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The doldrums of the offseason may mean vacation for most of the league, but the recess allows us time to think about basketball in innovative ways.
Ambitious projects that would have little use during the season, or get lost in the frenzy of the draft and free agency have more room to breathe and come to life this time of year. So with ample time to sit around and just think about hoops without any games, we indulged perhaps our most curious itch.
Predicting on-court impact before it happens is no easy task. NBA teams spend millions of dollars hiring the most innovative thinkers to create the most advanced projection models. Gamblers and fantasy basketball players and fans of the game around the world have endless use for similar data.
Unfortunately, as we all know, there are no shortcuts or solutions that tell us exactly who is going to do what over the course of an NBA season.
There are countless variables that interfere along the way and even still, no one agrees about how to measure individual success. No one seems to agree on how to quantify defensive impact, for example.
But that won’t stop us from waving the white flag this early in the process.
RotoWire has a fantastic resource that provides full-season projections with every box score stat for every single player in the league. Although the best all-in-one metrics in basketball also include tracking data and on-off factors, we wanted to find a crude number to assign to each player.
We asked a basketball data scientist who works for an NBA team to tell us which was the best statistic using just the data provided by Rotowire. This individual recommended Daily RAPM Estimate (DRE) by Kevin Ferrigan.
You can learn more about the metric via Nylon Calculus. But the shortened version is that it’s like Player Efficiency Rating (PER) but weights derived from RAPM (which you can learn more about here) instead of just arbitrary weights.
We reached out to Ferrigan and asked if he would convert the raw numbers from RotoWire into his catch-all metric. Fortunately for us, he was interested and this was similar to projects he had done in the past.
The first step was to convert their per-game rates into per-48-minute rates, which are more aligned with per-100 possessions. He continued:
“[I] used the weights for DRE outlined in the linked post to create a raw DRE per 48 number. After figuring out the minutes-weighted projected league average for raw DRE per 48, I backed that average out (the same basic idea as the intercept in the original DRE regression) to give me DRE per 48 minutes. Once I had DRE per 48 minutes, it was pretty simple math to convert Total Projected Minutes and DRE per 48 minutes above replacement level (-2.0) to a projected Wins Above Replacement (WARP) measure.”
DRE is a metric that includes personal fouls, which RotoWire does not project. So he also had to come up with estimates for that “using a simple linear regression” from last season.
Once that was done, however, he succeeded in providing a reasonably predictive Wins Above Replacement Player score (how many more wins would a team win because of this person relative to a league average) for all individuals signed to an NBA roster.
Ferrigan explained that these numbers are “by no means gospel” and cautioned that projections based on box scores will not accurately capture defensive impact.
“But these are good enough estimates to work in broad strokes,” Ferrigan added.
Based on these calculations, here are the top projections for 2023-24:
| Nikola Jokic | 20.1 |
| Giannis Antetokounmpo | 16.0 |
| Joel Embiid | 15.6 |
| Tyrese Haliburton | 13.8 |
| Damian Lillard | 12.7 |
| Shai Gilgeous-Alexander | 12.6 |
| Desmond Bane | 12.4 |
| Lauri Markkanen | 12.1 |
| Stephen Curry | 11.9 |
| Anthony Davis | 11.6 |
Thanks to RotoWire and Ferrigan, we have an assigned impact number for every single player in the league. As the offseason progresses, we’re going to continue to cite this metric during our NBA coverage.
While it’s not perfect, it’s likely very helpful for betting (e.g. we are looking at Tyrese Haliburton and Desmond Bane as serious candidates to win NBA’s Most Improved Player) and other fun calculations. Stay tuned for more.
The Tip-Off
Some NBA goodness from around the USA TODAY Sports network.
Steph Curry’s stories about Kobe Bryant on Hot Ones were made even better with the video clips:
“The SAG-AFTRA strike has essentially brought the promotional duties from actors to a complete stop, forcing shows like Hot Ones to look elsewhere for celebrity guests. This week, the show re-visited the sports world with Warriors star Steph Curry taking on the wings a couple weeks after England’s Harry Kane.
Curry’s appearance on the show — where guests answer questions while eating increasingly spicier wings — didn’t disappoint.
During the interview, host Sean Evans asked Curry about what it meant for him that Kobe Bryant was one of the first NBA stars to recognize Curry’s greatness. That led to Curry sharing a couple stories about how he impressed Kobe, and The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor managed to find clips of the moments Curry referred to.”
Yeah, this rocks.
Shootaround
—HoopsHype ranked the top-24 point guards for the 2023-24 season
— Steph Curry makes bold claim heading into new Warriors season
— Bulls legend Michael Jordan’s 1996 car will be auctioned for $23
— On Derrick White’s new role (and new look) with the Celtics
