received some good e-mails in response to the stats page. Most of the votes for an additional statistic were in favor of something I’ll call "combined efficiency." It’s simple:

Combined Efficiency = Offensive Efficiency – Defensive Efficiency

It’s just the amount of points a team would gain or lose in 100 possessions with an average opponent. Honestly, I am not all that comfortable with this stat. The idea of calculating OE and DE was to assess the effectiveness of parts of the team. With CE, you have one number that applies to an entire team. It’s really just a glorified average margin of victory. A couple of printable e-mails from the past week…

Ken,

Great work. I’m still reading through your explanation, but that’s my slow comprehension, not necessarily your explanation.

I have a couple of suggestions that could be considered for "bonus stat". One could be Offensive Efficiency Minus Defensive Efficiency. I think this sort of Efficiency differential could be useful in comparing teams that play each other. Also, weighting games differently that are home/away. I would argue that a team with a true home-court advantage have a better shot at controlling the tempo of the game than a visiting team, ergo producing a more efficient offense/defense. I’m new to this stuff, so ignore me if this isn’t statistically significant.

Thanks for the work,

Tim

There were some items I left unmentioned in my original post. The main thing being, I do apply home court advantage to the efficiency numbers. It’s applied on a per possession basis, so it ends up being a few hundredths of a point for each possession.

As far as applying that concept to the tempo, it’s hard for me to see a connection. I can understand how it would be advantageous for a road team, typically being the underdog, to attempt to slow down the game. But even if coaches were that conscious of tempo, once the team fell behind they would instinctively play faster. Overall, the effect would be small.

Ken,

I can’t get enough of your site. Thanks for everything you do. So, I’m unemployed and can’t see any games on TV because I’m in Thailand. So I’m getting my whole hoops fix on the web.

That’s my excuse for having done the following table by hand. It shows the differential between teams’ adjusted offensive and defensive efficiencies from your site. I like this because it takes the efficiency data and synthesizes it.

Pretty good list, too. I hope it’s legible on your end.

Best wishes,

Joshua

The moral of the story is, if you claim to be from some far-flung country, you get your e-mail printed. Other tips are: 1) include an appropriate greeting and closing, and 2) put something meaningful in the subject because I have a vicious spam filter in place.

And with that I am out of here. Time for some mind-clearing rounds of golf where the temperature can occasionally reach 70 this time of year. Until Wednesday, updates on the ratings pages may be sporadic, and posting here will be non-existent.