Related to your comments that he is having a "top 50 impact to winning" how would you think the best way to demonstrate that is? For example you say he has more of an impact than Simmons despite al have 3.7 win shares and Ben Simmons having 6.7 despite playing on the same team and Harris is at 4.3
WS are based largely on counting stats. Horford has poor counting stats. But as I said, they Sixers are 11-6 in games with Horford without Embiid. Last year, and every other year of Embiid's career, the Sixers have been a well below .500 team without Embiid on the court. That isn't the case this year.
As for actual metrics, you can look at on/off numbers and see that the Sixers are actually worse with Simmons on the court than when he is not on the court (-1.4 per 100 possessions). Per 100 possessions, Harris is at +3 and Horford at +2.3, but when you realize that Horford is often in the game when Embiid is not, I think you can reasonably conclude that Horford impacts winning more than Harris. Just looking at Embiid, I think illustrates that. Every year of his career, before this one, Embiid was at least +10 per 100 possessions in the on/off numbers. This year he is down to +3.4. I believe a large reason for that is Horford, who quite simply is a better player by a wide margin to Embiid's prior back-up centers.
If you look at counting stats, you will never really see Horford's value, but he has always had a great impact to winning. It is one of the reasons why every single team he has ever played on has made the playoffs (I'm not sure there are many players in league history with 12+ year careers that can say that). Average Al's impact is much greater than the box score counting stats and always has been.
Your new argument is really that Horford has a greater impact on winning than Ben Simmons? I can tell you if Ben Simmons is injured and there are no other changes their betting line will move 2 to 2.5 points. If Horford is injured and not playing it does not move at all or perhaps .( points.
Shifts in betting lines have more to do with what the gambling population might do not what basketball experts or basketball analytics have to say. Judging a players impact on a team based on what a casual fan or gambler might think isn’t smart
Not saying your wrong but it’s pretty flawed logic to use this to make your point
No offense, but your post is painfully wrong here and relies on a number of misconceptions. (As a little background I am a semi professional sports better and have been for a number of years. It has been a good stream of secondary income). A very common misconception is that lines move around because Joe from Jersey thinks Ben Simmons is a great player and he is either playing or not. In reality, there can be 2000 Joes from Jersey, but they are all betting 20-50 bucks based on that premise. Meanwhile, there are professionals and analytics services that run really complicated simulations of games over and over and looks for discrepancies in lines. If they find a discrepancy hundreds of thousands of dollars can be bet on it (and even more if they are a paid pick service). This moves the line 100x compared to the thoughts of Joe from Jersey. (Note you can have occasional exceptions to this if you have like a floyd mayweather betting 10 million on a game based on a whim, but even then the professional analytics driven people will pound it if the line gets out of whack and offset most of it. This is also just not happening on the average tuesday night regular season game which is the kind of thing we were discussing).
My friend who is a full professional, had an excel sheet that looked like a PHD dissertation entirely for trying to find inconsistencies in the first to score based on jump ball histories (the data wasn't strong enough to overcome the juice so he stopped the project). You can only imagine what a modeling looks like for an entire game. These lines are actually the most analytic and data driven of anything we can possibly find out there and many of the people that are serious about this pay for advanced data we as common fans don't even have access to. The joe schmo theory of "they just want equal money on both sides" is a dramatic oversimplification and really glosses over the fact that the lines are created and moved based on very very hard technical work by some of the smartest people in the world (and EXTREMELY data driven).
just to clarify, a team can lose and still cover the spread and the gamblers that bet on said team still win right? so explain to me how gambling should factor into this considering that it doesnt have to do with the team winning and losing, it has to do with covering a spread
with all due respect to you and your friends spreadsheet, but im still not gonna use gambling lines to judge nba players and how bad their contracts are.
again, never said i thought you were wrong, in fact i think youre in the right here in this arguement. But gambling lines? sorry cant do it.
So first off, this isn't me and my friends spreadsheets. That is a pretty condescending way of responding to what I wrote. (It seems hard to believe you actually understood what I wrote that poorly, so just seems a bit jerky). Secondly, to elaborate lines are set up by the linesmakers (in some cases a very highly skilled stats person that is paid very well) and they generally move around based off professionals that use in depth data to inform there bets. In real life, it is a constant battle being a bunch of really smart statistical people trying to outsmart each other.
Taking it further, the casino linesmaker and the professionals that move the lines are using some data average fans have access to (all sorts of splits) and some that we don't. (On a side note Silver has been really ramping up stat tracking and injury report stuff in a result to make this stuff more readily available to everyone for legal betting). You said "Shifts in betting lines have more to do with what the gambling population might do not what basketball experts or basketball analytics have to say."
This is a complete nonsense statement because the actual "gambling population" where the significant money is happening is literally "basketball experts and basketball analytics people." I understand why people don't really get this. This is not how it is portrayed in movies and popular culture or even on sportscenter when they have the chalk analysts on. (or how most people talk about it with their friends that do it casually) It is a lot more palatable and interesting to have some guy smoking a cigar and saying he has a lean or gut feeling on the bulls getting a win (or using some really basic date like their record in their last 6 games against the spread) than to have some nerdy guy in front of a bunch of spreadsheets trying to explain why his 37 factor model (and explaining what each of the factors mean) predicts a score of 91-88 while the current line available only has 89-86. That is completely boring for most and 95% of the population finds advanced stats and modeling completely lame.
Now it is totally up to you if you want to get into to deciding if you want to accept lines and oddsmakers valuations of players and feel like it isn't interesting, but you should at least understand how it works and what the lines really are based off and move off of. Me personally, knowing how much math goes into it, it does hold a lot of sway with me if linesmakers assign a very much significantly higher value to one player over another on the outcome of a game (certainly more than a poster on here using basic on off splits with no context), but I obviously can't force you to value that the same if you don't want to.
Topic: Could Horford end up being the worst contract of offseason? (Read 127947 times)