Applying Player Efficiency Ratings (PER) to WCC Men's Basketball
Before we begin this blog post, we would like to say that statistics are extremely powerful and helpful, but they are not everything. Coaching and scouting play very large, important roles in sports. Statistics and analytics are simply here to supplement the coaching, scouting, playing, and viewing of sports.
The Player Efficiency Rating (PER) is a statistic that measures a player's overall performance. The formula for PER takes into account field goals, free throws, 3-pointers, assists, rebounds, blocks, steals, missed shots, turnovers, and personal fouls. The rating boils down to a per minute basis and is adjusted for pace to bring players' statistics on a level playing field. PER is the brain child of John Hollinger, who is now the Vice President of Basketball Operations for the Memphis Grizzlies.
The downside of PER is that it undervalues some players who play great defense, but don't record a lot of blocks or steals. Also, as with any statistic, it can be misleading when a player hasn't played very many minutes in the season.
PER is widely used for the NBA, but we have not seen it applied very often to the college game. For this project, we decided to find the PER for every men's basketball player in the West Coast Conference. This project was the biggest undertaking that we have taken on for this blog. We looked at every inter-conference game, amounting to over 1600 observations (every player stat line for every conference game). After we did all of the calculations, we only kept players that have played at least 100 minutes to reduce the chance of misleading statistics. We couldn't adjust for pace in the normal way because we do not have access to possession information, so we used an estimated method. The process that we used is defined here.
PER is always adjusted so that the league average PER is 15. Hollinger explains that the breakdown for PER numbers is as follows.
We calculated PER for every West Coast Conference Men's Basketball player, let's discuss the results! The table with every players' PER is very long and is available later in this post. For now, here is a table of the top 10 players in the WCC according to PER.
As can be seen, Jock Landale is categorized as a runaway MVP candidate. This makes sense as Jock Landale won the WCC Player of the Year. Most of the awards are as follows....
We also have a similar question as to why Killian Tillie did not make the WCC First Team. His stats are tremendous for this previous year. As we looked over the Gonzaga team, we noticed how incredibly impressive their roster is, and it makes me wonder whether some of their players are overshadowed by their teammates. Saint Mary's doesn't seem to have this problem, at least according to PER, as there is a significant drop off from Jock Landale's 33.4 to Jordan Ford's 17.2. PER hints that Saint Mary's would have been significantly worse without Jock Landale. On the other hand, Gonzaga's first three players are in the mid-to-high 20's and they don't fall to below 17.2 until their sixth player. Gonzaga's strength is their team, they don't rely on any one superstar to carry them.
The most interesting PER stat that we discovered was Loyola Marymount's Mattias Markusson who came in at #6 with a whopping PER of 23.71, meaning that he would be considered a "definite all-star." Markusson did not make the WCC First Team, Second Team, or even receive an honorable mention. We looked at his stats compared to players who had similar PERs, but made conference honors. The difference that we found is that Markusson gets a high number of rebounds, but he does not score in double digits on average or do anything too flashy. Markusson is an extremely efficient player. He shoots 62% and averages less than a turnover per game. Other big players like Jock Landale and Yoeli Childs average a little over two turnovers per game. Markusson also averages 6 shots per game in 25 minutes while Childs and Landale average 13 shots per game in 33 to 34 minutes.
We would love to see Markusson get consistently more minutes and see how he performs and can further help his team. Obviously, this is not a sure thing, but it seems that Markusson has some serious potential and it would be interesting to see how he would benefit from more opportunities.
The full list of the 88 qualifying players can be seen here.
As always, since we are BYU fans and most of our audience has consisted of BYU fans, we'll discuss a little about BYU players' PERs. BYU had 8 players qualify under the 100 minute cutoff. They are listed below.
Yoeli Childs leads the team listed as a "weak MVP candidate" with Elijah Bryant not far behind as a "definite all-star." Dalton Nixon seems to be an underrated player, although a big part of the reason that his minutes are low is because he missed a large portion of the season due to injury. BYU's players' PERs may seem low, but these numbers are compared to the rest of the conference. Gonzaga's roster strength is ridiculous. Gonzaga's players' PERs are listed below. There is also a link to the players' PERs for every team in the conference listed below and left.
PER listings linked below.
WCC Teams
PER listings linked below.
WCC Teams
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