Leandro Barbosa and "The Iverson Factor" - Page 3

You might ask: So what? After all, there are many instances where players must watch their own stats take a hit for the good of the team. You might shoot more threes to open it up for teammates underneath (although we now have eFG% and true shooting percentage to account for this). You might be the master of making the pass that leads to the assist, so you never get any stats for your good work. In baseball, you might hit a groundball to the right side in order to advance a runner, all while coming up with nothing but an 0-for-1 in the box score. I understand that argument.

However, the problem here is that now analysts and experts and economists are trying to quantify how many wins an individual player is generating for his team. Malcolm Gladwell touched on this in the New Yorker this month when discussing a book, The Wages of Wins, written by three economists purporting to quantify how many wins players were personally responsible for during the course of a season. Gladwell uses Iverson as his primary example of a player that doesn’t produce wins, according to the stats. He even cites Iverson’s “dismal shooting percentage” and then surmises that the Sixers would be “better off without him.”

I don’t blame Gladwell for drawing these conclusions based on the book. I don’t even blame the authors of the book for their results. However, I do think that this whole situation is an example of why you can never rely completely on stats when evaluating a player.

We don’t have a stat for the “Iverson Factor” — for those instances when a supremely talented athlete becomes so unstoppable that the whole team has to try to guard him. Those instances where an attempted pass would merely become smothered by the bodies and arms of all those defenders. Those instances when all the attacking player has to do is throw the ball up off the glass or the rim and watch a teammate slam it home (that is, if it doesn’t go in, or if a foul isn’t called).

In this case, the work has already been done. Guys like AI arrive at this situation because they have had so much success in the past that the opponent can’t help but break down defensively. Yet for all that, he gets penalized. Not only on the stat sheet, where this sort of thing tends to happen (again, think of the baseball player racking up an 0-for-1 at the plate for moving a runner over), but also in the books and columns about “Win Shares” and other statistical measures that attempt to take stats and turn them into failsafe ways of measuring a player’s ultimate impact.

Article Author: Adam Hoff

Adam Hoff is the columnist for the Webby-winning WhatifSports.com. He can be reached at wis.insider@gmail.com.

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