Why can't basketball stats nerds separate the superstars from the ball hogs?

So it's doubtful these data will resolve the Carmelo debate. Still, nearly all of the NBA stats experts I interviewed saw Melo in about the same way: an elite offensive threat who underperforms on defense, especially in zone coverage. One joked that it was surprising Carmelo had gotten so much attention, given that he was not even the best player traded before the deadline. That player would be Deron Williams, by a significant margin. (Shane Battier, the famous "No Stats All-Star" who was traded from the Rockets to the Grizzlies, also continues to rate well among the stats set.)

Today about half of NBA teams work with statisticians, and they tend to outperform those that don't. But the heyday of the all-in-one advanced-box-score stat may actually be behind us; coaches now chart players' strengths and weaknesses using services that slice up piles of game film into digestible pieces. That lets them scrutinize the quality of pick-and-rolls and investigate whether their power forwards are better attacking the basket from the left or right post. There are statistics involved, but in the end a flesh-and-blood human must sit there and fix his eyeballs on the tape.

Dean Oliver, the founding father of hoops math, who now runs the numbers for all of ESPN, says the main benefit of statistical analysis is simply that it lets coaches keeps tabs on more games. "The numbers do not see any individual game as well as a person. But they see all of the games," he said. In the next breath, though, Oliver stated with confidence that Dwayne Wade is the "most important guy to take away" on the Miami Heat—not LeBron James. "Not everybody knows that," he said—including many opposing coaches who appear to be keying on LeBron. So how did he know that? His computerized mathematical game-analysis tool, called Roboscout, told him. "It's not an obvious thing when you watch the game," he said. "But when you do the analysis, that comes out."

Correction, March 8, 2011: The original version was misleading about Dave Berri's assessment of the Carmelo Anthony trade. His prediction that the Knicks would win just 29 games with Carmelo was based on an earlier version of the deal that never came to pass. (Return to the corrected sentence.)