2010-2011 Phoenix Suns as Seen Through the Lens of 82games.com "Simple Ratings"

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
~Benjamin Disraeli

It's always possible for us to cherry pick data that support our preconceived notions. It happens in the corporate world, certainly happens in politics, and happens among sports fans too. After all, who wants to be cold and rational about the Suns? The emotional attachment is what makes it fun to be a fan. This same emotional attachment can cloud our judgment of players.

Still, stats can show us bottom line results if they are used correctly. 82games.com and Basketball Reference are two excellent resources for advanced statistical analysis, since we know that raw scoring numbers don't tell much. For example, Aaron Brooks could score 20PPG if he was given 40 minutes per game, and told "go for it!". Of course, his team would be terrible and those scoring numbers would be empty. PER and +/- have their flaws, too, but I've found a stat that I've begun to go to often: 82games.com "simple rating", a hybrid of the two. In their words:

The main components of the 'Simple Ratings' are a production measure (a variant of John Hollinger's PER rating) for a player's own stats versus the counterpart player on the other team while he is on the court, as well as a simple on court/off court plus minus.

The +/- used isn't just a player's +/- overall, meaning it doesn't punish good players on bad teams or reward bad players on good ones by saying "team X had this success with player Y on the floor." Instead, +/- is measured when a player is on the floor versus when he isn't. For example, the T-Wolves are awful overall, but they are much more awful when Kevin Love isn't on the floor, bolstering Love's simple rating. Jump it to see how our Suns stack up by this measure.

Steve Nash is the most effective, valuable and irreplaceable member of the current Phoenix Suns, by far. Captain Obvious reporting for duty. His 11.0 rating also places him 7th overall in the NBA. The league top 10:

1. LeBron James
2. Dwight Howard
3. Dwyane Wade
4. Kevin Garnett
5. Paul Pierce
6. Manu Ginobili
7. Steve Nash
8. Dirk Nowitzki
9. Chris Paul
10. Kobe Bryant

Full list can be found here. Once you stop smiling in satisfaction that Nash is rated above Kobe (this took me awhile), take a closer look at the list. You can argue with placement of some players, but none of them seem completely insane, right? It passes the initial smell test? Other things I choose to note: by this measure, Nash is indeed the best point guard in basketball and Derrick Rose, favorite to win league MVP, is the 17th player overall. Many will see this as a failure in the smell test for this stat, but I prefer to see it that this stat is a tool to help understand and not a be-all, end-all ranking.

How do the rest of the Suns stack up? Mostly as you would imagine. The Suns have one elite player in Nash, and then two solidly above average but not dominant players in Marcin Gortat and Grant Hill. The other plus players for the Suns this season? The departed Jason Richardson and......yes, that's right, the man who is kindling in the eyes of a great amount of BSOTS-ers, Vince Carter.

Undoubtedly, this will cause many of you to issue a "fail" on the smell test. And my point here isn't to champion Vince Carter's meager accomplishments with the Suns. Yet it might also indicate that he hasn't quite been the complete disaster that we think. Data show that Carter is a slight minus in production compared to his opposing SGs, and a slight plus in his time on the floor vs. his time off the floor.

The ranking of Suns players this season, as of April 6:

1. Steve Nash
2. Marcin Gortat
3. Grant Hill
4. Jason Richardson
5. Vince Carter
6. Jared Dudley
7. Channing Frye and Hakim Warrick (tie)
8. Mickael Pietrus
9. Aaron Brooks
10. Josh Childress
11. Earl Clark
12. Robin Lopez
13. Hedo Turkoglu
14. Zabian Dowdell
15. Goran Dragic
16. Garret Siler
17. Earl Barron
18. Gani Lawal (very limited sample size, obviously)

Complete list with supporting data can be found here. (If anyone can tell me how to paste the chart into this post, let me know.)

My observations:

• Channing Frye and Hakim Warrick aren't equal players, so I take issue there.
• Robin Lopez has been a mess by any measure. 
• Aaron Brooks has indeed been an upgrade from Goran Dragic, who struggled mightily in his time with Phoenix this year.
• Hedo wasn't really that bad, was he? 
• Earl Barron was outstandingly craptacular. The Suns front office should be embarrassed that they did such a poor job securing a big man this past offseason that Barron was ever an option.
• I've expressed my Polish Hammer love repeatedly, and he's been rock solid by any measure, smell test or eyeball test. Not a star, but he continues to grow and is already one of our team's best players.

What say you about these ratings? Do they seem fairly close to what you've seen out of our players? And, what do you think of the methodology used to determine them? There will never be a simple number that will tell us how good a player is, but this one is closer to the truth than others I've seen.