Byron #2 in Assists

[Mr. Orange-Power]

ASSIST, EATON

With four assists against A&M, senior point guard Byron Eaton reached 435 career assists. That put him in second place on the all-time assist list.

The only player with more assists is Doug Gottlieb, who leads the pack by a bunch. Gottlieb finished his career with 793 assists.

[legelegel]

Again, many more of Eaton's balls go to the rim than Gottlieb's. If you can't shoot, you pass and that creates more opportunities for assists.

Too many times a player gets an assist just because he passed the ball. An assist should be more than that.

[CaliforniaCowboy]

Again, many more of Eaton's balls go to the rim than Gottlieb's. If you can't shoot, you pass and that creates more opportunities for assists.

Too many times a player gets an assist just because he passed the ball. An assist should be more than that.

Huh?

is there a translator in the house?



... an assist means that you got it to an open man that actually made the shot... not just because "he passed" the ball.

[legelegel]

... an assist means that you got it to an open man that actually made the shot... not just because "he passed" the ball.

I know.

My point is that it isn't very hard to pass the ball to the man next to you and let him take the three. To get an assist the pass should be more than just a pass. There should be more than a minor effort and there should be some difficulty in getting the ball to the shooter.

[Inky29]

I actually think Doug would have had more assists if he could have scored at all. It's not as easy as you think to find the open man when the sag off you and take away passing lanes. I still think Doug was one of the top 3 PG's we've had even with the scoring deficiencies. JL3 and Sean would be the other two I would rank up there.

[legelegel]

This would be an assist in anyone's book.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEEGWf3_gPQ

[legelegel]

I actually think Doug would have had more assists if he could have scored at all. It's not as easy as you think to find the open man when the sag off you and take away passing lanes. I still think Doug was one of the top 3 PG's we've had even with the scoring deficiencies. JL3 and Sean would be the other two I would rank up there.

Very good points

Skip Iba was a Gottlieb type in that he did very little scoring.

[CaliforniaCowboy]

I know.

My point is that it isn't very hard to pass the ball to the man next to you and let him take the three. To get an assist the pass should be more than just a pass. There should be more than a minor effort and there should be some difficulty in getting the ball to the shooter.

If it wasn't "very hard" then every one could do it... it's much, much harder than you're allowing.

I think that you're totally off base with your comment. I can't find any statistic or analogy that would support your premise.

[legelegel]

I was a point guard. I think assist totals are inflated.

In basketball, an assist is attributed to a player who passes the ball to a teammate in a way that leads to a score by field goal, meaning that he or she was "assisting" in the basket. There is some judgment involved in deciding whether a passer should be credited with an assist. An assist can be scored for the passer even if the player who receives the pass makes a basket after dribbling the ball. However, the original definition of an assist did not include such situations, so the comparison of assist statistics across eras is a complex matter.

Averaging a large number of assists doesn't always mean that the player is good at passing; it could just mean that he/she makes many passes in the course of a game. A more useful metric is a player's assist/turnover ratio (http://www.ehow.com/how_2092831_calculate-assists-turnover-ratio-basketball.html?ref=fuel&utm_source=yahoo&utm_medium=ssp&utm_campaign=yssp_art), which compares passes that lead to an assist to those that fall into the opposing team's hands. Of course, many other factors, such as a team's play style and teammates' scoring prowess, should be considered as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assist_(basketball)

An assist is a pass that directly leads to a basket. This can be a pass to the low post that leads to a direct score, a long pass for a layup, a fast break pass to a teammate for a layup, and/or a pass that results in an open perimeter shot for a teammate. In basketball, an assist is awarded only if, in the judgement of the statistician, the last player's pass contributed directly to a made basket. An assist can be awarded for a basket scored after the ball has been dribbled if the player's pass led to the field goal being made. http://www.nba.com/canada/Basketball_U_on_Assists-Canada_Generic_Article-18072.html

[legelegel]

Pages 28 and 29 of The Official NCAA 2007 Basketball Statistician's Manual (http://www.ncaa.org/library/statistical/basketball_stats_manual/2007/2007_basketball_stats_manual.pdf) defines an assist for college basketball: A player is credited with an assist when the player makes, in the judgment of the statistician, the principal pass contributing directly to a field goal (or an awarded score of two or three points)… Philosophy. An assist should be more than a routine pass that just happens to be followed by a field goal. It should be a conscious effort to find the open player or to help a player work free… The manual goes on to detail some scenarios that further clarify when an assist should be awarded. It's fairly specific, and it is comprehensive about defining an assist, although in the end there is still some room for interpretation. After reading the manual, I concluded that there's not as much room for judgment as one might have thought. In most cases, the process of awarding an assist is standard across college basketball.

With biased errors, unlike random errors, there are ways to sort out where the biases exist, and whom those errors benefit. In this case, we can compare how often a team is credited with an assist at home to how often they get an assist away from home. Since scorekeepers are largely the same people at each home game, we can single out which teams have scorekeepers that ration assists like they're gold and those that make even the most selfish players look like Steve Nash.

The most generous scorekeepers were associated with the following five teams in 2007…

Assist Percentage (A/FGM)
Home Away
Texas A&M 78.5 45.2
Sam Houston St. 82.6 55.0
Evansville 72.1 47.3
South Florida 74.9 52.1
Cal St. Fullerton 69.0 47.9

It turns out that the king of assist bias is the table at Texas A&M. At home, the Aggies recorded assists on 78.5% of their made field goals. It's a percentage that is ridiculous to the point of being unbelievable. Only one team in the country cleared an assist rate of 70% on the season and that was Northwestern at 71.6%. A&M did play some cream puffs at home, so perhaps a figure close to 80% could be attained over 19 games, which was the length of their home schedule.

Any hope of suspending disbelief is lost by knowing that away from Reed Arena, A&M was credited with assists on just 45.2% of their made baskets. That figure is significantly below the national average assist rate of 55.1%. It's a rate that, sustained for the entire season, would have ranked Texas A&M 323rd--14th-worst--in the country in sharing the basketball. So to summarize: At home, Texas A&M was one of the best assisting teams in college basketball history. Away from home, they were the worst major conference team in sharing the ball.

Away from home, A&M was playing in front of all sorts of different scorekeepers, so it's unlikely that there was a conspiracy among all or even most of them to not record Aggies' assists. No, the only explanation is that assist inflation was at record levels in College Station in 2007. It was a phenomenon that didn't go unnoticed in the rest of the conference. Texas took the unusual step of voiding assists that were credited to its own team in a game at Texas A&M. (Note: under NCAA rules this a step that doesn't affect the official statistics, only Texas' internal records.)

So how many assists did the Aggies really have? Let's use their road assist percentage as a guide. The average NCAA scorekeeper gives the home team five more assists per 100 made field goals than he/she gives the opponent. This could be real, but it's probably not.

You wouldn't think there would be a home-court advantage for passing, especially since we are accounting for the number of field goals made in this study. If we evenly distribute that 5% bias between the home and road team, Texas A&M's true assist percentage on the road was 45.2% +2.5%, or 47.7%. If we assume this was their true assist percentage in all games, then we can apply that figure to the 908 field goals A&M made for the season. This yields a "real" assist total of 433--158 fewer than were actually recorded.

Now to the question that is the basis for this article. Applying this reduction equally to each A&M player would reduce Acie Law's assist total from 169 to 124, or from 5.0 per game, ranking 63rd in the nation, to 3.6 and out of the top 200. Law was credited with a career-high 15 assists in A&M's home win over Texas in February. We don't know how many he really had, but it's safe to say that 99% of NCAA scorekeepers would have recorded a lower number.

Before wrapping this up, it's only natural to look at the opposite end of the spectrum. While on balance, there's a tendency for home scorekeepers to give their players an assist boost, this isn't true everywhere. The folks with the strictest definition of an assist…

Assist Percentage (A/FGM)
Home Away
New Mexico St. 46.3 60.1
Northern Colorado 50.9 60.6
Lafayette 57.7 67.1
Illinois 57.8 66.0

Long Island 42.3 50.4 Nobody was stingier about doling out assists than the table at the Pan American Center, where they ignored about one out of every four assists that their counterparts in other arenas were counting. This means that New Mexico State point guard Elijah Ingram was better at setting up his teammates than his stats suggest. Officially, he had 35 assists at home. Had he recorded assists at the rate he did on the road, he would have had 47 home helpers.

That might not seem like a dramatic difference, but you can really get a feel for how subjective assists are by magically trading the Aggie scorekeepers in College Station for the ones in Las Cruces. If we could do that, our best estimate of Ingram's home assist total would have it increasing to 78, or more than doubling. His assist rate for the season would have risen from 17.3% to 26.4%, or from a below-average playmaker to a respectable one, ranking him just outside the top 150 nationally. Similarly, Law's assist rate would have decreased from 30.8% to 19.7%, making him look like a score-first point guard--which is closer to the truth.

For the most part, scorekeepers across the nation have a similar view of an assist. As long as D-I nation spans more than 300 teams, however, there will be outliers. In this case, it may have influenced the view of Acie Law's and Elijah Ingram's talents. More than likely, Ingram was better at setting up his teammates, even though the stats indicate that Law was easily the better assist man. There is no statistic in major sports as subjective as the basketball assist, and we should consider that before reading too much into a player's or team's assist rate.
http://www.basketballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=14

[legelegel]

Dukes' Bobby Hurley, with 1,076 assists, lead Division I in career assists. He played 4 years.

2. Chris Corchiani - 1,038
North Carolina State: 1988-91

3. Ed Cota - 1,030
North Carolina: 1996-2000

4. Keith Jennings - 983
East Tennessee State: 1987-91

5. Steve Blake - 972
Maryland: 1999-2003

http://collegebasketball.about.com/od/players/tp/career-assists.htm

There is no statistic in major sports as subjective as the basketball assist, and we should consider that before reading too much into a player's or team's assist rate.http://www.basketballprospectus.com/...p?articleid=14 (http://www.basketballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=14)

[CaliforniaCowboy]

welll... I'm going to just disagree.

The point you're making sounds a lot like discounting Offensive Rebounds because our guys shouldn't be missing in the first place.

It is what it is.

Eaton is where he is on that list because he's darn good at dishing the ball where it needs to go. He's not the best we've every had, but he's darn good at it.

[legelegel]

welll... I'm going to just disagree.

The point you're making sounds a lot like discounting Offensive Rebounds because our guys shouldn't be missing in the first place.

It is what it is.

Eaton is where he is on that list because he's darn good at dishing the ball where it needs to go. He's not the best we've every had, but he's darn good at it.

Are you just disagreeing for the hell of it? ;)

Did you read what I found to support what I was saying?

I didn't say Eaton wasn't good at assists. I was pointing out that the Cowboy ahead of him may not be that much better than him or even better than him.

[CaliforniaCowboy]

I read that stuff.... it said nothing except "perhaps" and "possibly".

I seriously doubt that there are a ton of assists being awarded on plays where they were not legitimately earned. Sure there may be a few questionable "assists" on occasion, but that certainly would not skew matters enough to move Eaton significantely either way on the OSU all-time assist chart.

I think we also play more games these days, which skews career stats.

One of my all-time favorites was Matt Clark, who played with a Magic flair... and I loved Brooks Thompson....

My only knock on Eaton has been when he plays out of control, and when he doesn't move his feet on defense and just slaps himself into foul trouble.... he seems to be a little better at those two things this season.

[legelegel]

My only knock on Eaton has been when he plays out of control, and when he doesn't move his feet on defense and just slaps himself into foul trouble.... he seems to be a little better at those two things this season.

I would have to agree with your statement on Eaton. In the past every time he had the ball I had to hold my breath, because I was afraid of his uncontrolled play which usually resulted in an errant pass.

[pistolpete2002]

I have to agree with both of you. I agree that it's not that easy to make assists, but I also agree that it is pretty subjective to the statistician and if someone is trying to reach a certain goal in assists, they can be helped out by the person keeping the stats.

[wickerbill]

Did you not watch Gottlieb, legelegel? He made some great passes as our point guard and I seem to remember a pretty good assist to turnover ratio.

[CaliforniaCowboy]

Did you not watch Gottlieb, legelegel? He made some great passes as our point guard and I seem to remember a pretty good assist to turnover ratio.

Yeah, but you can't really gage turnovers accurately, if a guy passes to someone and he takes a dribble and fumbles it then it's a TO on him, but probably should be a TO on the PG, just like the passing assist where the guy doesn't fumble it and makes a dribble and basket. ;)

[legelegel]

Did you not watch Gottlieb, legelegel? He made some great passes as our point guard and I seem to remember a pretty good assist to turnover ratio.

I saw him play. I'm sure his assist/turnover ratio was very good. I still think a lot of assists are given when they should not be.

Gottlieb's glaring fault was at the charity line. In my mind that out weighed his excellent passing. A good driving point guard has got to make his free throws or he is a liability.

[wickerbill]

I saw him play. I'm sure his assist/turnover ratio was very good. I still think a lot of assists are given when they should not be.

Gottlieb's glaring fault was at the charity line. In my mind that out weighed his excellent passing. A good driving point guard has got to make his free throws or he is a liability.

True, but we're talking about assists here, not FT %.