Dwyane Wade's infamous Finals of 2006 would be an example -- there's no way I believe he puts up those numbers, has that impact, under 90s rules.

The same could be said and, I suppose, *is*, in relation to Dirk Nowitzki's Finals and overall playoffs this year. Defenders are helpless, more because of the way the game is now officiated than Dirk's skillsets; at the very least, the rule changes are greatly playing up and complementing those skills.

Individual performance is often higher, made easier, thanks to the machinations to "open the game up" that have been pushed over the last decade.

I'm wondering if you could calculate correlation coefficients for SPM vs. leverage for each player? A statistically significant positive coefficient would suggest better play when the leverage is high; a negative would indicate a choker.

#5 - Basically. By far, his best impact games of the 2003 playoffs were 5/29/2003 vs Dallas (Game 6, 4-4 3fg, 2 reb, 3 ast in 13 minutes) and 6/13/2003 vs New Jersey (Game 5, 6 pts, a rebound and a steal in 9 minutes). Those games happened to carry leverages of 2.13 and 5.11 respectively, and then in his other high-leverage games his average impact was a little better than 0, so he comes out looking good here. If your bad games come with almost no leverage (on 5/7/2003 vs. LA he had an impact of -3.31, but that game only had a leverage of 0.88), and your good games come with a lot of leverage, you'll do well, which is as it should be.

#6 - That would double-count leverage, since impact already takes into account the leverage of every game the player played. But yeah, an adjustment for total games could be made, since impact is a per-game metric.

No Ray Allen surprises me.

Am I missing something or are defensive rebounds more valuable for overall SPM than offensive rebounds now?