from Amazon
Thursday, November 20, 2008
David G. checks in again on whether experience matters in the post-season
Here is the article on THT web site:
And here is what I wrote in the comments section:
Now I’m starting to get convinved, David! Maybe.
I don’t know that you are doing “pure cherrypicking.” In fact, I am pretty certain that you are not. If you had used 4 years or 3 years or 6 or 7 years as your cutoff point, and you got a completely different result, then I would call that “pure cherrypicking.” But, without doing the math myself, my guess is that any boundary you choose will show a difference, although maybe no so large as when you use 5 years as your boundary.
Some kind of regression of years on “regular/playoff difference” would be nice.
Are those PA numbers, the total number of reg season PA? How about the number of post-season PA for each group? I’d certainly like to get a feel for the sample sizes of each group.
I’d love for someone to speculate on why it might be the case that experienced players appear to do better in the post-season. I still find it a little hard to believe. I mean, if there is such a significant effect here, which it appears there might be, why don’t we find similarly dramatic effects in other situations, like clutch? I would think that if playoff experience can magically transform an average player into a very good player and/or vice versa, surely we would see other dramatic effects in other areas, like clutch. But we don’t.
I’d also like to see how age might play a role in this. Could it be that older players do better in the post-season and that it has nothing to do with post-season experience? I would think that the more post-season experience, the older the player, on the average.
I would also like to see how the regular/post-season differences match up with team w/l records? IOW, does it appear that most or all of the team w/l differences are a function of the differences in individual performance, or is there still something going on at the team level that does not show up at the individual level?
Good work.