I have had a great time teaching a sports and math class to Kelley School of Business students at Indiana University. One of my ace students Paul Aynilian did a study trying to estimate John Hollinger’s famous ESPN PER Ratings based on box score statistics. We found that
45.75*(Points/Minute)+22.55*(Rebounds/Minute)+32.8*(Assists/Minute)+58.2*(Steals/Minute)-48.65*(Turnovers/Minute)
-39.73*(Missed FG’s per minute) -20.6*(Missed FT per minute)+38.37*(Blocked Shots Per Miute)-18.68*(Personal Fouls Per Minute)
explains over 99% of the variation in this season’s PER rankings and is off by an average of .37 in estimating the PER of the top 200 NBA players whose stats are on Yahoo.com. So basically our simple formula virtually duplicates the PER rating without a lot of mumbo jumbo.
The disturbing thing about these weights is that if an NBA player shot 33 .33% (1-3) then the more shots they take the higher their PER because shooting 1 for 3 gives you a net contribution of 2(45.75)-2(39.73)>0!! Clearly this is bad because a 33% shooter is not a good shooter and with these weights the more shots a bad shooter takes, the higher his PER rating.