By the time Nov. 17 gets here every school in the county will have begun its basketball schedule. Some already have.
Over the years, fans have argued and coaches have studied how to evaluate a player.
What, they ask, is a good individual game performance?
This is a lot more difficult than it appears, but, naturally, I have an answer, well part of one anyway.
First, the most difficult part of a player’s game to evaluate is defensive performance. To evaluate a player’s defense, a person would have to watch many hours of tape.
Fans don’t do that and even coaches don’t have time.
It’s also best to remember if a player is guarding space (zone) or are playing man-to-man and guarding a very good opponent or a weak one.
Therefore we have to fall back on stats that are formulated by offense or our team getting the ball from the opposition.
This is dangerous but it’s all we have, so lets give it a shot.
In order to do this we must have a standard and I have chosen the best player ever – Michael Jordan.
Now I know that players have scored 100 points in a game and many in the pros have scored more than 60 in a game (Shaq, Gervin, Baylor, Kobe, Thompson) but no one averages that.
A professional game is 48 minutes and the standard for scoring excellence is 30 a game. That works out to approximately two points every three minutes.
So a great scoring night in college (40 minutes) is 26 a game, high school (32 minutes) is 22 points and in middle school (24 minutes) is 16 points a game.
Remember these are the levels where excellence is reached, not just good, but excellent.
As coaches are constantly reminding players, who seem to forget on a daily basis, there’s more to the game than scoring and indeed there is. Therefore, I’m willing to give a player a +1 for a block, steal or rebound, a –2 for each turnover (turnovers get you beat) and -1 for each foul.
Let’s have a couple of examples.
Your “star” high school forward scores 23 points, gathers in six rebounds, blocks a shot, has two steals, three turnovers and two fouls. That’s a 24-point game – excellent – even if the player played all 32 minutes.
Let’s say your fine high school point guard scores 22 points and has three steals, two rebounds but six turnovers. That’s a 15 point night – very good but not excellent.
Surely it goes without saying that a player could reach the excellent totals and still play less than the full game and that a substitute could come off the bench for 16 minutes in a high school game and reach excellent level by, say, getting a game total of 11 points. That’s a huge plus for your team.
On a side note, I have a very close friend who once guarded a future professional player who played college ball for Kentucky.
My friend scored 32 points but the future pro had 52.
It’s all relative, so don’t forget the defense and on a closing note, don’t forget the shooting percentage either.
If a player has to shoot it 30 times to get 20 points, that’s not good.
The next time you look at a box score check out the shooting percentage. I don’t care what he or she scored, if they shot much less than 45 percent then it wasn’t a good game.
Let me know what you would add to this evaluation process. |
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