How bad were the "Bad Boys"?

[Epsilon]

Fivethirtyeight is taking a look at the Detroit Pistons legendary "Bad Boys" team, and investigating whether the "bad boys" persona can be quantified:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/just-how-bad-were-the-bad-boys/

It would be interesting to see someone attempt to do something like this with hockey and teams where the narrative is they won partly through intimidation, such as the Broad Street Bullies or more recently the 2007 Ducks.

Click to read more...

 

[kmad]

I've thought about trying to quantify this before but couldn't find sites that compiled the data I needed.

Basically figuring out team toughness, but rather than a crude averaging of height and weight, we'd specialize it by combining height and weight with amounts of specific types of penalties that denote "badness", like fighting, roughing, slashing, etc (I do not have a formula for this yet), create a value from those contributing factors, and multiply it by that player's percentage of that team's total even strength icetime for that position for the season.

Does that make sense? It's late.

 

[Epsilon]

I've thought about trying to quantify this before but couldn't find sites that compiled the data I needed.

Basically figuring out team toughness, but rather than a crude averaging of height and weight, we'd specialize it by combining height and weight with amounts of specific types of penalties that denote "badness", like fighting, roughing, slashing, etc (I do not have a formula for this yet), create a value from those contributing factors, and multiply it by that player's percentage of that team's total even strength icetime for that position for the season.

Does that make sense? It's late.

Yeah something like that sounds reasonable if the data can be obtained. Here's a follow-up piece on the original:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/some-fouls-are-so-bad-theyre-good/

which directly considers the question of how badness correlates to winning:

That’s a bit wacky — the technical foul, remember, can’t provide value directly, because it gives up .85 points (on average) to the opposition. From where I sit, then, there are two potential kinds of explanation:

Explanations that avoid the nasty conclusion that unsportsmanlike play gives a team an advantage. For example, it could be that technical fouls are committed more often by teams that are already winning, or that winning teams and players just have a propensity to get more technical fouls, and are willing to absorb the cost.

Explanations that embrace the nasty. These would argue that teams that get more technical fouls are better because the behavior that leads to the technicals (i.e., bad behavior) likely provides more benefit than the occasional .85 points that it costs.