kflo

good passing obviously helps an offense. the ability to break down a defense obviously helps an offense. a good pass that leads to a basket obviously helps an offense.

assists may not correlate well with wins, but they certainly help teams win. a good pass, that leads to a score, helps a team win. that seems like a pretty unimpeachable statement. if we accept that statement, assists can't be meaningless. assists are often the result of a positive play by a player. the more positive things you do for your team, the more you are helping give your team a chance to win.

i think assists need better context - i'd love to see ppfga on assist shot attempts. but the assist isn't a meaningless stat. with individual players, it does tend to correlate with a players ability to create opportunities for others. and that's good, and that helps teams win. it's simply another tool to help evaluate the strengths of a player. you see a good pass that leads to a score - common sense tells you that was a good thing. well, common sense would lead you to not ignore assists then. how can we evaluate players like bird, magic, stockton, lebron even, without considering assists? how can you accurately measure their impact? it's impossible if you simply discount assists as meaningless.

Hoopla

I don't understand the logic here. Just because assists are relevant to team success, that means they should be considered meaningless in evaluating a player's ability? A player's scoring ability is certainly relevant to team success; does that make it meaningless to consider it when evaluating the individual?

Well of course, because you are making the assumption that FGs made are equal. If that's the case, then obviously the amount of points scored will be around the same.

Didn't you say earlier that assists are relevant to team success? I think you just pulled a flip-Ginobili.

Regardless, your use of statistics is faulty. If you just look at total points scored, Detroit would come in near the bottom. When looking at the value of a statistic, you can't just analyze totals by one team; you have to compare it to their opponents, because they played under the same other variables (ie, pace).

If you look at team assist differentials per game (vs. their opponents) over the regular season, 4 of the top 7 teams are San Antonio, Phoenix, Miami, and Detroit.