player compatibility

[GHack101]

Does anyone know of any papers/articles/bodies of work that involves some metric of player compatibility? Maybe not just what lineups currently work the best together, but the potential of mix-matching certain players ?

I haven't been able to find much more then this paper:
http://www.sloansportsconference.com/wp ... is_NBA.pdf

Alternatively any ideas about how one would go about it ? Metric for how versatile teams are defensively? Overlapping shot charts? I know this is a bit of an abstract question and I'm not looking for something specific. Just curious what people know/think.

Thanks in advance!

[Crow]

RAPM player pairs was one approach, in past. Raw plus / minus for player pairs is less helpful but can still open the research.

[Nate]

...
Alternatively any ideas about how one would go about it ? Metric for how versatile teams are defensively? Overlapping shot charts? I know this is a bit of an abstract question and I'm not looking for something specific. Just curious what people know/think.
....

You could just do the brute force thing - calculate whatever metric you like pairwise and individually, and then, as long as your metric is not linear, you'll see some deltas. There probably isn't enough data for that though.

More generally, you can start with some idea - like finding players to usefully cover all the shooting areas on the floor. You could also look at where players spend their time on the floor, or which players draw attention, and which players are good at exploiting space.