Kevin Garnett has always been among the league's most versatile players,
but this year he's outdoing himself.
Not only is he averaging his usual 22.5 points a game, but in addition
to that he fills up the box score with 13.0 rebounds (2nd in the NBA)
and 5.7 assists (tops among NBA forwards) -- both career highs -- making
him a nightly threat for a triple double. In fact, he and Chris Webber
are the only NBA players averaging at least 20 points, 10 rebounds and
five assists.
But how does he compare to the other top players? Are Garnett's averages
more remarkable than Kobe Bryant's 29.8 points, 7.1 rebounds and 6.5 assists?
How about Webber's 23.9 points, 12.9 boards and 2.9 assists? And in the
bigger picture, how unusual is it for a player to put together the kind
of across-the-board stats Garnett is?
All this got me thinking about ways to measure versatility. What I came
up with was something I'll call "Versatility Index." I intentionally designed
it to reward players who excel in all three categories, as opposed to
players who dominate in one or two (Allen Iverson, for example, or the
younger John Stockton).
There's a fairly easy way to do this, thanks to the work of an analyst
in another sport who had a similar problem. Baseball analyst Bill James
designed something called "Power-Speed Number" to rate player's combinations
of homerun-hitting and base-stealing ability, and Versatility
Index works on the same principle. To
compute it, take the player's points,
rebounds and assists per game and multiply them together. Then take the
cube root of that number. (No, no, please, don't click
away just because I said "cube root" -- we're done with the math. I swear.)
Most players will end up with a Versatility Index around five or so; the
cream of the crop, about four or five guys a season, will be above ten.
As we can see in the next chart, Garnett is way ahead of the pack at
11.8.
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