APBRmetrics

For the last few weeks, I've been searching the internet for a somewhat simple, yet sill relatively in-depth formula for gauging team success AND individual player success. At the community college level, it seems a little more difficult to find something that can either account for or eliminate the players' tendencies to often be inconsistent. Also, while a few of our players seems to have a fairly high basketball IQ, even more of our players are simply athletic, yet have little to no basketball IQ. We need something on paper that can show us which players are really making a solid impact, and which players are just flashy. And finally, the league we're in has no statistical information from years past that could be used to determine any sort of league average in terms of stats. So, I'm trying to find something that can help us as a coaching staff figure out which of our rotations work best, and which of our 'flashy' players really aren't helping us, if not hurting us, which I think some are. Some of the kids are great scorers and efficient rebounders, but cannot seem to grasp the idea of defense, which obviously hurts us. PLEASE HELP!

*Also important: What we would want to do is to be able to figure out player value relative to the team on a game-by-game basis. So, at the end of the game, inputting their stats (minutes played, FG missed, etc.) into a formula, and seeing how efficient or inefficient that player was in the game.

So do you have data from this year?

I do, we've played 3 games so far, and I have stats and film for each player and each game at the office.

Right now we're using two different simple metrics: the NBA quick formula, adding the positives and subtracting the negatives, and something we found online out of Houston College which basically adds these things up similarly as the NBA quick formula, but multiplies them by different numbers (2, 3, 5, etc.) based on perceived "value" and also divides the positive attributes by the negative ones. However, this only gives us individual player efficiency, and doesn't show how the team suffers/improves when that player is in the game, and when there is no extreme difference in their individual efficiency, we'd like to find something that shows how the team becomes better when certain players' are in versus when others' are in. I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense, I'm tired, it's late, and the Tip-Off Marathon is on in the background.

Unfortunately you have nothing like enough data to say which of your lineups is most efficient, in fact you don't have enough data to say anything much about the players individually, either. I know that's a rubbish response, but using data with large uncertainties is not going to be useful to you.

Having said that, I probably have a few formulas you can use with the standard box score values to try to tease out some information, but digging into defence is something you can probably only do well with your eyes at this point.

I figured there wouldn't be anything too in depth, but would love the few metrics you said you thought of.

Can you post the box score numbers you do have? I don't need player names, but some sort of unique identifier for each player would be handy - I want to tailor the coefficients to the environment of your guys, as the values I use for the NBA will be too harsh/nice to some players.

How would I go about attaching an Excel file onto this discussion thread? Or would I have to post it to a third-party site and provide the link?

ChrisCoug wrote:How would I go about attaching an Excel file onto this discussion thread? Or would I have to post it to a third-party site and provide the link?

Posting it to Google Docs would probably be the best way to go about it.

Google docs would be ideal if possible, but any old third party upload site would do.

Currently uploading them, will post link when they are completed.

Here's our page. http://cccaastats.org/sports/mbkb/2013- ... /grossmont
Thank you again for helping, you guys are great!

I may be being slow, but I can't see minutes played by each of the guys there? There seems to just be the number of games played in the minutes column? Making these stats per-minute rather than per-game will be pretty important.

No, that's on us. Our other assistant coach lost the paper that had our minutes, and the tournament did not save them after giving them to us. We have another tournament this weekend, and I'll be in charge of securing the paper this time. I'll try to watch the games again and keep track of minutes sometime this weekend.

You can do your own analytics if you have video of the games and a Windows PC using Jam23 Analytics software. Go to http://www.jam23.net/bbstatshome.htm for more information. It takes time but visit http://www.jam23.net/ncaachamp2013.htm for examples of what you can learn. Go to http://www.jam23.net/NumberOneNumbers.pdf for an interpretive article.