All points are not created equal
by Ken Pomeroy on Monday, May 24, 2010
Somewhere in the past week, this innocent blog post went viral. At least viral in the sphere of basketball blogs that still publish regularly in the offseason. The upshot is that coaches who bench players with foul trouble are only hurting themselves. It’s more geared towards the NBA, but the same principles discussed in the piece apply to any level of the game. My initial reaction was a desire to share a beer with Joe Morgan and decry the use of stats in sports analysis.
But as the post picked up link after link after link, there was little dissent from the conclusion that a coach should be maximizing a foul-prone player’s minutes. The result of that thinking would be that a coach simply uses his player independently of his foul count.
Consider me unconvinced. If a coach is trying to win, he should not…