Measuring a team's average height, part I

In Ken Pomeroy's 2006-2007 Big 12 Preview, he calculates a number he calls "effective height." He says the following about this stat:

Effective height is the average height of the team weighted by
minutes played. I thought it would be revealing, but there was only
a 1.2" difference between the tallest and shortest teams in the
conference.

Like Ken, I find the lack of interesting information provided by this number very dissatisfying. Some teams are just TALLER than others, and there should be a simple numerical method for quantifying this fact.

I ask (therefore) whether there is a way to tweak Ken's "effective height." For instance, a 6'5" PG may be a very nice thing to have, but--considering that he does most of his playing on the perimeter--does he REALLY affect your team's effective playing height by an entire six inches over (say) a 5'11" PG?

Said another way: isn't a 3-man team with a 5'11" PG and two 6'10" forwards somehow "taller" than one with a 6'5" PG and two 6'7" forwards, despite the fact that the average heights of the two trios are the same?

You might argue that if the PG is posting up and driving to the basket a great deal, or pulling lots of rebounds, then, yes, he DOES affect the team's height--though maybe still not as much as a PF would.

I might even agree with this argument. In fact, this line of thought leads me to several ideas. I'll look at the first one today.

1. An "inside shooting" stat. Ken Pomeroy calculates exactly this in the aforementioned Big 12 preview. He uses 100*(FTA-3PA)/FGA. Pomeroy says, "For regulars, values range from about -70 for pure perimeter players to +70 for pure post players."

If I'm going to eventually shoot for a weighted average of height based both on minutes played and on some sort of "inside rating," then I'm going to prefer a number between 0 and 1 rather than one between -70 and 70. To get there, we could (say) add a hundred to Ken's number and then divide by 200. Or we could do something like FTA/(FTA+3PA).

If we're just looking for a stat by which to scale "height" ratings for teams, I think we can do better than this one. Still, I find this stat fairly interesting (in either of the forms I mentioned above) as a measure of where a player does his shooting.

It may be even more interesting as a measure of where a team does its shooting. I'll keep track of it this season for SEC teams, so stay tuned.

In the meantime, idea #2 to follow tomorrow...