...in particular, the "Assist".
This is THE most subjective stat in all of basketball, and has been that way for several decades. It is also thus the most misunderstood and misreported stat, as witnessed Saturday.
There was a time, eons ago, when an Assist only occurred without a dribble --- in other words if you hit an open guy on a fast break and the dude decided to take a dribble to set up his dunk, you didn't get the Assist. Totally unfair... and that (thankfully for us PGs) changed. The current criteria have been in place for decades.... but they are still a bit nebulous. Here's a good, standardly accepted definition I lifted from elsewhere:
"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). Only one Assist is to be credited on any field goal and only when the pass was a major part of the play. Such a pass should be either (a) a pass that finds a player free after he or she has maneuvered without the ball for a positional advantage, or (b) a pass that gives the receiving player a positional advantage he or she otherwise would not have had. The receiving player can still dribble if it is part of his normal action to complete the goal. 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 official Assist is typically awarded by the home stat keeper, and that is often a problem. On one hand you had the infamous NC State stat guy who awarded them to Chris Corchiani for breathing. Now, he was a great passer and got a lot of legit Assists, but how often did he just pass the ball over to Rodney Monroe, who would just dribble down to the corner and fire up a 3-pointer and still get credit? Folks around the ACC called those "Corchiani Assists". On the other hand you get stingy stat guys who don't understand the full scope of the definition... especially in away games.
The standard I used for my stat girls when I coached was in line with the quoted definition above, and that's the correct criteria I use when I keep them myself. The last line sums it up perfectly. If, for example, you feed the post in a way that puts him in an advantageous position and he scores directly off of it, then that is properly by definition an Assist --- even if he does an up-and-under to avoid a shot-blocker or uses a power dribble off a drop-step to score.
Just so y'all know, we had at least 4 more actual Assists Saturday than we were credited for. For example, I keep hearing folks repeat that Joel Berry had zero (he actually had 2, just for the record). On the other hand,there was a TO that was missed (on a questionable "palming" call) as well. Bottom line is, outside of actual scoring, individual stats are often subjective and sometimes misleading, like in as I mentioned before how the guy who ends up with the ball often gets credit for a steal perpetrated by a teammate. Be careful reading too much into individual lines in a given game.
This is THE most subjective stat in all of basketball, and has been that way for several decades. It is also thus the most misunderstood and misreported stat, as witnessed Saturday.
There was a time, eons ago, when an Assist only occurred without a dribble --- in other words if you hit an open guy on a fast break and the dude decided to take a dribble to set up his dunk, you didn't get the Assist. Totally unfair... and that (thankfully for us PGs) changed. The current criteria have been in place for decades.... but they are still a bit nebulous. Here's a good, standardly accepted definition I lifted from elsewhere:
"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). Only one Assist is to be credited on any field goal and only when the pass was a major part of the play. Such a pass should be either (a) a pass that finds a player free after he or she has maneuvered without the ball for a positional advantage, or (b) a pass that gives the receiving player a positional advantage he or she otherwise would not have had. The receiving player can still dribble if it is part of his normal action to complete the goal. 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 official Assist is typically awarded by the home stat keeper, and that is often a problem. On one hand you had the infamous NC State stat guy who awarded them to Chris Corchiani for breathing. Now, he was a great passer and got a lot of legit Assists, but how often did he just pass the ball over to Rodney Monroe, who would just dribble down to the corner and fire up a 3-pointer and still get credit? Folks around the ACC called those "Corchiani Assists". On the other hand you get stingy stat guys who don't understand the full scope of the definition... especially in away games.
The standard I used for my stat girls when I coached was in line with the quoted definition above, and that's the correct criteria I use when I keep them myself. The last line sums it up perfectly. If, for example, you feed the post in a way that puts him in an advantageous position and he scores directly off of it, then that is properly by definition an Assist --- even if he does an up-and-under to avoid a shot-blocker or uses a power dribble off a drop-step to score.
Just so y'all know, we had at least 4 more actual Assists Saturday than we were credited for. For example, I keep hearing folks repeat that Joel Berry had zero (he actually had 2, just for the record). On the other hand,there was a TO that was missed (on a questionable "palming" call) as well. Bottom line is, outside of actual scoring, individual stats are often subjective and sometimes misleading, like in as I mentioned before how the guy who ends up with the ball often gets credit for a steal perpetrated by a teammate. Be careful reading too much into individual lines in a given game.
