ATLANTA HAWKS REAL PLAYER RATINGS 2008-09 Regular Season Through Jan. 5, 2009 Joe Johnson 0.783 Mike Bibby 0.762 Al Horford 0.688 Josh Smith 0.665 Marvin Williams 0.577 Zaza Pachulia 0.536 Acie Law 0.500 Solomon Jones 0.495 Ronald Murray 0.439 Maurice Evans 0.422 SCALE FOR REAL PLAYER RATINGS For a Regular Season Historic Super Star 0.900 and more Super Star 0.800 0.899 A Star Player; An Extremely Good Starter 0.700 0.799 A Great Player; A Solid Starter 0.625 0.699 Major Role Player 0.575 0.624 Role Player 0.525 0.574 Minor Role Player 0.475 0.524 Very Minor Role Player or Very Important Defender 0.425 0.474 Poor Player or Extremely Important Defender 0.375 0.424 Very Poor Player Regardless of Defending 0.325 0.374 Extremely Poor Player / Disaster of a Season / Injury Problems etc. and less 0.324 ATLANTA HAWKS REAL PLAYER PRODUCTION 2008-09 Regular Season Through Jan. 5, 2009 Joe Johnson 1036.60 Mike Bibby 871.15 Al Horford 709.15 Marvin Williams 635.10 Josh Smith 494.40 Maurice Evans 317.45 Zaza Pachulia 303.00 Ronald Murray 288.80 Solomon Jones 145.60 Acie Law 131.95 HAWKS STARS AND GREATS JOE JOHNSON MIKE BIBBY AL HORFORD JOSH SMITH
Note: This guide is a mix of material already seen in the User Guide for Game Breakdowns and some new material, including an important new note about high production players and about the Nuggets, highlighted below in italics. USER GUIDE FOR REAL PLAYER RATING BY TEAM REPORTS (Last updated January 6, 2009) The Real Player Rating (RPR) is a very carefully constructed all inclusive performance measure. Everything of value that a basketball player can do is recorded by official NBA scorekeepers who sit right along the edge of the court, mid-court, and who are trained to observe and record everything that happens in a game. Since nowdays all of these counts are immediately all input into continually updated public data bases online, such as at ESPN, it is theoretically possible to combine everything together into an overall performance measure for each player. This is what the RPR is. Not counting purely subjective and abstract factors such as leadership, the only thing a basketball player can do on the court of any value that is not counted in the RPR is preventing what would have been a score from being a score by defending against the shot well enough to change the shot from a score to a miss. This would be counted too if it were possible, but there is no way to know exactly how many shots a good (or any kind of) defender has changed from being a score to a miss. The RPR is everything (other than as just discussed changing scores to misses) a player does, good and bad, added and substracted (with negative things such as turnovers and missed shots being subtracted) together using very carefully calibrated factors, or weights, per minute of playing time. Because it is per time, it is the best possible measure of the net quality of a basketball player, or simply "how good" the player is (on average) for each minute of playing time. But to be completely honest and clear, although it is the best possible overall real life measure, it is still not a perfect or absolute, "final word" measure on any player. This is because players need not only playing time but possession of the ball in order to produce many of the things that count in the rating. So if, for whatever reason, a player does not get the ball as often as he would on a different team, or with a different coach, or with whatever other circumstances you can dream of, then his RPR will be lower than what it could or would be. So don't think of RPR as the ultimate gospel or bible on how good players are. But do think of it as an extremely accurate and reliable summary of how good the players actually have been in real life in the specific circumstances involved. So with a Real Player Ratings Report for a Team for the Regular Season, you can see very rapidly who the best players on the team have been during the course of the season. However, not as many breakdowns of individual game ratings are going to closely track the overall average for the roster as you might think. This is because one of the interesting things about basketball that makes it different from most other sports is that "how good" a player is from game to game varies radically. The best players have terrible games where they do almost nothing sometimes, while players who normally do not do much can every once in a while have outstanding games, at least if you measure it per minute on the court anyway. If you just looked at actual production, and never at a reserve player's Real Player Rating, you would hardly notice any of his unusually outstanding games, since players who normally do not do much will normally not have much playing time. But in fact, looking at actual production (everything positive added together and everything negative subtracted out) is something that is extremely important too. The total production (everything good and everything bad combined together) is simply called Real Player Production or RPP. There are certain things that only certain players can do very well, and if those things are crucial for the team, than those players will have to play more minutes than they might otherwise play. The extra minutes might tend to reduce the player's Real Player Rating, while his total production will rise with the additional minutes. So to fairly and completely evaluate any player, you must always look at both the Real Player Rating (RPR) and the Real Player Production (RPP). Furthermore, it is strongly suspected that, in order to compete in the playoffs, a team must have as many players of as high a quality (RPR) as possible, while at the same time having at least one or two players whose actual production is among the highest in the NBA regardless of what the RPRs happen to be. Specifically for example, LeBron James' actual massive amount of production is most likely just as important to the Cleveland Cavaliers as is his RPR or, in other words, as is his rate of production. Similarly, Kobe Bryant's quantity is probably at least as important to the Lakers as is his quality. Whereas, teams such as the Denver Nuggets, who have instructed a possible huge producer, Carmelo Anthony, to "not worry about scoring" may have made a fatal mistake relative to the playoffs, because teams with no extremely high rate producers may be generally doomed to lose quickly in the playoffs even if they have an unusually large number of high quality players as shown by RPR. Only players who played at least 5% of the minutes of whoever has played the most minutes on the team are included in these reports. Any player who has played for less than 5% of the minutes of the player who has played the most minutes is not included, since he didn't play for long enough to be fairly or reasonably compared with the other players. For 2008-09, the RPR formula has been very carefully and accurately tweaked again and is set to be as follows: POSITIVE FACTORS Points 1.00 (at par) Number of 3-Pt FGs Made 1.00 Number of 2-Pt FGs Made 0.60 Number of FTs Made 0.00 Assists 1.75 Offensive Rebounds 1.15 Defensive Rebounds 1.25 Blocks 1.60 Steals 2.15 NEGATIVE FACTORS 3-Pt FGs Missed -1.00 2-Pt FGs Missed -0.85 FTs Missed -0.85 Turnovers -2.00 Personal Fouls -0.80 ACTUAL COMBINED AWARD OR PENALTY BY TYPE OF SHOT 3-Pointer Made 4.00 2-Pointer Made 2.60 Free Throw Made 1.00 3-Pointer Missed -1.00 2-Pointer Missed -0.85 Free Throw Missed -0.85 ZERO POINTS: PERCENTAGES BELOW WHICH THERE IS A NEGATIVE NET RESULT 3-Pointer 0 score % 0.200 2-Pointer 0 score % 0.246 1-Pointer 0 score % 0.459 ASSISTS VERSUS TURNOVERS ZERO POINT Assist/Turnover Ratio That Yields 0 Net Points: 1.143 QUALITY (RPR) AND QUANTITY (RPP} SUMMARIZED RPR game reports show for each player the RPR (Real Player Rating) which tells you how good a player did (all the good things minus all the bad things) out on the court per unit of time. The RPP (Real Player Production) report tells you how much in total (the sum of the of the good things minus the sum of the bad things) a player did out on the court, without regard to playing time. Many and maybe most sports watchers and an unknown but probably disturbingly large number of sports managers make the mistakes of exaggerating the importance of quantity and overlooking to some extent quality. These reports allow you to expand your horizons. These reports put quantity and quality side by side, which is extremely valuable, because both are roughly equally important in explaining accurately why and how the team is playing the way it is. Players who over the course of a season appear to rank higher in RPR (quality) but lower in RPP (quantity) may not be getting enough playing time. Players who over the course of a season appear to rank lower in RPR (quality) but higher in RPP (quantity) may be getting too much playing time. But as alluded to earlier, you must not automatically conclude this, because some skills are needed out on the court most of the time, but yet may be available only from a small number players on the roster. Such players may have to get more playing time due to that critical skill in short supply, even if their overall quality does not seem to justify all of that playing time. A relatively common reason for unusual playing time will be players who are either truly outstanding defenders (who get extra playing time) or truly bad defenders (who get their playing time reduced). This is because the one and only thing that is not counted, because it is impossible to calculate it, is the number of shots that a player prevents from being scores. Investigation has to date revealed that, apparently, no one has ever attempted, for the NBA, even rough estimates of the actual value of each player's defending, in terms of number or percentage of scores prevented, or in terms of number or percentage of possessions made worthless. But over the coming year, I am going to be working to see if it is possible to use some combination of advanced statistics that are tracked on certain internet sites as an accurate proxy for the number of shots and/or for the number of possessions ruined by a defender. A common reason for extra playing time will be if a team has a point guard who has many more turnovers than the average point guard has. Because the point guard is so important, a good coach has to play his best guard who can make plays at the position for a full set of minutes every game, pretty much regardless of how many turnovers that player makes. If you take out your designated point guard due to "too many turnovers," it may end up sort of like cutting your foot off because you have a bad case of athletes foot!
I have it. Oh yeah, I've got it! Finally, after several dozen hours of searching over the last 18 months, I have found a database that has defensive ratings of players that appear to be reasonable and accurate. So I am going to always adjust the RPR for defending now. The defending adjustment in most cases is between 0.200 and 1.000, although the entire possible range is 0 to 1.500. The RPR will still not be perfect; it still won't include leadership, style points, or hustling for balls heading out of bounds and things like that, but this was one improvement that I knew I had to have in order to have something that is without a doubt as good or better than any other summary measure out there. Atlanta Hawks changes as follows: ATLANTA HAWKS REAL PLAYER RATINGS Including Adjustment for Defending 2008-09 Regular Season Through Jan. 5, 2009 Joe Johnson 0.832 Mike Bibby 0.819 Al Horford 0.781 Josh Smith 0.770 Marvin Williams 0.638 Zaza Pachulia 0.587 Acie Law 0.530 Solomon Jones 0.552 Ronald Murray 0.494 Maurice Evans 0.461 The defending adjustments were: Joe Johnson ..49 Mike Bibby ..57 Al Horford .93 Josh Smith 1.050 Marvin Williams .61 Zaza Pachulia .51 Acie Law .30 Solomon Jones .57 Ronald Murray ..55 Maurice Evans ..39 So according to the database and formulas in use I discovered, Josh Smith and Al Horford are the best defenders on the Hawks, which I do believe is a correct estimate.
And the scale changes to: Historic Super Star 0.925 and more Super Star 0.835 0.924 A Star Player; An Extremely Good Starter 0.760 0.834 A Great Player; A Solid Starter 0.700 0.759 Major Role Player 0.650 0.699 Role Player 0.600 0.649 Minor Role Player 0.550 0.599 Very Minor Role Player 0.500 0.549 Poor Player at This Time 0.450 0.499 Very Poor Player at This Time 0.350 0.449 Extremely Poor Player at This Time / Disaster and less 0.349
