In a previous post I wrote about how a coach reads a box Score and talked about which statistics don’t have much meaning, and which do.
For instance, while announcers like to talk about which team is outrebounding the other, the much more meaningful stat is the percentage of offensive rebounds the teams are getting. A team that gets 15 offensive rebounds on 40 misses is winning the rebounding war, a team that gets 6 offensive rebounds on 40 misses is not. Announcers also talk about “points off turnovers” which is a meaningless stat since it does not differentiate between live ball turnovers (steals) that regularly turn into easy baskets, and dead ball turnovers (offensive fouls) that simply allow the defensive team to take the ball out of bounds.