Archive for the 'Statistical +/-' Category

If you've been following the blog recently, I've developed a way to convert a player's Basketball on Paper stats to a Statistical Plus/Minus estimate. I'll spare you the gory details (which you can read about at the bottom of this page), and simply say that this version of SPM is less biased toward any one position and captures defense better than the original edition, making it the superior SPM in my opinion (although, as always, I'm certainly open to critiques).

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Which players excel against the best defenses, and which ones get their numbers by feasting on the weakest Ds?

To answer those questions, here's the latest installment of a series I started in 2009 and continued in 2010... The concept is simple: I rate each team defensively using the BBR Rankings formula (including regular-season and playoff games), then track how well each player performed offensively against opponents of varying defensive quality.

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As a follow-up to this afternoon's list of the Top 593 Players of 2012, here's a positional breakdown for the 452 players who played at least 1 game in 2011:

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(Note: File this squarely under "Insane Ideas".)

Watching one of the NFL Network's "Top 100 Players of 2011" shows this weekend, I was inspired to create a similar list for the NBA using APBRmetric stats. But why stop at 100? Instead, I ranked all 593 players who played at least 1 NBA game since 2008-09.

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As a follow-up to Thursday's post about the best Finals performances according to Statistical Plus/Minus, here's a playoff ranking since 2003 with a few tweaks:

• I finally re-ran the Offensive SPM formula without steals and blocks. Steals in particular were causing certain players to be extremely overvalued offensively, and there's little reason to include those defensive stats in an offensive regression. (DSPM is the same as before -- and yes, it still includes several offensive stats, but DSPM wouldn't explain more than 25% of defense without them, while OSPM's explanatory power was barely affected by dropping steals & blocks out.)
• At the request of readers, instead of per-minute SPM players are ranked by per-game "Impact", which is SPM times the % of team minutes played.
• All of a player's games are weighted by Championship Leverage, which takes into account how much the game will potentially swing the odds of a team winning the NBA title. Leverage is relative to the average playoff game in a given season (which always has a leverage index of 1.00). For instance, Game 1 of the Magic-Hawks 1st-round series had a leverage of 0.44, while Game 5 of the Finals had a leverage of 5.28. This means that, in terms of influence on championship probability, Thursday's game was 12 times as important as Game 1 of a 1st-round series, and the rankings will reflect this.

Finally, why 2003? Because that was the year the NBA adopted best-of-7 first-round series, allowing me to use the series win probabilities found here.

Anyway, here were the top playoff performers since 2003 according to per-game SPM impact, weighted by the importance of the game (minimum 10 games):

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With the NBA Finals locked up 2-2, it seems like a good time to look at the best Finals performances in our database (which extends back to 1991 for playoff games). The metric of choice is Statistical Plus-Minus, an estimate of the player's contribution to the team's point differential per 100 possessions, using his boxscore stats as inputs. And, as an added twist, I weighted each game of the Finals according to its series leverage (the expected change in series win probability of the game in question relative to the series' overall average per-game change), meaning that performance counts more in the games that contain the most pressure. Here is every player in the dataset who played a minimum of 24 minutes per team game:

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Miami Heat

58-24, 1st in NBA Southeast Division (Schedule and Results)
Coach: Erik Spoelstra (58-24)

PTS/G: 102.1 (8th of 30) ▪ Opp PTS/G: 94.6 (6th of 30)
SRS: 6.76 (1st of 30) ▪ Pace: 90.9 (20th of 30)
Off Rtg: 111.7 (3rd of 30) ▪ Def Rtg: 103.5 (5th of 30)
Expected W-L: 61-21 (2nd of 30)

Arena: AmericanAirlines Arena ▪ Attendance: 810,930 (4th of 30)

Playoffs:
NBA Finals versus Dallas Mavericks
Won NBA Eastern Conference Finals (4-1) versus Chicago Bulls
Won NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals (4-1) versus Boston Celtics
Won NBA Eastern Conference First Round (4-1) versus Philadelphia 76ers
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Bill Simmons and BS Report HoF guest Chuck Klosterman are discussing Larry Bird vs. Dirk Nowitzki in a podcast. Simmons says that the advanced stats place Dirk in the same category as Bird, perhaps even giving Dirk the edge, and he's not sure how he feels about this.

I wasn't sure how I felt, either, so I looked up the numbers. Here is a monster table with their advanced stats -- each has played exactly 13 years:

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Dallas Mavericks

57-25, 2nd in NBA Southwest Division (Schedule and Results)
Coach: Rick Carlisle (57-25)

PTS/G: 100.2 (11th of 30) ▪ Opp PTS/G: 96.0 (10th of 30)
SRS: 4.41 (8th of 30) ▪ Pace: 91.3 (18th of 30)
Off Rtg: 109.7 (8th of 30) ▪ Def Rtg: 105.0 (8th of 30)
Expected W-L: 53-29 (8th of 30)

Arena: American Airlines Center ▪ Attendance: 803,968 (6th of 30)

Playoffs:
Won NBA Western Conference Semifinals (4-0) versus Los Angeles Lakers
Won NBA Western Conference First Round (4-2) versus Portland Trail Blazers

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Chicago Bulls

62-20, 1st in NBA Central Division (Schedule and Results)
Coach: Tom Thibodeau (62-20)

PTS/G: 98.6 (20th of 30) ▪ Opp PTS/G: 91.3 (2nd of 30)
SRS: 6.53 (2nd of 30) ▪ Pace: 90.4 (23rd of 30)
Off Rtg: 108.3 (11th of 30) ▪ Def Rtg: 100.3 (1st of 30)
Expected W-L: 61-21 (1st of 30)

Arena: United Center ▪ Attendance: 893,462 (1st of 30)

Playoffs:
Won NBA Eastern Conference Semifinals (4-2) versus Atlanta Hawks
Won NBA Eastern Conference First Round (4-1) versus Indiana Pacers

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