As usual, Phil Jackson made another interesting tweet today:
And, as usual received many criticisms from “Experts”, who just looked at the raw numbers from each players, and saw that there is just no way such a statement is justified, but it is not that simple!
When you compare two players (or two objects) who have very different data feature values, it is not that they can’t be compared, you must effectively normalize the data somehow to make the sets comparable.
In this case, I used the data from Basketball-Reference.com to compare Chris Jackson’s 6 seasons in Denver to Stephen Curry’s last 6 seasons (including this one) and took into account 45 different statistical measures, and came up with the following correlation matrix/similarity matrix plot:
Dark blue circles indicate a strong correlation, while dark red circles indicate a weak correlation between two sets of features.
What would be of interest in an analysis like this is to examine the diagonal of this matrix, which offers a direct comparison between the two players:
One can see that there are many features that have strong correlation coefficients.
Therefore, it is true that Stephen Curry and Chris Jackson do in fact share many strong similarities!
Relativity Digest 