Have you ever heard of PER?

Basketball has been well behind other sports in the field of stats analysis despite the facts that the game has a long history of score keeping. It's very easy to score points, rebounds and so on, what is very tough, almost impossible I should say, is try to judge players' performance indipendently by their teams.
In other word, the goal is trying to isolate a player's performance from its context and get an advantage from possible market inefficiencies as they say, or in other words things nobody else actually know but you. That's Moneyball ! which by the way is a wonderful book by Michael Lewis.
From Bill James to Billy Beane this has become (more or less) a "common" practice in baseball with quite a few ball clubs actually getting full advantage of it while it's quite new in the NBA. The first club really into it are the Houston Rockets, who named Daryl Morey as their GM. Morey was/is a computer science/stats expert and an MIT alumni...not your everyday former player getting to the upper floor.


Speaking of analytical approach to the game, ESPN insider and basketball analyst John Hollinger has come up, a few years ago, with this PER index. It was discussed in the Pro Basketball Forecast, an excellent publication from a few years ago. I think the last available was about the 2005/06 season.
The Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is a rating of a player's per-minute productivity and measure with plenty of statistical adjustments. Now the always analytical Hollinger has come up with predictions about the upcoming season.

Yao Ming, Wade and LeBron are 1-2-3 in the rankings while the first Sun is Amaré Stoudemire at no. 12. Steve Nash will be the 3rd best PER point guard in the game and 19th overall.
Of course we all know he's by far the best in the League and makes everyone around him so much better...that's what Steve's stats will never get.
I guess it's no surprise that almost every basketball analyst on the net is predicting the Rockets to win the West.

By the way, Suns beat Kings, 110-99 in the first game of the preseason. A convincing meaningless win.

Go Suns !