SportsHubLA

On TrueHoop Tuesday was a link to a piece by APBRmetrics “guru” David Berri, who gives a whole new meaning to the term “idiot savant,” about how Andrew Bynum has been more effective, per-minute, than Kobe Bryant.

First, defending Berri a little bit: the post wasn’t quite as aggressive as Henry Abbott, TrueHoop editor, made it out to be in his synopsis, which made it look like Berri was saying flat-out that Bynum is a better player than Bryant. The theme of Berri’s article was actually “Kobe wanted the Lakers to trade Bynum this summer, but now he’s having a great year and will be a great center sooner rather than later.” I’ve written the same thing myself, so I’m not really going to get on him for writing that.

Then Berri decides to push his irony luck a bit too far, and uses the fact that Bynum has a higher “WP48″ than Kobe to make the half-serious argument that Bynum is better than Kobe. I’ll put the entire ill-advised paragraph here:

In fact, returning to the subject of Kobe’s summer demands, if Bynum’s play continues we might start seeing him make similar demands. Kobe has only posted a WP48 of 0.268 this season. Yes, this is quite good (only Manu Ginobili and Dwyane Wade did better with respect to WP48 last season at shooting guard). Still, Bynum could argue he has done more on a per-minute basis.

So perhaps Bynum should start wondering if he could win an NBA title if only he had a better star on his team (a point I made a few weeks ago). Perhaps Bynum should demand the Lakers trade Kobe to the Nets for Jason Kidd.

Of course, the Lakers might say no. Then we would might hear Bynum say something like…”Are you kidding me? We’re talking about Jason Kidd.”

I don’t know how you read it, but if you believe as I do that the last two paragraphs were mostly a joke, then Berri’s direct quote regarding Bynum/Kobe is the one in bold, which does carry different meaning than “Andrew Bynum has been more effective than Kobe Bryant,” which is what Abbot said in his link. In this case, Berri actually doesn’t deserve all the venom that Lakers fans and just about everyone else are currently throwing his way.

Now, onto Berri-bashing: He doesn’t understand the nature of basketball. Basketball is not played on a spreadsheet, and has far too many variables, because of the nature of team play, to be reduced to one formula, like Berri has done. This argument was articulated quite clearly today by Tom Ziller, and Bethlehem Shoals, my other boss/editor, also briefly got his licks in. I don’t have a lot to add to what they said, but basically it should go on record here that while Bynum has been good, anyone who says that he’s actually better than Kobe has no idea what they’re talking about. The whole thing made me decide to put up a guide to where to find good advanced basketball statistics, which can be seen on my home turf here-the jist of the article is that there are some great places to find stats that you can’t find in a box score, but to be wary of guys like Berri that use their formulas as a be-all end-all.

What’s on the paper ought to confirm a lot of what you see watching games. You know, like Kobe being better than Andrew Bynum.

John Krolik is the author/host of Truth in a Bullet Fedora. His work can also be found on Free Darko, and the Most Valuable Network.

Discuss: