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I confess to being rather a stats geek, whether it's election statistics or fire/EMS or basic demography or sabermetrics. As much as I love football as a sport, it's a big downer that so few games means a small sample and much more variability in football stats. And other than Rachel Maddow and of course Barack Obama, who in politics came out of 2008 with their ticket punched more loudly than former Baseball Prospectus genius turned polling genius Nate Silver? It was a good year for geeks. And then there's basketball, which is kind of in between baseball and football in stat utility. Since the last time I was heavy into the NBA however, folks like ESPN's John Hollinger have injected the stat geek's spirit into it, and several good ratio statistics have been introduced. Some of the better basketball stats in terms of really seeing how well teams and players stack up are the points scored and allowed per 100 possessions, which compares efficiency against an even standard; and point differential (points scored minus points allowed). The differential can also be extrapolated in a quick formula to get what in baseball are called Pythagorean Wins: the expected win-loss total based on point differential. The excess is written off to luck and expected to be balanced out in the future as luck naturally turns. These and other stats at the player level are combined by Hollinger into a PER stat, which estimates total production per minute, pace adjusted. One of the component stats that I think really gets to the essence of a particular skill is the suite of rebound stats. What Hollinger does is compute the percentage of all possible rebounds (offensive, defensive or both) that the player actually got. It stands to reason that every time a shot is missed and you're on the floor, in theory you should have a chance at a rebound and the best rebounders get the highest percentage of available boards. I've spoiled the surprise, of course, but what I discovered while messing around with Hollinger's stats is that when it comes to rebounding, especially on the defensive end, there's no doubt that the best bound-for-bound glassman in the NBA is none other than the Vanilla Gorilla, Joel Pryzbilla. {the amazing truth, below}
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