A Rebuttal of FiveThirtyEight’s Takedown of Andrew Wiggins
Dec 26, 2014; Denver, CO, USA; Minnesota Timberwolves forward
Andrew Wiggins(22) during the second half against the Denver Nuggets at Pepsi Center. The Nuggets won 106-102. Mandatory Credit: Chris Humphreys-USA TODAY Sports
FiveThirtyEight is a statistically based website, launched by ESPN and Nate Silver awhile back. On Christmas Eve, they posted an article by Neil Paine with the click-bait title, “Forget The Next LeBron, Andrew Wiggins May Not Be The Next James Posey”.
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Now, before I get into the specifics of the article, a little about my feelings on that site in general. I actually feel like they do post a lot of interesting stuff, and certainly seem to have a smart staff of writers. My issue is that they have a tendency to isolate one particular statistic and make a grand, declarative statement based off of it. I remember when I was in college, I had an assignment in Statistics class to pick a topic and try to determine what causes success or failure. I picked NBA basketball, and why do teams win or lose. I had 15 or 20 factors and thought I had a good model. My professor told me that my paper was well-written (believe it or not), but it was virtually impossible to take into account all of the factors that determine success in an NBA game.
That brings us back to the article from the 24th. In it, Paine builds his article around Statistical Plus/Minus, while only briefly touching on a few other aggregated statistics. At the time the article was posted, no one in the NBA had a lower SPM than Wiggins amongst players playing a comparable number of minutes. The crux of his argument is that even if Wiggins regresses to the mean, there has never been a star player whose SPM was worse as a rookie.
Not surprisingly, I have many issues with this. First of all, it is ridiculous to project a 19 year-old’s entire career based off of one statistic in the first two months of his career. Furthermore, the only credit he gives Wiggins is that he will probably regress to the mean. There is no mention of the fact that he has been logging major minutes, guarding some of the best players on the planet for a terrible team who lost its most important player after five games. There is no mention of the fact that Wiggins, while an incredible athlete, simply has not had the time to build an NBA-ready body yet. There is no mention of the fact that Wiggins has a huge amount of weight on his shoulders as a 19 year old, whereas many guys, such as Kobe Bryant, were able to watch a lot from the bench and ease into their roles.
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I still believe in Wiggins’ superstar potential. No doubt, there is a very good chance that he never reaches the stratospheric heights of LeBron James, Kevin Durant or Kobe Bryant. Fact is, they will all go down as legends because there are so few of them. The reason I am happy is the Wolves have a player being mentioned as a possible heir to the throne. It is something to hope for and hold on to.
The last thing I would like to point out is the absurdity of the title. Using the flimsy logic that Wiggins to regress to the mean but no more, Paine projects Wiggins to have a career best SPM of 6 at some point in his career. James Posey‘s career high? You guessed it, 6. What Paine neglects to mention is that Wiggins’ per game measureable, traditional statistics are already meeting or exceeding Posey’s best numbers from any season in his 12 year career. So while it makes for a catchy and clickable title, I believe Paine is way off base.