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Originally Posted by Minstrel
When did I say defense should be thrown out? I just said it's subjective.
Again, I'm all for including defense. There's just no way to conclusively rule on it, so it'll remain in the realm of opinion. Which is fine by me.
As for intangibles, to be totally frank, I think opinions on it is more noise than information. Just my take. I don't render opinions on it and I don't find opinions on it very compelling. Obviously, everyone is free to weight intangibles as they like, but I'll disagree when it's weighed in to any significant degree.
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How does that which is in the "realm of opinion" (i.e. defense) factor into a player analysis which is based primarily on quantitative measures?
Suppose, for instance, that we agree to a 50/50 split between offense and defense with respect to how each category should factor into a player's overall value. If the measures for 50% of a player's value are, as you say, merely opinions, then how should they be weighted against the other 50% which is more quantitatively sound?
If they are weighed equally, it seems contradictory to your stance that quantitative measures should be the primary (or is it only?) factor in such an analysis. If they are not weighed equally, then the analysis for a player's value (which theoretically should be 50/50) is based primarily upon only 50% of the theoretical model for a player's value; such that even if we have correctly evaluated
both offense (primarily quantitative) and defense (primarily qualitative), our final analysis could still be wrong due to reducing the value of any qualitative measures.
i.e. T-Mac's offense is a 9.5/10 and his defense is a 7.5/10. This should make him an 8.5/10 overall, but due to our weighting of offense as, say, twice as important as defense (since it was quantitatively measured), the final rating we assign McGrady is an 8.8/10.
This can certainly influence comparisons with similar great players or just lead us to tend to overvalue offense in general.
How do we discuss Dennis Rodman? Especially prior to his rebounding revolution.
And that's just defense. I'm deliberately biting my shirt and holding back on bringing up the argument for intangibles!
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That's always a good question. The best way is if you can combine the player production into a team total and those team totals correlate well with team wins (the "objective" standard for success).
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But is that what Hollinger did? I haven't read his books, but on his website I clearly recall him using arguments for why other "single number" player ratings were inferior like "any measure that has David Robinson over Michael Jordan is flawed". It could just be rhetoric, but I've always thought the drive to devise a method for rating players' overall value with a single number was at least in part due to our own sense of what results such a number "should" reveal.
I know for me personally that the joy of statistics is watching the numbers describe what I see in reality, or vice versa.