A Stat for Ball Hogs

There’s a metric for everything nowadays. From Assist Percentage to True Shooting Percentage, anything that can be done on a basketball court is being measured in some way. Add to that list…BALL HOGGINESS.

What is Ball Hogginess? If you’re a basketball fiend, you already know the answer to that one. Ball Hogs are players that take more shots than passes.  Usually that’s not a bad thing when you are a sick scorer like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, but you do have to keep your teammates involved if you want them to play defense.

Here is my metric (its still raw):

(FGA+FTA)/(ASSISTS+Bad Passes)
———————————————-
48 minutes

Let me break each part down:

The top part is simple. FGA + FTA are all indicators of the amount of shots one is taking.  Divided by that are assists and bad passes. Assists make you less of a ball hog. Bad passes are “attempts” at a good pass, so we give the player a benefit of the doubt and say he was looking to pass, so he’s not that much of a ball hog.

It’s all the divided by 48 (minutes) to prorate the metric to a level playing field, so one player who plays more minutes can be compared to a 6th man of some sorts. This stat is meant to look at the ratio of players taking shots over making a pass. Its not as truly accurate as looking at game tape of one particular player, but serves as a great estimation. Players who are inefficient at scoring (low TS%) and have a high Ball Hog rating are horrible players that need a coach to tell them they suck.

Remember, this is a rough stat. Therein lies problems (I’m sure of in) but I haven’t done enough tests with it to determine what those problems are. One glaring problem is that with a small sample size, the stat is not that accurate.

Here’s some selected players Ball Hog metric for reference for the 2010-2011 season. Remember, the higher the more they do not pass.

Chris Paul- .03
Kobe Bryant- .10
Kevin Durant- .18
Lebron James- .07
Dwight Howard- .34
Monta Ellis – .08

I’ll post an excel document of all the players Ball Hog stat for 2011 if I have enough support for it.

Thanks. If you have any tips for this stat, I’ll be happy to hear it.

*update – It seems that the stat doesn’t accurately incorporate the “hockey assist” in basketball. I’m looking into ways to incorporate that. Take this stat as an ESTIMATE of ball hogginess, not actual cold hard fact.

-ricky9