was roughly 1.5 times that of his in the NBA, but his Euroleague numbers were slightly worse.  His shooting numbers remained high in the Greek League but were lower in the Euroleague, basketball’s version of the UEFA Champions League.  However, his shot attempt rate was higher in the Greek League.  On the whole, Childress played more of a scorer’s role for Olympiacos Piraeus, and his numbers remained fairly consistent with what he had done (Greece) and what he would do when he returned to America (EuroLeague).  Either way, pretty good.  Disenfranchised with the experience, Childress opted out after his second year and did not play overseas during the next season’s lock-out.  According to Wikipedia again, “He cited concerns with reliability of getting paid, differences with coaching styles, and lower standards of business travel compared to the NBA.”

However, the NBA has not looked at him kindly since he returned.  As soon as he arrived back in the States, he was sent to Phoenix in a sign-and-trade for a second-round-pick and a large trade exception (which allowed Atlanta to take on added salary equal to Childress’s for one time only for a period of up to one year).  Two years and greatly reduced minutes later, Phoenix released him using the amnesty clause, a one-time-only allowance that gave teams the right to release one player without taking his salary as a cap hit but still having to pay his salary.  In other words, Phoenix is paying him roughly $6 million not to play for them.  He was a free agent until mid-September, when Brooklyn picked him up to be bench filler for the previously listed minimum salary.

I have a feeling that Childress is being indirectly punished for spurning the system, but he’s not paying the price.  He’s being a lot of money from his amnesty deal, and he’s still in the NBA.  On the contrary, all the teams not servicing him are suffering.  This is what I am now going to call Hatteberg’s Elbow; teams are overlooking a perfectly good player for reasons he cannot entirely control, thus frustrating everyone who knows of his true value because their teams won’t sign him  This is not the first time I’ve compared Josh Childress to Scott Hatteberg (see my Lakers Free Agents article from late August), and I don’t think it will be the last.  Thank you for reading, please comment, and please come back.  

P.S. For those who have not read or seen Moneyball, or do not remember this specific instance, the “Picking Machine” nod in the title is a reference to Hatteberg’s shaking confidence when adapting to the first base position.  He was so nervous that the team had to resort to overly sappy boosts of praise in order to keep the experiment going.  Maybe I’m trying too hard, but I thought it would be more interesting title than “Josh Childress Is Scott Hatteberg,” and it might give someone an incentive to read to the bottom of the page.

What the Heck Happened to ___?

Currently, we are just over a month into the NBA season.  The analysts at the Wages of Wins have been focusing on how uncharacteristically (or characteristically) well some players, such as Kobe Bryant, Kevin Martin, and O.J. Mayo, are playing.  However, I have decided to look at the other end of the spectrum at the players who are playing uncharacteristically poorly, and maybe a couple of ultra-surprising players I haven’t seen mentioned as often.  I will only mention players who have played both 10 games and 150 minutes.  Here goes nothing:

• SF C.J. Miles, Cleveland- (2011-12: 1,145 minutes, -.039 WP48.  2012-13: 176 minutes, -.308 WP48)  I know that C.J. Miles has never been a particularly good NBA player (for the reasoning behind the italics, read my article “Good Can Be Bad: Production vs. Skill in the NBA” from back in early September), but he has never been anywhere near this bad.  By never been particularly good, I mean one near-average season (2007-08), one average season in a very limited sample size (2005-06), and only one of his other six seasons were in the positive range (2008-09).  His employment is a great example of the John Bryant Error (Thank you, www.thenbageek.com) just by employing this guy.  However, nothing he has done has led us to believe that Miles could be this mind-bogglingly terrible, even in a small sample size like this to start a season, the additional caveat being that season metrics are more recognizable.  I would be unsurprised to learn that he’s had stretches this bad in the past, but that Wins Produced rate just makes you do a spit take.  The reason for the drop has largely been caused by a precipitous drop in shooting efficiency, which is caused by a greatly increased three-point attempt rate at an abysmally horrible 26.8%.  While Miles was only even an average shooter from range for a small forward once in his career (2007-08), he is generally not this bad; his career success rate is 32.4%.  This, coupled with a 86.4% increase in turnovers, contributes to the absolutely atrocious Wins Produced.  If the Cavs are…ill-advised enough to continue to play him, I assume that he will be more productive, but I would just cut him if I could.
• C Greg Stiemsma, Minnesota- (2011-12: 766 minutes, .181 WP48.  2012-13: 163 minutes, -.168 WP48)  In his rookie season, Stiemsma played really well as a back-up big in Boston.  Thus far, he has been playing at a remarkably subpar level.  This year, his shooting percentage has dropped from 54.5% to an abysmal 35.4%, his rebounds have decreased 26.1%, his turnovers are 52.4% higher, his amazing blocked shot rate is 77.4% of the astonishing 5.3 per 48 it was last year, and his steals rate is only 39.1% of what it was last year.  Coupled with the disastrous drop in shooting efficiency is a 85.5% increase in field goal attempts per 48 minutes.  In other words, Stiemsma is worse at everything except committing fouls-his free throw percentage also went down 6.4% despite (or because of) a 57.7% uptick in attempts.  I want to chalk this up to small sample size, but I could just as easily say that last year’s 766 minutes wasn’t a terribly large sample size either.  I want to think this Stiemsma guy is good-I don’t know why, maybe I just like the name-but he probably isn’t significantly better than average, if that.  Darn.
• SF Michael Beasley, Phoenix- (2011-12: 1,087 minutes, -.014 WP48.  2012-13: 478 minutes, -.120 WP48.)  We knew that Beasley was bad; he has been the past three years ever since he decided to forsake rebounds and chuck.  This year, he has been especially bad.  His three-point percentage is 27.3%, his overall field goal percentage is 38.9%, his total points per shot is 90% of what his already-terrible rate of last year (1.09 to 0.98; the average small forward is 1.22).  In his Miami years, Beasley has a bang-up legit prospects, producing .063 and .080 Wins Per 48 as a power forward.  For his first two years, that’s a legitimate sign of hope, and it was hope that was foreseen by the great Arturo Galletti’s model.  Then, he got traded to Minnesota for two second-rounders, and something snapped.  He stopped rebounding, he started turning the ball over, and his shots first increased, then regressed, but with less efficiency as well.  What might have been.
• PF Kevin Seraphin, Washington- (2011-12: 1,176 minutes, .114 WP48.  2012-13: 319 minutes, -.103 WP48.)  Like other guys in this article, his shooting efficiency has gone down, his turnovers and shot attempts have gone up.  This is because, according to www.basketball-reference.com’s shot chart, he’s moved farther away from the basket; he’s taken more 16-23 foot jumpers already than he did all of last season.  He’s also taken more 10-15 footers.  Mr. Seraphin, get you feet back on the low block; you’re killing your team.
• PF Jan Vesely, Washington- (2011-12: 1,078 minutes, .145 WP48.  2012-13: 172 minutes, -.055 WP48.)   Since he’s been in the NBA, this Czech has been a low-usage shooter.  Keep that in mind.  Last year, he took 66.8% of his shots at the rim at a 73.1% rate (again, according to www.basketball-reference.com).  This year, he’s taken 30 shots, only 12 of which have been at the rim, and 7 have been from 16-23 feet.  He took 21 shots from the latter range all of last season.  As such, his shooting percentage went from 53.9% to 43.3%.  He’s also rebounding at 75.7% of the rate that he did last year, and small sample size is the probably cause of a 37.7% spike in his foul rate (6.9-9.5 per 48 minutes).  However, the drop is less dramatic as I have above, as the NBA Geek has him evaluated as a generic forward; as a power forward, he produced .110 per 48.  Still, ouch.
• PF Ersan Ilyasova, Milwaukee- (2011-12: 1,655 minutes, .251 WP48.  2012-13: 323 minutes, -.047 WP48.)  His shooting efficiency and rebounding rates have absolutely plummeted, and everything else has actually improved.  (The declines are 50.5% per shot and 51.5%, respectively.)  He’s been shooting 22.6% from three, compared to 45.5% last year.  For his career, Ilyasova is a 34.7% 3-point shooter; last year is starting to look like a fluke.  On the other hand, he’s also just in a major slump, I guess he’s a solid amount above average, but nowhere near where he was last year.  His “amazing” contract is starting to look like less of a steal now.  Ah well; if he can rebound (pun not  initially intended but enjoyed), it will have been a good move.
• PF LaMarcus Aldridge, Portland- (2011-12: 1,994 minutesm ,125 WP48.  2012-13: 611 minutes, -.038 WP48.)  Somehow, his statistics do not seem to have changed that much.  His Points Per Shot are down 14.5%, and his rebounds are down 11.6%.  I’m guessing that the Adj48 standard for power forwards has gone up a little bit this year.  (For information on the calculation of Wins Produced, visit www.wagesofwins.com.)

Has anyone else noticed that none of the players I’ve written about so far are guards?  Don’t worry; guards tend to be more clustered around the mean than other players; I’m sure that there will be some down the road, but no guarantees; I’m making this up as I go along.

• PG Isaiah Thomas, Sacramento- (2011-12: 1,655 minutes, .140 WP48.  2012-13: 262 minutes, -.037 WP48.)  I mentioned that I make this up as I go along, and guess what, after the interlude, my first player is a point.  Thomas’s assist and turnover rates have both gone down the toilet (down 67.4% and up 63.3%, respectively), as have his rebounds (down 58%).  His fouls have also gone up slightly (20%) and his Points Per Shot have gone down slightly (4.8%).  Since 1,655 minutes is hardly a small sample size and basketball stats are amazingly consistent (again, www.wagesofwins.com), I’m guessing that this a combination of a slump and a quick trigger finger on the part of the coach.  I would be shocked if he doesn’t bounce back.
• PF Jonas Jerebko, Detroit- (2011-12: 1,468 minutes, .149 WP48.  2012-13: 221 minutes, -.035 WP48.)  First off, he was evaluated as a small forward last year and a power forward this year; change him back to a 3, and he produces positive .035 Wins Per 48.  He takes the majority of his shots from the rim and beyond the arc, and his 25 threes have only led to five scores.  That, and a mysterious 21.7% drop in rebounding contribute to his swoon.  However, his offensive rebounds have actually increased 38.7%; mysteriously, his defensive rebounds have gone down a whopping 76.9%!  If anyone can explain this to me, I would really appreciate this because this looks like massively bad luck.  Or Andre Drummond.
• C Ian Mahinmi, Indiana- (2011-12: 1,139 minutes, .102 WP48.  2012-13: 251 minutes, -.016 WP48.)  His stellar points per shot rate has gone down from 1.77 to 1.49 to 1.31 over the past three years, and his turnover rate has almost doubled from last year.  Interestingly, his block rate has increased 2.62 times; I’m saying that’s small sample size.  He’s taking more mid-range jumpers; it’s not hurting his rebounding, but it is hurting his scoring efficiency.  Get back on the block, sir.
• PF Josh Smith, Atlanta- (2011-12: 2,329 minutes, .116 WP48.  2012-13: 454 minutes, -.011 WP48.)  We all know that Josh Smith is a small forward in a power forward’s clothing.  Evaluate him as a 3, and he is significantly above average in every year of his career instead of hovering around that mark (till now), and he is a legit star in 2009-10.  Smith’s turnovers are up 26.5%, his scoring efficiency is down 10.8%, and his rebounds are down 23.8%.  He’s just in a slump, I think.  Besides, he has taken more 16-23 foot jumpers than shots at the rim; since he’s playing as a big, that needs to stop, and it might happen (2009-10 and 2010-11) or not (last year).  I don’t know.
• C Gustavo Ayon, Orlando- (2011-12: 1,088 minutes, .171 WP48.  2012-13: 171 minutes, -.010 WP48.)  His defensive stats, aside from rebounding, have completely and utterly tanked; I’m tired of listing off percentages, but let’s just say that there are 50%+ changes for the worse in blocks, steals, and fouls.  He’s also taking fewer shots at the rim, which have corresponded to a 10.9% drop in Points Per Shot.  Don’t ask me why that has occurred; he’s playing with Glen Davis and Nikola Vucevic, who are fond but not overly fond of jump shots.  Small sample size is all I gotta say.
• SG Arron Afflalo, Orlando- (2011-12: 2,086 minutes, .109 WP48.  2012-13: 512 minutes, .018 WP48.)  Another Magic man to close out this segment.  45% increase in turnovers, 25% drop in shooting efficiency.  The rate of 16-23 foot jumpers he has taken has increased almost 50% from his rate last year.  He’s good at mid-range jumpers, but he’s not Dirk good, and he’s perfectly good at taking threes.  His shot attempts have increased 18.6%, but, as the Wages of Wins people love to say, THE USAGE CURVE DOESN’T EXIST!

As for people who have not been pointed out at the Wages of Wins but are playing amazingly by their standards, I would like to nominate Jimmy Butler (who was good in a small sample size last year), Mo Harkless (who the NBA Geek has mentioned), that Ray Allen’s playing amazingly well even by his standards, that Omri Casspi, Antwan Jamison, Jason Richardson, and Carl Landry are all playing uncharacteristically well, Eric Bledsoe’s breaking out (but not with zits), and Hasheem Thabeet may have finally gotten on track in Oklahoma City.  Thank you for reading, please comment, and please come back.