“I went into the NBA as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as I could get,” Alex says. “I loved the game. I didn’t want to taint it.” This was before Alex had the power to change NBA records.

A while back, we brought you the story of a stat-padding NBA scorekeeper who, in 1997, attributed 23 assists to Lakers guard Nick Van Exel, just for the hell of it. That was Alex. (He is now an officer in the Navy and asks that I not use his last name.) From 1995 to 1998, he managed the Vancouver Grizzlies’ stat crew. Alex is a numbers guy, and he came at the job from the perspective of someone who spent his childhood, as he says, “recreating baseball games with Dungeons and Dragons dice and baseball cards.” So it was particularly galling for him to find that the seemingly cold and objective NBA box score was, on many nights, a self-serving fiction, subject to so much artful embroidery and deliberate manipulation that one might reasonably conclude that the boys from Enron were sitting courtside, counting dimes.

“I wanted the numbers to be meaningful and accurate, and I knew they weren’t,” Alex says, a lesson he soon came to know firsthand. “I was good at making them inaccurate.”

Alex was hired by the expansion Grizzlies in 1995 while still in school in Ontario, where he kept score for his college team. That offseason, the NBA was in the process of switching over to a computerized stat-keeping system, and at some point during the summer, Alex found himself at a training seminar in Detroit with the rest of the league’s stat crews.

“That was my first exposure to the subjectivity of NBA statistics,” he says. “I had come from the ivory tower where everything was straightforward. … In Detroit, they’d show us a little video clip, and we’d enter it on our computer. That’s a basket, no assist or whatever. Everyone around me would be giving assists. I was like, ‘Really?’ The dude passed it to a guy on the wing, who did a headfake, took two dribbles and made a jumper. And that’s an assist?”

Alex found out that  scorekeepers were given broad discretion over two categories: assists and blocks (steals and rebounds are also open to some interpretation, though not a lot). “In the NBA, an assist is a pass leading directly to a basket,” he says. “That’s inherently subjective. What does that really mean in practice? The definition is massively variable according to who you talk to. The Jazz guys were pretty open about their liberalities. … John Stockton averaged 10 assists. Is that legitimate? It’s legitimate because they said it was. If he’s another guy, would he get 10? Probably not.”

The bias is easy to see. Just look at the home-road splits. Last season, home teams leaguewide scored 101.58 points per game; road teams, 98.32. That’s to be expected: Teams play better at home. What’s surprising is that assists and blocks rise disproportionately for home teams — assists by nearly 8 percent, blocks by more than 15 percent. Last year’s Nuggets averaged 25 assists at home, only 19.4 on the road. They recorded 7.3 blocks per game at home and just 4.7 outside Denver. (Hell, Chris Andersen swatted 117 shots in 38 games at home against only 58 blocks in 33 games on the road. It was as if he stepped into the Pepsi Center and suddenly turned into Larry Nance.) The reason? People like Alex.

* * *

In Vancouver, Alex ran the stat crew, which is usually a two- or three-person operation (and always the responsibility of the home team). Alex was the caller, which meant that he’d call out the game to someone tapping feverishly away at his computer and rarely even glancing at the floor. “I would sit there, and I would call out things like, ‘Field goal, miss, Bryon Russell, 18-footer from the elbow.’” He’d note “location, shot type, whether it was missed or made, assisted if necessary, blocked if necessary,” and all this information would coalesce into a box score that would wind up, in shrunken agate type, in your morning newspaper. The process allows for what Alex calls “two points of failure — the guy subjectively seeing the action on the floor and then calling it out to the inputters.” Errors, deliberate or otherwise, weren’t easily corrected, given the NBA’s growing desire for “immediacy over accuracy” in the Internet age.

His first season in Vancouver, Alex was admittedly “very liberal,” especially with his assists. At home, the Grizzlies — who, in those early days, essentially served as the league’s discard pile — assisted on 67 percent of their field goals where league average for home teams was 63 percent (these numbers were crunched by a user on the APBRmetrics forum); on the road, that figure was just over 56 percent (league average for away teams was 59 percent). “It wasn’t as though we had a player like Chris Paul or Mark Jackson or Magic Johnson, and we wanted to help that one player,” he says. “It was a function of the impression I’d gotten from talking to other scorekeepers that assists were like candy and we handed them out.” He grew stingier over time; by his third and final season with the Grizzlies, the team’s share of assisted field goals was edging toward league average.

Certain players, Alex says, “got a lot of help.” Look, for instance, at Shareef Abdur-Rahim’s splits. Abdur-Rahim was the Grizzlies’ first-round pick in 1996, No. 3 overall, and a great deal of the franchise’s future was resting on his liquid, almost preternaturally cool game. To go by the box score his first two years, he was a different player in his own stadium. Here he is in 1996-97:

Note that he recorded 50 steals in Vancouver and 29 elsewhere, and that he blocked more than three times as many shots at home as he did on the road. Today, as he calls up the numbers on his computer, Alex laughs. He sounds almost embarrassed. “The blocks,” he says, “are atrocious.”

Here’s Abdur-Rahim in his second year:

The steals leveled off, but he still got more blocks at home (53 to 23) and now more assists as well (133 to 80).

“He was probably the only guy who got a massive benefit,” Alex says, though he also directs me to the home-road rebounding splits for Bryant Reeves, the massive 7-footer who couldn’t be bothered to grab anything that wasn’t under a sneeze guard. “The way to get a guy extra rebounds,” Alex says, “is if a shot goes up and someone tips it and someone else recovers it, you can give it to either one. Rodman would get those all the time. Most callers will give it to the guy who actually gets possession. But that doesn’t mean a caller can’t give it to someone in a scrum who tipped it. What if Byron Scott retrieves it? Byron Scott doesn’t need the rebound.”

The guy who grew up making games out of Dungeons and Dragons dice and baseball cards was still freely mixing fantasy and reality. It was his job now.

* * *

On Dec. 13, 1995, the Grizzlies hosted the Houston Rockets, who were coming off their second straight NBA championship and still had Hakeem Olajuwon doing his Arthur Murray routine in the post. The Rockets won by 11. Have a look at the box score. “There will be something that jumps out at you fairly quickly,” Alex says.

It’s Olajuwon’s line, a tidy 15-14-10:

“It’s the one incident that stands out in my mind,” Alex says. “That was the only time I was ordered to do something.”

As Alex remembers it now, Olajuwon had a double-double with nine blocks at some point during the fourth quarter. “Someone in management came to me and said, basically, Thou shalt give Hakeem Olajuwon a triple-double. Come hell or high water, he’s getting a triple-double. I’m like, uh, OK.” The Grizzlies had small monitors on which they kept a running box score. Anyone could see if someone was closing in on a milestone. “If a guy is in vicinity of a record, people are tracking those things. I know those things,” Alex says. “If a guy has an eight-game streak of getting 10 rebounds, I’ll know that. Am I gonna help that? Probably.” The Rockets game, though, “was the one time someone said, ‘You’ll do this.’ And I did.” (For the record, Alex is reasonably certain that the 10th block was legitimate. “If he got a bullshit block,” he says, “it probably happened before the 10th one.”)

He won’t say who issued the commandment, other than that it was someone in basketball operations who helped compile statistical packets for the media. “It was a mid-level guy, not a GM or an assistant GM,” he says. Alex believes the suit was acting on his own initiative, though the habit of fudging statistics upward was practically an organizational, if not leaguewide, imperative. “When you get a triple-double, that dramatically increases the potential of our game being shown on ESPN. ‘Here are some highlights of Olajuwon, and oh, by the way, they happen to be in Vancouver.’ A team like ours was getting zero national media coverage. There’s some value in that, even if someone is lighting us up, for marketing and longterm growth.”

Alex was new to the game, however, and the request pissed him off. “I was immature,” he says, “I was 20-21 years old, and some dude was telling me I needed to do something.”

Which is perhaps why, a little more than a year later, with Nick Van Exel and the Lakers in town, Alex decided to act out. “I was sort of disgruntled,” he says. “I loved the game. I don’t want the numbers to be meaningless, and I felt they were becoming meaningless because of how stats were kept. So I decided, I’m gonna do this totally immature thing and see what happens. It was childish. The Lakers are in town. We’re gonna lose. Fuck it. He’s getting a shitload of assists.” If you were to watch the game today, you’d see some “comically bad assists.” Alex’s fingerprints are all over the box score. He gave Van Exel everything. “Van Exel would pass from the top of the three-point line to someone on the wing who’d hold the ball for five seconds, dribble, then make a move to the basket. Assist, Van Exel.”

No one noticed. From his chair, Alex could hear the legendary broadcaster Chick Hearn calling the game. Van Exel’s having a great game! He’s moving the ball exceptionally well! And in the next day’s writeups, Van Exel was of course the hero. Alex thought, What the fuck?

“This is a bad analogy, but it’s like a husband cheating on a wife in such a way as to guarantee he’s going to be caught,” Alex says. “There’s nothing to justify it. It was stupid. And there were no consequences.” He figured he’d at least get scolded. He wasn’t. In fact, a management guy congratulated him. The game was sure to get on SportsCenter now.

* * *

Everyone cooked the books, and the tendency, by and large, was to overcount — with a few notable exceptions. “Why would you underrerport? The only reason is to make your players look bad,” Alex says. “Normally, you wouldn’t want to do that. If the players look good, they’re more likely to be All-Stars and generate trade value. You don’t want to undervalue your own assets. But if you’re a stupid franchise, and you don’t intend to make deals, and you want to depress your own players’ signability — well, which franchise is stupid enough to do that?”

In the latter half of the 1990s, the Clippers held down their own players’ assists with an almost suspicious regularity. Between 1987 and 2009, home teams assisted on 61.8 percent of their field goals; away teams, 58.3 percent — a gap of 3.5 percentage points in favor of the home squads. Year after year, the Clippers reversed the trend. In 1996, the Clips’ scorekeepers credited the team with assists on 47 percent of its field goals (with only Pooh Richardson averaging more than five assists per game); in other arenas, the same Clippers team assisted on 60 percent of its field goals, a difference of 13 percentage points. No team since 1987 has underreported its own assists by a larger margin. Second-largest: The Clippers in 1999, with a difference of 12.2 percentage points. Third-largest: The Clippers in 1998, at 12.1 points. Fifth-largest: The Clippers in 1997, at 9.1 points.

“The numbers are huge,” Alex says. “It’s pretty amazing. This is total conjecture. But do I think someone from management went to them and said, ‘You need to underrerport stats’? There’s no way — even with an organization as dysfunctional as the Clippers. That would expose them to civil liability, if they’re intentionally diminishing the market for a player — that’s almost criminal. But if someone goes to a statistician and says, ‘We’re being way too liberal on steals, blocks and assists,’ that’s probably legitimate. You can define that as, ‘We want the numbers to be correct.’ But as a practical consequence, your own players look worse on paper.”

The question, ultimately, is whether this really matters to anyone beyond the people who had the misfortune of playing for the Clippers in the 1990s and those handful of figure filberts who’ve dedicated themselves to building a science on the whims of a few people sitting courtside. It certainly doesn’t matter to the NBA.

“Teams have a legitimate, vested interest in stats being inflated, just like the league does,” Alex says. “Ten assists is way more interesting than eight assists. As humans, those are more appealing and interesting numbers. The NBA benefits and every team benefits from bigger, flashier numbers.”

In the end, the league has little incentive to address the issue, even now, in this tight-assed, post-Donaghy era, when the NBA wants desperately to convince you there are no magnets in the pinball machine. And so the scorekeepers will continue doing the professional equivalent of rolling their Dungeons and Dragons dice, perhaps saying, “Fuck it” now and again and giving a guy a shitload of assists, mostly for the hell of it, and Chris Andersen will go on looking like Larry Nance every Nuggets homestand. The NBA: Where Fudging Happens. “It is,” as Alex says, “an entertainment thing.”

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Justin Upton distinguishes himself from other successful, young Major League Baseball players through his shear amount of raw power. “Isolated Power,” or ISO, is a widely-used statistic which is designed to measure a player’s raw power. By looking at Upton’s ISO, we not only have evidence of his raw power, but we can also see why he is on his way to becoming one of the best players in Major League Baseball history. For those of you who aren’t familiar with ISO, here is a quick description of the statistic according to Associated Content:

“Isolated Power, or ISO, is a statistic that was created invented by the famous general manager Branch Rickey and Al Roth in the 1950’s (this pair also invented On Base Percentage). Isolated Power attempts to separate and measure a player’s ability to hit for power as exhibited in extra base hits (doubles, triples, and home runs). Where batting average counts all hits equally, and slugging percentage gives credit for total bases, but also counts singles, ISO measures just the player’s extra-base abilities. Isolated power is basically a ratio of Extra Base Hits per at bat.”

So far this season, Upton’s ISO is .253. It is astonishing to see a 21-year-old display that type of power, considering that his body is still developing, and he is far from what Bill James considers to be a player’s prime (between the ages of 26 and 30). To put his ISO into perspective, let’s take a look at the other players that have posted an ISO of .250 or higher before the age of 22. Baseball reference reports these numbers:

That is quite a notable list of players.  To be counted in that company indicates that he may very well go on to become one of the top players in MLB history.  It’s also important to note that Upton is currently posting a .394 On Base Percentage, a number which would be remarkable for any player, but much more so when posted by a 21-year-old. According to Fangraphs, 90% of players that play at the level Upton has played at this early in his career end up as Hall of Fame players. Upton certainly appears to have a bright future. If he continues on this road, he should have no problem getting a phenomenal deal when he’s eligible for free agency as a 26-year-old in the 2013 season.

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Just as was true for baseball until a short time ago, it has always been difficult to accurately measure a basketball player’s true performance on the court.  In baseball, a man named Bill James revolutionized the way fans looked at a player’s true effectiveness through sabermetrics.  And now, a man named John Hollinger has done the same thing for basketball, forever changing how fans will view the game’s traditional statistics.  Combining these traditional statistics, which you see in every box score, with underlying statistics that aren’t as highly publicized, Hollinger discovered his groundbreaking statistic, which he dubbed “PER” -  Player Efficiency Rating. This is how Hollinger described his new system:

“PER strives to measure a player’s per-minute performance, while adjusting for pace.  A league-average PER is always 15.00, which permits comparisons of player performance across seasons.  PER takes into account positive accomplishments, such as field goals, free throws, 3-pointers, assists, rebounds, blocks and steals, and negative ones, such as missed shots, turnovers and personal fouls. The formula adds positive stats and subtracts negative ones through a statistical point value system. The rating for each player is then adjusted to a per-minute basis so that, for example, substitutes can be compared with starters in playing time debates. It is also adjusted for the team’s pace. In the end, one number sums up the players’ statistical accomplishments for that season.”

With that in mind, let’s take a look at Kobe’s PER.  This season, he posted a PER of 24.46, ranking him 6th in the NBA.  Lebron James posted the highest PER with a 31.76, followed by Dwyane Wade at 30.46, and Chris Paul rounding out the top three at 30.04. I know what you’re thinking: Kobe is older now and Phil Jackson rested him a bit more than in previous seasons.  So maybe we should look at the highest PER Kobe has posted in a single season, right?  Kobe’s highest PER in a single season was 28.11 in the 2005-2006 season.  At this point, it’s not a stretch to say that Dwyane Wade, Lebron James, and Chris Paul all three had better seasons this year (according to statistics) than Kobe Bryant is likely to ever have in his career… including that season with the 81 point game.  In fact, Lebron has already surpassed Kobe’s career high PER of 28.11 in three of his five seasons, and Chris Paul has posted the highest PER ever for a point guard in his first four years – a ranking that pushes him past even the beloved Magic Johnson.

One argument in Kobe’s favor is that he does have three championships, and is about to collect a fourth.  While this may ruffle the feathers of many Laker/Kobe fans, the most logical conclusion is that Kobe Bryant has simply gotten lucky.  In only three out of his thirteen years in the NBA has Kobe Bryant not had a teammate with an elite PER.  One of his most famous teammates, Shaquille O’Neal, has the 2nd highest career PER in NBA history, only behind Michael Jordan.  And his new teammate, Pau Gasol, is ranked 28th overall in NBA history with a career PER of 21.77, just behind all-time greats Dr. J and Moses Malone.  In those three seasons in which he didn’t have a teammate with an elite PER, Kobe posted a record of 121-125, a win percentage of .491. It seems that, if he doesn’t have another player with a high PER on his team, Kobe just doesn’t have what it takes to get to a championship.

Kobe Bryant’s ability to do the unimaginable leaves us star-struck.  Eighty-one points in a single game, 62 points against the Dallas Mavericks through 3 quarters,  61 points at Madison Square Garden breaking Michael Jordan’s previous record, 35.4 points per game scoring average in the 2005-2006 season… the list goes on and on.  When Kobe delivers a fadeaway jumper over three defenders, it’s all you can do to keep from drooling on the person’s head in front of you while your mouth hangs open in sheer awe.  But it’s exactly these types of feats which cloud our judgment when trying to view Kobe objectively as a player throughout the course of his career. And it’s these emotions that lead many to declare that Kobe’s the best. However, here is a list, just of current NBA players, who have a higher career PER than Kobe:

• Shaquille O’Neal
• Lebron James
• Dwyane Wade
• Chris Paul
• Tim Duncan
• Dirk Nowitzki
• Kevin Garnett

While Kobe Bryant is undoubtedly one of the greatest players who will ever play the game of basketball, raw numbers will never lie, and they indicate that he may not be as PERfect as everyone thinks.

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Let’s take a look at some of the reasons that Big Papi is struggling.  Currently as of June 5th, he is batting .188 with 1 HR, an OBP of .281 and is slugging .288.  Those numbers are downright terrible, especially considering he had been batting between Dustin Pedroia and Jason Bay who are both having great seasons.

Although some have claimed that he “looks” to have lost bat speed, no one has definitive numbers to prove this point.   Some statistics do tell his story though.  According to Fangraphs.com, he is swinging at an uncharacteristic 25% of pitches outside of the strike zone compared to his career average of 18.4%.  Not to mention, when he is swinging at pitches in the zone he is making contact 82% of the time compared to his career rate of 86%.  His plate discipline is obviously one reason why he is struggling with a strike out rate of 27%, 6% higher than his career average.  So essentially, he is swinging at bad pitches and making less contact on pitches that are strikes.

One thing that is a bit odd is that he is hitting more line drives than he ever has.  His line drive rate is at 23.8% which is higher than his career average by nearly 4 points.  Not to mention he is hitting a fly ball percentage of 50% which is higher than his career average of 45%.  So it’s not like he is hitting weak ground balls, he is hitting line drives and more fly balls which should mean given Big Papi’s power, more home runs.  Yet his home run per fly ball rate is at 1.4% which is astoundingly low compared to his career 18.5%.  Which makes us believe his natural power may be a thing of the past.

It’s easy to give up on Big Papi right now given his current stat line, but we will have to wait and see.  To truly judge if he’s completely lost it and become Big Mami we have to wait and see if he returns to his career plate discipline percentages.  If he becomes more selective, and retains his line drive rate, there is no reason why he shouldn’t return to the David Ortiz of old.  Bad luck is also one reason he is struggling.  He is currently posting a batting average of balls in play at a low .254 average compared to his career average of .307.  So he is getting rather unlucky when he gets the ball in play.  Looking at all the numbers, there is a high probability that he may return to form as Papi, but the “Big” may be a thing of the past.

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While the stars take up all the spotlight, one overlooked factor will likely be the very thing that decides the NBA Championship. Phil Jackson vs game 1.

Jackson has had tremendous success in the NBA Playoffs. He is currently tied with the legendary Red Auerbach for the most championships. What is the secret to Phil Jackson’s playoff success?

Phil Jackson holds a 43-0 record when winning game 1 of a playoff series. Through all the years he’s coached the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers, he has never lost a series in which he has won the first game. So what does that tell us?  Phil Jackson winning game 1 won’t neccessarily guarantee a championship for the Lakers, but his 43-0 record clearly shifts the probability in favor of the Lakers.

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