Now I was busy last night and there were many games on tap that I missed. So as I frequently do I open up league pass and catch the 4th quarters of some games im interested in or watch all the plays from a particular player from a game.
Now NBALP has that great feature where you can select a player and it'll show you all the "events" (shots, assists, blocks etc) that the player was involved in.
There's often errors on these but I wouldn't know what the frequency is. Sometimes the display is just wrong from NBALP (a player's shot might be labeled as an assist icon for another player rather than show up as a shot icon for the highlighted player, no biggie).
But often there are errors which go beyond an NBALP labeling error. The error is in the actual description. I decided to check the nba.com play-by-play logs to see if it's showing up there as well. And yes they are. These descriptions are pulled off of the game's official play-by-play. Which means if it's an error here it's an error in the play by play.
I don't know how often they occur because I would say my viewing is a bad sample size but I see them often enough to be alarmed. Is it just strange luck that I see them often or does everyone notice these?
An example from just today:
Last night's Pistons-Bucks game. I like to keep an eye on how TMac's doing so I was watching all his "events". I saw a block icon ("McGrady Layup Shot: Missed, Block: Bogut, 2Q 3:39"). TMac passes the ball to a cutting Prince, and Bogut blocks Prince's layup. This counted as an attempted shot for McGrady and a block against (BA) him. This is on the official play by play and boxscore for NBA.com, and even other sites like espn and basketball-reference (which I'm assuming grab their stats from the official source).
I paid a bit closer attention to the stats on yesterday's Heat/Pacers game. Obviously can't monitor all of them but out of maybe 30 or so statistics, there were around 5 errors.
By errors I mean, assists that weren't really assists, assists attributed to the wrong guy, shot attempts attributed to the wrong guy. lol. How can stats be this inaccurate? I wonder if theyre ever purposely tampered.
lol obviously not a large enough sample size but some errors included giving Lebron an extra assist, and instead Of Danny Granger getting his shot blocked, the shot was attributed to Darren Collison. Propping star players up much?
Yeah, well I see it happen with rondo the most. Like he will pass the ball, the guy will hold it for 4 seconds take 2 dribbles and shoot and he gets the assist...
I paid a bit closer attention to the stats on yesterday's Heat/Pacers game. Obviously can't monitor all of them but out of maybe 30 or so statistics, there were around 5 errors.
By errors I mean, assists that weren't really assists, assists attributed to the wrong guy, shot attempts attributed to the wrong guy. lol. How can stats be this inaccurate? I wonder if theyre ever purposely tampered.
They are, someone posted an article way back about big wigs wanting stat keepers to fudge stats so that team gets more national attention. Unfortunately there's nothing we can do about it
Statistical Errors
