The Lazy Statistician - STATRIBUTES SERIES PART II: ATHLETICISM

[garbageman]

The Lazy Statistician is back, and this time, we're taking a look at athleticism, one of the most coveted areas of the game. It's long been accepted that points in athleticism are more valuable than points in different attributes. That's why it costs more to train an athletic attribute than a skill attribute.

I did a lot of poking around with athleticism and total attribute points overall, and truth be told, I didn't find much that was really surprising. More points translate to better stats (at least for the 2015 season dataset I've been using). Of course, if I wanted to be really lazy and end it there, I could, but I probably wouldn't get the full 5 article points without some nifty graphs and such.

So let's take a look at the first graphic. This separates the four athletic attributes (jmp, qkn, str, sta) into graded bands and shows both the PER and per 36 minute stats on points, rebounds, assists, steals, and blocks. Here we go:

Screen Shot 2017-09-13 at 2.21.09 PM.png (95.98 KiB) Viewed 721 times

As a caveat, PER doesn't do much justice for defensive specialists. I'll try to take a look at defense in another article. But as you can see, increases in each individual athletic attribute translate to increases in player efficiency. However, it's not as cut and dry as this graphic would have you believe.

Screen Shot 2017-09-13 at 2.33.23 PM.png (60.41 KiB) Viewed 721 times

Centers, for example, don't have to be incredibly athletic. The most important attribute for a center to have is strength, and strength tends to correlate positively with rebounds per 36 minutes:

+------+----------+---------+
| str | rp36min | players |
+------+----------+---------+
| 90-100 | 9.882353 | 21 |
| 80-89 | 9.794118 | 11 |
| 60-69 | 9.191489 | 6 |
| <60 | 9.047120 | 8 |
| 70-79 | 8.050633 | 14 |
+------+----------+---------+

There were some outliers dragging down the 70-79 group...guys like Kelly Olynyk, James Peacock, and Jeff Withey, who rank towards the bottom in combined rebounding attributes. However, the 80-89 group had the 2nd lowest average rebounding attributes, but their high strength helped compensate.

In any case, we also see that quickness is an attribute heavily weighted towards height (or lack of height). Thus, it's a no-brainer that quicker players will have more assists...although that's because point guards are the quickest players and playmaking falls under their job description.

Perhaps jump is the most interesting category to look at. All five positions fall relatively evenly at jumping, so that serves as the best indicator to me that athletic attribute points do have the expected effect on stats when you look at the first image in this article.

Finally, let's take a look at athleticism totaled together and its effects on stats for another balancing measure.

Screen Shot 2017-09-13 at 2.58.00 PM.png (58.39 KiB) Viewed 721 times

This adds up to me, too. You'll notice that the stats rise for blocks and rebounds as the athletic totals lower. This is again because of the decreasing need for athleticism for frontcourt players. Centers will be primarily focused on these two attributes, so there won't be many guards who have less than 200 athleticism. In fact, there are only 2...one is Matthew Dellavedova, and the other is Adrian Wetzel, who is technically listed as a SG on the 2015 rosters, but at 6'11, that's obviously not the case.

In any case, keep the athletic total in mind (strength plus stamina plus jump plus quickness) because in the next comment (I can only add 3 graphics) we'll look at total athleticism and its effect on points per game.

[garbageman]

And we're back.

Anyway, let's look at points per game...or better yet, points per 36 minutes. I've made a couple of scatterplots here with trend lines. The first is by scoring attributes (ins + jps + fts + tps).

Screen Shot 2017-09-13 at 3.10.12 PM.png (140.05 KiB) Viewed 720 times

Here's the second. This is by athletic attribute.

Screen Shot 2017-09-13 at 3.11.44 PM.png (126.83 KiB) Viewed 720 times

As you can see by the trend-lines, the slope for athleticism is a lot steeper than the slope of the scoring attributes chart. Just looking at an eyeball test, +10 in athleticism nets about an extra point per 36 minutes while +10 in a general scoring attribute only nets about half an extra point per 36.

My conclusion? If you're training your players and you've got a heavy bank, training their athletic attributes is probably going to get you better return for your buck than training their scoring attributes. It'd be foolish to just look at points and call athletic attributes twice as valuable, but they definitely should be weighted a little higher when determining a player's value.

Of course, if we're talking a player's value, the stats generally speak for themselves, so maybe only consider weighting their athleticism when you're looking to increase a player's value through training.

In any case, that's all I've got for now. However, if there's anything you want me to dig deeper into regarding athleticism, post below, and if it's not too much of a time sink, I'll try to answer in the comments.

If it is too much of a time sink, I'll add it to the queue of ideas for future installments of ask the lazy statistician, but only if I feel like it.

[Inner_GI]

You can claim 5 points.