Garnett's PER may be down, but his Touch Rating is off the chart

by GJPBoston on Feb 23, 2010 1:05 PM EST

The below is from an article in yesterday's NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/health/23mind.html) regarding recent research about touching and communication (note the discussion of the Celtics and Garnett). Does this perhaps give Hollinger a new statistic to chart? Should we be asking will Nate Robinson touch as much as Eddie House? I hope this touches you all as it did me...

"In a paper due out this year in the journal Emotion, Mr. Kraus and his co-authors, Cassy Huang and Dr. Keltner, report that with a few exceptions, good teams tended to be touchier than bad ones. The most touch-bonded teams were the Boston Celtics and the Los Angeles Lakers, currently two of the league’s top teams; at the bottom were the mediocre Sacramento Kings and Charlotte Bobcats.

"The same was true, more or less, for players. The touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, the Celtics’ star big man, followed by star forwards Chris Bosh of the Toronto Raptors and Carlos Boozer of the Utah Jazz. “Within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw, Garnett has reached out and touched four guys,” Dr. Keltner said.

"To correct for the possibility that the better teams touch more often simply because they are winning, the researchers rated performance based not on points or victories but on a sophisticated measure of how efficiently players and teams managed the ball — their ratio of assists to giveaways, for example. And even after the high expectations surrounding the more talented teams were taken into account, the correlation persisted. Players who made contact with teammates most consistently and longest tended to rate highest on measures of performance, and the teams with those players seemed to get the most out of their talent. "

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This article had a lot of 'NO HOMO' moments.

by AlexC on Feb 23, 2010 1:54 PM EST reply actions

Lol

I just saw that as well. All jokes aside, this reads to me as an interesting way to try to quantify UBUNTU. I think they’re essentially using touches as a way to measure togetherness, and it’s really not surprising that KG would lead the league in any stat that tries to measure that.

by drza44 on Feb 23, 2010 2:35 PM EST reply actions

I agree that it is probably a very good measure (as long as the players are unaware they are being measured on this) and it is not surprising about KG. But I think the way they try to quantify it (which admittedly they have to do in a scientific paper) is comical: “Within 600 milliseconds of shooting a free throw, Garnett has reached out and touched four guys.”

by GJPBoston on Feb 23, 2010 4:31 PM EST up reply actions

I think the purpose of that quote in there was to demonstrate a sort of measuring stick. If KG leads the league in “Touch” then a good demonstration of that is how after shooting a free throw, he reaches out to each of his teammates.

Oddly, this is actually something I noticed this season. I noticed when KG reached out, he’d reach back like he usually does for the guards to come up and touch hands, but it seemed like this season the guards rarely come up and slap his hand. Maybe that happened last season, and the season before, but I didn’t notice it till this season. This could also have to do with the reports that I read about some players having their own agenda and such, and the chemistry was a little off, and maybe I was just looking at it like that more. It might not be related at all.

by 18isGREATERthan72 on Feb 23, 2010 6:01 PM EST up reply actions