{"id":179,"date":"2014-04-21T13:21:52","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T19:21:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67.227.157.91\/~kenpom\/wp_blog\/beejay-anya-plays-110-pounds-less-than-hes-listed\/"},"modified":"2014-04-21T13:21:52","modified_gmt":"2014-04-21T19:21:52","slug":"beejay-anya-plays-110-pounds-less-than-hes-listed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/beejay-anya-plays-110-pounds-less-than-hes-listed\/","title":{"rendered":"BeeJay Anya plays 110 pounds less than he’s listed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whose listed weight is the most misleading? You didn\u2019t know you wanted to know that and I didn\u2019t either, until I started trying to predict a player\u2019s weight based on other information. And the only reason I did that was because sometimes a player\u2019s weight is not revealed. Mostly in cases of players on Utah Valley\u2019s roster as the Wolverines are the lone team in college hoops that treats its players\u2019 weights<\/a> like Bill Belichick treats his players\u2019 injury information.<\/p>\n

You might think it is really dumb to be bothered by such minutiae, and that\u2019s fine, but you are not the intended audience of this site. Go to some other place and read \u201cnormal\u201d things about \u201cpeople\u201d and stuff. In the real world, when one entity out of 351 refuses to do something the other 350 are doing, it can create a headache. I mean, that \u201ceffective weight\u201d stat people have been demanding is not possible because of the Wolverines.<\/p>\n

But there is no need to let Utah Valley hold us back from having a complete data set of players\u2019 weights. One can look at available players\u2019 weights and all of their accumulated statistics and figure out what matters when predicting what a player\u2019s listed weight will be.  And this produces a pretty decent estimate. By pretty decent, I mean a standard error of 13.5 pounds for the 2014 season by using data from the 2007 through 2013 seasons to build the model.<\/p>\n

It turns out some non-statistical data is useful in making predictions. Naturally, height is the most important thing and fortunately, all teams are willing to publish this information. But other stuff helps, too. A player\u2019s age would figure to be predictive, but I don\u2019t have that. However, eligibility class is a decent proxy and useful. Given players of the same height, the older player will tend to weigh more. Each year is worth about two pounds on average.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s more! Take two players of the same height, but one is listed by his team as a center and the other is listed as a forward\/center. The latter will weigh about five pounds less than the former. You can roughly apply that five pound difference as you ascend to pure forwards, guard\/forwards, and pure guards. Also, players on better teams tend to weigh more, as do players in better conferences. These factors are included in the estimates. <\/p>\n

One last non-statistical piece of information that\u2019s important is uniform number. It\u2019s understood that taller players tend to choose larger numbers, but all things being equal, heavier players wear bigger numbers as well. The player wearing 55 tends to be five pounds heavier than his statistical twin wearing zero. <\/p>\n

I suspect one could find value in a player\u2019s hometown as well. That would take quite a bit of effort, and I think I have a decent enough model already. I mean, I\u2019m just trying to figure out whose weight is the most misleading. The fact that I\u2019m writing 1,000+ words on this is silly enough.<\/p>\n

There are true statistical indicators that help, too and there aren\u2019t many surprises in this area. Heavier players of the same height get more rebounds, use more possessions, commit more fouls, and take fewer threes. Lighter players tend to be better shooters from the free-throw and three-point lines, get more steals and blocks, and dish out more assists.<\/p>\n

Enough with the blah, blah, blah. Let’s look at some output. Take a look at who the model expects were the ten heaviest players from the past season.<\/p>\n

                        Act  Pred\nPlayer             Ht    Wt    Wt\nMamadou N\u2019Diaye   7-6   290   307\nSim Bhullar       7-5   360   295\nOmar Oraby        7-2   270   269\nBoris Bojanovsky  7-3   235   267\nChad Posthumus    6-11  265   263\nDavid Wishon      7-2   265   262\nMichael Ojo       7-1   292   262\nJordan Bachynski  7-2   248   261\nPrzemek Karnowski 7-1   305   261\nIan Markolf       7-1   260   261\n\n<\/pre>\n
One thing that jumps out is that only two players exceed a predicted weight of 269. Maybe everyone should stop listing weights, because the guessing game is always going to be friendly to the larger gentlemen in the game. Actually, this isn\u2019t a horrible aspect of the model. Only about one percent of the D-I population has a listed weight greater than 269 (38 of 3,497 players that participated in at least 10% of their team\u2019s minutes). So it’s going to be impossible to guess at which players under seven feet would be in that exclusive group solely using statistics.<\/p>\n
The fact is, heavy people rarely to play basketball at a high level. Those that succeed are either very tall, or just incredibly special. We\u2019ll get to those cases in a second. It also doesn’t help this effort that programs may be less-than-truthful about a player’s weight when it exceeds 300. <\/p>\n
Here are the ten statistically-lightest players in the country. <\/p>\n
                        Act  Pred\nPlayer             Ht    Wt    Wt\nJordan Wilson     5-7   155   155\nMarcel Smith      5-6   150   156\nKeon Johnson      5-7   160   157\nKevin Alter       5-6   147   158\nJustin Robinson   5-8   165   159\nChristavious Gill 5-8   165   160\nBlake Provost     5-10  170   160\nRaymond Taylor    5-6   145   160\nParker Wentz      5-9   160   161\nZavier Turner     5-9   170   161\n\n<\/pre>\n
There are a lot of names that play for low to mid-major programs on this list simply because you don\u2019t see too many 5-6 to 5-9 guys playing at high-majors. The model does a better job guessing the weights of the lighter people because the weight of college basketball players is not normally distributed. The difference between the heaviest and seventh-heaviest player is 65 pounds, while there are 27 guys that are within 15 pounds of the lightest player (Richmond\u2019s Kendall Anthony, at 140 pounds).<\/p>\n
The more fun lists are the ones where the model missed. Here are the ten guys the model most overestimated.<\/p>\n
                        Act  Pred\nPlayer             Ht    Wt    Wt\nBen Moore         6-8   185   227\nRaphiael Putney   6-9   185   225\nJosh Mendenhall   6-8   180   218\nTate Stensgaard   6-8   190   227\nJosh Sharp        6-7   185   222\nTy\u2019Quan Biting    6-8   185   222\nMarcus Holt       6-10  200   236\nJohn Bohannon     6-11  210   246\nOnochie Ochie     6-6   180   216\nCorey Allen       6-1   147   183    \n\n<\/pre>\n
This group is a mix of guys who were just incredibly light for their listed height – Allen, Mendenhall, and Putney were the lightest players in the country listed at 6-1, 6-8, and 6-9, respectively – and guys that \u201cplayed heavy\u201d. That description applies to guys that rebound well, shoot mostly twos, commit a bunch of fouls, and don\u2019t get as many blocks or steals as you\u2019d think. <\/p>\n
Also, I\u2019m guessing some of these guys truly do weigh more. John Bohannon, for one, was listed at 210 pounds for each of his four seasons at UTEP, despite the fact he was given an extra inch this season. <\/p>\n
What about the guys \u201cplaying light\u201d?<\/p>\n
                        Act  Pred\nPlayer             Ht    Wt    Wt\nBeeJay Anya       6-9   325   215\nJoshua Smith      6-10  350   246\nJ.J. Davenport    6-6   325   245\nSim Bhullar       7-5   360   295\nJustin McBride    6-10  310   249\nKennedy Meeks     6-9   290   233\nDavante Gardner   6-8   290   234\nAko Kaluna        6-7   276   223\nAntonio Campbell  6-8   279   227\nSteve Forbes      6-9   295   243\n\n<\/pre>\n
BeeJay Anya never shoots (he took 8.5% of N.C. State’s shots) and is a woeful rebounder for his size (7.1 OR%\/13.5 DR%), but the man can reject some shots. He swatted roughly one-in-eight opponents\u2019 two-point attempts. It\u2019s a profile that is typical of the skinny shot-blocking specialist. The kind of guy that a coach wishes would add 25 pounds in the offseason.<\/p>\n
If you\u2019re listed at 300+ pounds, you\u2019ll be a candidate for this list simply because the model thinks someone of that weight would be pretty pathetic playing basketball. Five of the six 300-pounders in the country represent the top five on the list. (Prezemek Karnowski ranks 18th.) But Anya\u2019s the unique case in this group because he projects as lighter than the average<\/em> 6-9 player while being listed as the heaviest 6-9 player in the land. Come on, Mark Gottfried, let\u2019s give him the \u201c290\u201d designation in next year\u2019s program. (And maybe list him as F-C instead of a pure forward?) He\u2019s earned it.<\/p>\n
Finally, here are some bonus scatterplots. It\u2019s not too difficult to spot Anya in the second one.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Whose listed weight is the most misleading? You didn\u2019t know you wanted to know that and I didn\u2019t either, until I started trying to predict a player\u2019s weight based on other information. And the only reason I did that was because sometimes a player\u2019s weight is not revealed. Mostly in cases of players on Utah […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kenpom.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}