Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five erroneous ratings that were based on reputation and narratives, rather than accurate analysis.

Creating roster updates for PC releases of NBA Live for so many years has made me critical of, but also sympathetic to, the producers who maintain official rosters. On one hand, I know the importance of accurately rating players and always strived to do my best in that regard, while also relying on the watchful eyes of the community to provide helpful feedback. To that end, I also understand how easy it is to overlook certain ratings when there are over 400 active players to keep track of. Mistakes will slip through, or a much-needed update will be forgotten.

With that being said, there are times when erroneous ratings aren’t actually a matter of oversight, but rather by design. There are a few reasons for this. As Dee has pointed out, a lack of care with copy and paste jobs, and myopic reliance on spreadsheets and formulas, has led to laughable ratings and tendencies. Other times, these erroneous ratings are reputation-based, as an unsubstantiated narrative about a player is accepted as common knowledge. However, it’s not always a bad thing, as a player’s skill may demand ratings that their stats may not, justifying some padding. These five examples represent the good, the bad, and the lazy, of erroneous reputation-based ratings!

1. Darvin Ham’s Dunking Rating

These days, most of the dunking that Darvin Ham is involved in is when fans and pundits dunk on his coaching abilities. He sure has become a handy scapegoat; I mean, come on, he’s undefeated in the “prestigious” NBA Cup! Anyway, back in his playing days, Ham certainly could throw it down. He had some underrated jams in the 1997 Slam Dunk Contest that Kobe Bryant won, he shattered a backboard in college, and skied to the rim often enough to put together a Top 10 countdown. In that regard, his reputation as a dunker definitely was worthy of a higher-than-average rating…at least for a while. As the years went by, his past reputation inflated that attribute.

Towards the end of his career, Darvin Ham wasn’t dunking all that often. In fact, he wasn’t scoring a lot of points in any way! That’s not to say that he wouldn’t break out a strong jam as his career was winding down; he was still only in his early 30s when he played his final NBA game, after all. His dunk contest days were well behind him though, and even in his prime, he wasn’t exhibiting the same kind of flair as Vince Carter, game-in and game-out. Thanks to his participation in the dunk contest as a rookie and his glass-shattering efforts in college though, he too was capable of some Vinsanity on the virtual hardwood, thanks to high dunk ratings well into the 2000s.

2. Tayshaun Prince’s Defensive Ratings

Selected to the All-Defensive Second Team in four consecutive seasons, Tayshaun Prince was a perfect fit for a Pistons team that put the “D” in Detroit. He infamously locked up Kobe Bryant in the 2004 NBA Finals, frustrating the Mamba with his length and holding him to an abysmal 38% from the field, including 17% from downtown. The year before that, Prince had demonstrated just how spectacular defense can be, as his chasedown block on Reggie Miller in the 2003 Playoffs instantly joined a long list of iconic postseason highlights. Perimeter scorers of the 2000s were on notice: Tayshaun Prince will pick your pocket, and swat your shot!

Or so the erroneous ratings in a number of basketball video games would have you believe. While Prince did indeed make plenty of stops that were tallied in the box scores during his career, he never averaged at least one block or steal per game! He came close, but to put it into perspective, players known for their scoring such as Michael Jordan and Dwyane Wade have higher career averages in those areas! It goes to show that defense isn’t just about filling the stat sheet, but that’s admittedly tough to represent on the virtual hardwood. Inflating Prince’s defensive ratings allowed him to qualify for Freestyle Superstars, and be appropriately effective on D in video games.

3. Bruce Bowen’s Defensive Ratings

The same goes for Bruce Bowen. During his prime as the San Antonio Spurs’ toughest perimeter defender/basketball’s answer to a hockey goon, Bowen shut down/injured many of the league’s best offensive threats, making All-Defensive First Team five times, and All-Defensive Second Team three times. Unfortunately, we don’t have any official statistics as to how many kicks and leg sweeps he attempted and succeeded at! Jokes/fair observations about his dirty play aside though, Bowen does deserve credit as an excellent defender. Box score watchers would probably disagree with that of course, because like Tayshaun Prince, he doesn’t have gaudy defensive statistics.

To that point, during the span in which he earned his five consecutive selections to the All-Defensive First Team, Bowen averaged 0.8 steals and 0.4 blocks in around 32 minutes per game. That’s not exactly bad of course, and is actually slightly better than what Prince was tallying in around 36 minutes a night. It just means their method of defense – while effective – didn’t lend itself to big numbers. Once again, that’s hard to represent in video games, where excellent abilities demand high ratings, but are also tied to beefier numbers. Fudging Bruce Bowen’s ratings made them erroneous from a statistical standpoint, but gave him abilities that real hoop heads knew he should have.

4. LeBron James’ Midrange Shooting

Longevity has allowed LeBron James to break several scoring records, and look, that is still impressive. I don’t think it makes him the best scorer in NBA history, because total career points alone aren’t good criteria for that (unless you believe Karl Malone is a better scorer than Kobe Bryant, and I don’t see many people making that claim!). Beyond the numbers and accomplishments such as scoring titles, a player’s offensive arsenal – their “bag”, as it’s popularly called these days – is a major factor. LeBron is extremely athletically gifted and undeniably skilled, but there are other all-time greats who have had a better bag. He’s good at what he’s good at, but that’s not everything!

Specifically, midrange shooting has never been his forte. Now, before someone puts words in my mouth, I’m not saying that he can’t or has never hit them! Statistically speaking though, it’s not his strongest weapon, and even in the years where he’s shot better from midrange, those shots made up a very small percentage of his attempts. It hasn’t prevented him from getting his points – good luck stopping him at the rim, especially in his prime – but it doesn’t justify him having generous midrange ratings. In some games, he’s rated better in that area than MJ, a midrange master! Misleading percentages, as well as agendas, are the most likely culprit for these erroneous ratings.

5. Yao Ming’s Three-Point Shooting

Of course, LeBron isn’t the only player with erroneous ratings thanks to misleading percentages. It should be obvious to anyone who knows basketball and basketball video games – which you’d hope would include the people maintaining the official rosters – but a player going 2-for-5 from three-point range on the year isn’t the same as someone knocking down threes at a 40% clip while taking over 300 of them. If you’re just punching numbers into a spreadsheet though, it mightn’t click that mid 2000s Tim Duncan wasn’t a three-point threat. He just had a couple of seasons where going 2-for-5 and 3-for-9 gave him percentages that looked great without considering the totals.

I’d suggest this is why Yao Ming has also had an erroneously generous three-point rating in some games. Admittedly, it wasn’t high enough to make him Steph Curry – or even Dell Curry for that matter – but it still allowed him to be far more effective than he should be from downtown. Yao did make two three-pointers in his career, going 1-for-2 from beyond the arc in 2003, and then hitting his only attempt in 2009. That is of course 50% and 100% respectively, but again, totals matter! Additionally, he did have a good shooting touch and didn’t just operate in the post, so the prevailing notion that “he could hit threes if he wanted to” undoubtedly led to inflated ratings.

Have you noticed these erroneous reputation-based ratings in video games over the years? What’s your take on padding ratings to make mechanics work, and what are some of the most egregiously agenda-driven ratings that you’ve encountered in a roster, be it official or unofficial? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.

The post The Friday Five: 5 Erroneous Reputation-Based Ratings appeared first on NLSC.