Basketball Statistics Blog

Basketball Statistician's Digest: About Measuring Players

The central objective of Basketball analysis is to try to find a way to measure the value of individual players. The form that this usually takes is to look at each statistic, and assign them particular values. If a player scores 20 points, that’s worth so much. Each assist is worth so much, etc. And at the end, you add up all the numbers to get a value.

Meanwhile, in any case, we are going to analyze team values, for a few reasons. First, because the game is played at a team level. It doesn’t really matter how any individual player does—results are determined by how the team does.
Second, it’s hard to tell how important someone’s assists were, without looking at how the rest of the team performed.

By looking at the team level first, those effects are automatically factored in. And lastly, they’re easily available online and provide large enough samples to be statistically significant.

Photograph: Day Life

The most necessary statistic for any additional analysis, is the number of possessions a team gets in a game. Points scored doesn’t tell the whole story, because different styles of play will lead to different numbers of possessions.

If a team play slow-down ball, almost running the shot clock to zero each possession, then there will be fewer total possessions in the game. Essentially, this shortens the game, since the real length of the game in practical terms is how many possessions each team gets.

A basic misconception in analysis and broadcasting, treat as equivalent points scored and points given up with offensive and defensive quality, without properly normalizing for possessions.

This topic is resumed in the eBA Basketball Statistics Analysis System
at the eBA Encyclopedia > eBA System

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