(Sorry if this long, but it is interesting, I promise!)
It being All-Star selection time, I was thinking of arguments of why some Celtics (particularly Ray Allen) should be selected despite having less than dominant individual numbers. So I started looking at PERs. One thing lead to another and I thought it might be interesting to add up the PERs of all of the starters on some teams to see how they compared.
I know that many people here aren't big fans of Hollinger, but, flawed or not, PER is an easily accessible way to measure combined stats.
Before starting it, my hypothesis was that the top 4 teams would be pretty close, but in different ways. I thought that the Cavs and Magic would have one gigantic PER (LeBron and DH) with the other starters all having pedestrian PERs while the Celtics and Lakers would have more really good but not awesome PERs because they more team oriented teams.
So here you go...
Team Celtics Cavs Lakers Magic
PG 18.96 16.41 13.08 20.75
SG 18.33 15.75 24.30 10.70
SF 17.76 31.65 12.37 15.15
PF 21.46 13.29 21.78 18.52
C 13.54 21.05 19.29 25.41
Total 90.02 98.15 96.21 90.53
Mean 18.01 19.63 18.16 18.11
(For the record, I used the usual starting 5 for the Celtics, a healthy Cavs squad (including Delonte at SG and Z at C), Vlad at SF for the Lakers and Courtney Lee at SG for the Magic.)
The results were kind of surprising. A few thoughts:
1) Obviously PER heavily weights offensive stats. It can't take into account great defense and great players sacrificing their own stats for the better of the team.
1) Vlad sucks
2) The Lakers are pretty good
3) Lebron is very good and his rating inflates the whole team
4) The Magic are not quite on the same level as the other 3
It would be neat to see if less good teams have even better scores. A team like the Bucks, with lots of scorers might have a huge total PER, but much less wins. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to figure that out now. Anyone else?
Topic: Comparing team PERs (Read 1306 times)