Emergence: The No-Stats All-Star

Posted by Russ Abbott on Feb 15, 2009; 5:32pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Emergence-The-No-Stats-All-Star-tp2330583.html

After sending the previous message I started reading this (long) article: The No-Stats All-Star - NYTimes.com. Here's a key paragraph.

The five players on any basketball team are far more than the sum of their parts; the Rockets devote a lot of energy to untangling subtle interactions among the team's elements. To get at this they need something that basketball hasn't historically supplied: meaningful statistics. For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game. ("Someone created the box score," Morey says, "and he should be shot.") How many points a player scores, for example, is no true indication of how much he has helped his team. Another example: if you want to know a player's value as a ­rebounder, you need to know not whether he got a rebound but the likelihood of the team getting the rebound when a missed shot enters that player's zone.

That's a nice illustration of emergence. It may be subtle, but it's not magical or mysterious. To create the emergent level of abstraction that the paragraph refers to, the components have to work together in the right way.

-- Russ

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