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Inside The Numbers
March 14, 2005
Boston Celtics’ Executive Director of Basketball Operations Danny Ainge recently mentioned that Paul Pierce is one of the most efficient players in the league. What did Ainge mean by this? In basketball, you can beat an opponent one of two ways -- by either scoring more points per shot attempt, or by getting more attempted shots than your opponent.
Scoring more points per shot attempt (PPS), either through shots or free throws, is what Danny meant by efficiency. This season the Celtics as a team have excelled in this statistic (1.27 PPS), trailing only league leaders Miami and Phoenix. Paul has been the primary generator in this category. As the player who takes the most shots on the Celtics, Paul generates 1.42 PPS, currently ranking him 3rd in the league among guards.
Let’s look at how the Celtics as a whole fare in this statistic through March 14th:
| Player | FGA | PTS | PPS | PPT |
| Pierce | 15.4 | 21.9 | 1.42 | 1.20 |
| Banks | 3.7 | 4.9 | 1.32 | 1.05 |
| LaFrentz | 8.7 | 11.1 | 1.27 | 1.16 |
| Blount | 7.8 | 9.9 | 1.27 | 1.00 |
| Jefferson | 5.4 | 6.8 | 1.26 | 1.08 |
| Allen | 5.0 | 6.3 | 1.26 | 1.04 |
| Davis | 12.5 | 15.6 | 1.25 | 1.04 |
| Payton | 10.3 | 11.9 | 1.15 | 0.96 |
| West | 4.0 | 4.6 | 1.14 | 1.01 |
| Walker | 16.0 | 17.8 | 1.11 | 0.95 |
As you would expect, most of the team is clustered around the team average of 1.27 PPS, with Paul leading the way for the team. Paul has been consistently good at PPS over his career.
The PPT column (“points per touch”) introduces and explains a stat similar to PPS developed by our internal statistical analyst Mike Zarren. This stat penalizes a player for turnovers, treating a turnover like a missed shot. A turnover is actually worse than a missed shot as the offensive team does not have a chance at a rebound (among other factors), but for the purposes of simplicity it is treated the same as a missed shot. Paul remains one of the league leaders in PPT and Raef jumps out as one of the most efficient players in the league as well.
Even though Antoine trails the Celtics in these statistics, there is evidence he is working to fit into Doc’s system as he is taking fewer shots and his efficiency performance to date has been better than his career averages. In addition, Antoine’s offensive rebounding has helped the Celtics improve from the bottom of the league before the trade to approximately league average as through March 14th. This rebounding improvement has been a big factor in the Celtics generating 7 more shot attempts per game since Antoine joined the team.
Next issue: generating more shot attempts.
