ATLANTA HAWKS
REAL PLAYER RATINGS
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
SCALE FOR REAL PLAYER RATINGS
For a Regular Season
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
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
(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, and a few other, less common things not being counted or tracked by anyone yet, such as chasing down loose balls, the only thing a basketball player can regularly do on the court of any value, that is not counted by scorekeepers, 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. All of the good and bad combined together is divided by minutes, so we can tell the rate, which we need to determine the overall quality or value of the player.
As of January 8, 2009, Quest for the Ring is very happy to announce a major breakthrough that we have been hoping for and cautiously expecting for many months. We discovered a relatively obscure web site with a sophisticated basketball database. This gem of a site has, for every NBA player, numerous advanced statistics, including "Defensive Rating." A player's defensive rating reflects how well that player defends, in other words, how well the player does in converting scores to misses and, more generally, how well the player ruins possessions of the opposing team.
A careful review of both the underlying formulas used and of the actual ratings of players that resulted from them resulted in a decision by Quest for the Ring to use these ratings in the Real Player Ratings effective immediately. A conversion chart has been constructed to translate the defensive ratings to factors that will be added to all of the other RPR elements (all of which are counted by the scorekeepers, as you will recall.) So effective January 8, 2009, Real Player Ratings will from now on include good estimates of the quality of every player's defending.
The range of possible defending adjustments to the base RPR is from 0 to 1.5. In most cases, however, the adjustment will be between 0.200 and 1.000.
Because it is per time, RPR 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 of course, 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 exactly how high the RPRs happen to be. (All high RPP players will be relatively high RPR players; some will be higher than others.) 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. This is because extremely high RPP players can by themselves "dominate a game" to some extent, meaning they can by themselves possibly win the game for their team, without worrying about complications that come in to play if you need to coordinate several high RPR but ultimately and theoretically limited RPP players.
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
DEFENDING ADJUSTMENT
A quality of defending adjustment of between 0 and 1.4 is added, depending on what the player's Defense Rating is. In turn, the Defense Rating is a good indirect estimation of how many shots a player changes from being a score to a miss and, more generally, how many possessions of the other team are ruined by that player's defending. Although the overall adjustment range is 0 to 1.5, in most cases, the adjustment will be between 0.200 and 1.000.
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).
Another 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!
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