The Complete History Of The NBA. This is the first time all of these information sources have been combined publicly in a single metric. Naturally, the Suns then proceeded to take the bubble by storm, going 8 … These types of players often have higher defensive RAPMs than their traditional defensive statistics would imply, and some of the reason for that is that they’ve been producing a lot of “hidden” defensive value by inducing offensive fouls. (Although it depends on how the rebound is secured, the average value of a possession after an offensive rebound is around 1.2 points.) RAPTOR also evaluates the location of the shot preceding the rebound, as some shots are much more likely to produce offensive rebounds than others. This is a little tricky, though: Even shots that the NBA’s data currently describes as “wide open” (no defender within 6 feet) likely involve some degree of defensive pressure.10 Based on players’ shooting percentages, we treat the various shooting categories as follows: Isolation turnovers: Our research also found that some types of turnovers — which we call isolation turnovers — are more costly than others in terms of predicting in-sample and out-of-sample RAPM. We’re pretty excited about it. Finally, RAPTOR adjusts individual players’ ratings so that they sum up to reflect the team’s overall performance, adjusted for score effects and strength of competition. For both offensive and defensive rebounds, RAPTOR makes various fixes to the rebound statistics. Data and code behind the articles and graphics at FiveThirtyEight - fivethirtyeight/data There is so much […] The People of Portsmouth. That is to say that MVP, All-NBA and All-Star voters can sometimes pick up on subtle aspects of player quality that RAPTOR misses. Oct. 10, 2019, This rating combines player tracking data, play by play data, traditional box score data, and plus minus data to create a new all-in-one metric. (We made a few adjustments to RAPM from Davis’s version to make it more appropriate for our specific needs.)4. In our various regression specifications, it was ambiguous whether a better statistical fit was produced by using all 3-point attempts or instead weighting 3-point attempts based on how closely contested they were. Defense is more of an uphill battle. FiveThirtyEight’s NBA player projection system identifies similar players throughout NBA history to determine what a current NBA player’s future might look like. They include the following: As compared with our player projections, our process for calculating team projections is more straightforward. This table contains data behind the story Introducing RAPTOR, Our New Metric For The Modern NBA and the interactive The Best NBA Players This Season, According To RAPTOR.. modern_RAPTOR_by_player.csv contains RAPTOR data for every player broken out by season since 2014, when NBA player-tracking data first became available.. modern_RAPTOR_by_team.csv contains RAPTOR data … Because RAPM evaluates players by comparing how a team performs when the player is on or off the court, it struggles with situations where a player creates value for his teammates regardless of whether he’s on the court. Note that we do not apply the team effects adjustment in the predictive version of RAPTOR, PREDATOR, as it does not appear to improve out-of-sample performance. These market values reflect how NBA teams value both regular-season performance and championships, in other words. These have a small amount of value also because they (i) reset the shot clock to 14 seconds and (ii) often allow the offense to inbound the ball from an advantageous position, such as along the baseline near the basket, depending on where the foul was committed (empirically, possessions that restart after a nonshooting foul have a fairly high expected value). Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email. In addition, some very smart defenders (e.g., Green or Gobert) show indications of being selective about who they foul, based in part on which opponents make free throws at a high rate. In other words, RAPM doesn’t appear to add much value as compared with computationally simpler approaches to evaluating on-court/off-court ratings. The main exception is that point guards are slightly more valuable than shooting guards in RAPTOR on average, which makes sense to us since the league’s best point guards (think of a player like Curry) often have all the skills that off-guards do, but they also have additional ball-handling and passing abilities that off-guards sometimes lack. And for international rookies who did not play in the NCAA, we use variables related to both their country of birth and the country where they played professionally before coming to the NBA. 538 introduced their new RAPTOR rating system today. You read that right, second-best to win it all. In the Pythagorean equation, we use an exponent of 14.3 for the regular season and 13.2 for the playoffs.31. The RAPTOR variables correspond to Points above average per 100 possessions added by player. The idea is that centers are matched up against centers, power forwards against power forwards, and so forth. This is because fouls, although costly to the team, are at least a sign that the defensive player is challenging shots. RAPTOR consists of two major components that are blended together to rate players: a “box” (as in “box score”) component, which uses individual statistics (including statistics derived from player tracking and play-by-play data), and an “on-off” component, which evaluates a team’s performance when the player and various combinations of his teammates are on or off the floor. Thus, for example, offensive rebounds contribute to a player’s offensive RAPTOR and defensive rebounds to a player’s defensive RAPTOR, rather than blurring them together. Fastbreak turnovers committed: Just as generating turnovers that result in fast breaks help a team’s offense, committing turnovers hurts a team’s defense. This should make intuitive sense: a team is less likely to step off the gas pedal in the postseason when where is more on the line. We also make heavier use of a team’s overall offensive and defensive ratings than our current RAPTOR ratings do. Wins above replacement projections are based on a combination of regular-season and playoff performances. Since 2013-14, the best and worst players based on positional opponents’ points allowed are as follows: Positional opponents’ points per 100 possessions for players with at least 10,000 possessions played, 2013-14 through 2018-19, One advantage of this metric is that it can capture players who produce lots of blocks or rebounds at the rim — such as Kenneth Faried or Mitchell Robinson — but who aren’t very mobile defenders and might allow opposing centers and power forwards (especially stretch bigs) to score at high rates. Our average includes all candidates that FiveThirtyEight considers “major.” Candidates with insufficient polling data are not displayed in the averages. The fivethirtyeight package was featured in The fivethirtyeight R Package: “Tame Data” Principles for Introductory Statistics and Data Science Courses by Kim, Ismay, and Chunn (2018) published in Volume 11, Issue 1 of the journal “Technology Innovations in Statistics Education”. Layups produce high rates of offensive rebounds, by contrast — so defensive rebounds are worth more in this case. Conversely, players who played in worse leagues and who come from poorer countries start out slower but show steeper improvement. We find that there is no additional predictive power in using blocks when projecting RAPM, once you’re already accounted for opponents’ field goals.17. For more detail on Approximate RAPTORS, you can find a files here that lists each player’s rating in the regular season and playoffs separately, or a version that combines a player’s performance over the whole season. Specifically, we estimate that a steal increases the value of a subsequent offensive position by 0.2 points, and a blocked shot on which a team comes down with the rebound inbounds increases it by 0.11 points. Net passes: The NBA also keeps track of the number of passes a player makes and receives during the game, and a positive passing differential is associated with a higher RAPM in and out of sample. In comparison to “Box” RAPTOR, calculating a player’s “On-Off” RAPTOR rating is relatively simple. array, Recent All-NBA, MVP and All-Star appearances. We create depth charts for each team and project playing time using a combination of algorithms and human inputs. The full-fledged version of RAPTOR is available for the 2013-14 season onward, as that’s when the NBA’s player-tracking data came on line. 538 introduced their new RAPTOR rating system today. We calculate defensive usage rate by adding the number of possessions where the player induced a turnover, plus possessions where he committed a foul that results in free-throw attempts, plus possessions where he was the nearest defender on a field-goal attempt. On the other hand, in today’s NBA, any offensive rebound is rare, and therefore any offensive rebound is fairly valuable. at @natesilver538. Assists on dunks and corner threes are considerably more valuable than assists on midrange jumpers. Failure to account for assisted field goals will bias the value of offensive rebounds downward, and some advanced stats such as RPM very likely understate the importance of offensive rebounds for this reason. Data and code behind the articles and graphics at FiveThirtyEight - fivethirtyeight/data All data in the fivethirtyeight package are lazy-loaded, so you can access any dataset without running data(): library (fivethirtyeight) head (bechdel)? newline-delimited, CSV options: These "historical" data files use full player-tracking RAPTOR for seasons since 2014, a version of RAPTOR that mixes boxscore value estimates with single-year regularized plus-minus data for seasons from 2001 to 2013, and a version of RAPTOR that only uses a boxscore estimate of value for the seasons from 1977 through 2000. FiveThirtyEight's RAPTOR Statistic and Its Impact on the Jordan vs. LeBron GOAT Debate. The categories are exclusive rather than additive, so if a player gets 5 points for winning the MVP, he does not get additional credit for being an All-Star or on an All-NBA team. In addition, score effects are considerably larger in the regular season than in the playoffs. 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