06-07: The Year in SUPER

A while back, I introduced a stat that I decided to call SUPER, which is short for Schedule-Adjusted Usage-Rate-Weighted Player Efficiency Rating (PER).  The PER component was created by John Hollinger of ESPN.com, and I made two other relatively simple adjustments for schedule strength (something that’s not as important in the NBA, where Hollinger does his work) and to eliminate PER’s inherent usage bias (toward players who touch the ball most often).

This is my attempt to improve upon what Hollinger has called the one stat that takes pretty much all of the available numerical information about a player’s performance and rolls it up into one number.  SUPER seems like a good acronym for my adjusted version of that.

While I think Dean Oliver’s offensive and defensive ratings are more meaningful because of better theory, PER (and thus, SUPER), does a pretty nice job as a somewhat simpler calculation.  It also makes it easy to judge a player’s standing relative to the rest of the league.

With that in mind, below are the season’s rankings for SUPER in the GSC West, through the end of the conference tourney.  I’ll keep updating it for Henderson State’s progress in the NCAA tourney, but I figure it won’t change a whole lot.  I just want to get a jump on some of the posts I had planned for the end of the season.  I’ll get into some team summaries after I knock out a few of the major individual categories.

If you’re familiar with the usual scale for PER, almost everyone falls in between zero and 30, since the league average is artificially set to 15.  The latter is true of SUPER, but the range is smaller, with players pretty much topping out at 25.

Christian Brothers forward Kevin Weybright had an outstanding year as a high-volume, high-efficiency shooter.  He averaged 22 and 7 per 40 minutes, shooting 56% from the field and 43% from outside in 156 attempts.  Weybright was basically a shoot-first guy this year, which is fine if you’re a fantastic scorer like him.  Neither his assist ratio (8.8) nor his turnover ratio (13.4) was great, but it obviously didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.  With a 12.3% rebound rate, he was a major contributor in two of the most important aspects of the game.  Even after adjusting for his high usage rate (22.6), Weybright tops this year’s SUPER list.

The rest of the list reads pretty much like a who’s who of important GSC players.  Dee Dee Drake, Torre Doty, and Matt Hall were the best players on their respective teams, and most of the other solid players in the conference are on the list.

David Clark of Delta State stands out as an under-utilized player on his team, with a low 11.1 usage rate in just 14 minutes per game.  Omar Guinea is also an interesting name toward the top of the list, since he wasn’t really asked to do much on the Henderson State offense other than making some easy shots while banging around inside.

You’ll notice that Nate Newell cracks the list at #16, which is more of a testament to the importance of the three-point shot than it is validation for his ridiculous Superman role in the UAM offense.

This also should shed some light on which player was actually the best on his team.  Torre Doty, Derrick Woods, and Denarryl Rice make interesting cases to be their team’s real stars, over Newell, Marks/Rodriguez, and Terrance Whiters (who actually hogged the ball more than Newell for ATU).

SAU was the only school without a representative in the top 20, but Mori Turpin (16.65) and Brandon Williams (16.02) were not far behind the rest of the pack.

I think this list is a pretty good starting point for discussing the rest of the leaderboards for 2006-2007, which is something I’ll be doing in the coming weeks.