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ODE TO THE UNDERRATED
Ode To The Underrated: Andrei Kirilenko Edition
2:50 PMJUN 24, 2015 By NEIL PAINE
Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz waits during a foul shot at a game against the Miami Heat in 2010 at American Airlines Arena in Miami.
Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz waits during a foul shot at a game against the Miami Heat in 2010 at American Airlines Arena in Miami.
MIKE EHRMANN / GETTY IMAGES
It was little more than a footnote in Tuesday’s NBA news blotter, but the retirement of veteran forward Andrei Kirilenko caused longtime members of the basketball analytics community1 to cast our thoughts back over some fond memories. Kirilenko was one of the movement’s first underground stars, a player who, because of his statistical versatility and measurable on-court impact, deserved far more credit than he got from mainstream analysts.
To most observers, Kirilenko enjoyed a decent but ultimately forgettable NBA career, mostly with the Utah Jazz. He averaged 11.8 points, 5.5 rebounds and 2.7 assists per game — practically the textbook definition of “pedestrian numbers” — and although he was voted into one All-Star game and earned a handful of All-Defensive team nods, Kirilenko was never considered an elite player. (At one point he was the league’s sixth-highest-paid player, but the contract was also widely viewed as an albatross.) Tellingly, Kirilenko has less than a 1 percent probability of making the Hall of Fame in the estimation of Basketball-Reference.com’s algorithm, which is built to mimic human voting patterns. By conventional standards, Kirilenko was nothing special.
For statheads, though, he was a superstar, especially in the early stages of his career.
When Dan Rosenbaum,2 then an economics professor at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, first successfully reverse-engineered Wayne Winston and Jeff Sagarin’s proprietary Adjusted Plus/Minus (APM) metric in 2004, a few of the usual suspects topped his player rankings: reigning MVP Kevin Garnett and statistical legend Tracy McGrady. But third on the list was a surprise: Kirilenko, then a third-year player with modest traditional numbers. It was no fluke, either: Kirilenko showed up third overall in the combined 2005 and 2006 APM ratings computed by Rosenbaum disciple Dave Lewin, and Kirilenko peaked at second overall in Jeremias Engelmann’s Real Plus/Minus (RPM)3 ratings for 2006. During his best years, you could count on one hand the number of NBA players who more positively influenced their team’s performance than Kirilenko.
