Detroit Pistons Real Team Ratings: Rodney Stuckey and Tayshaun Prince are the MVPs

Discussion in 'Detroit Pistons' started by tremaine, Jan 13, 2009.

  1. tremaine

    tremaine To Win, Be Like Fitz

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    The Quest is proud to announce to you that the second major improvement to Real Player Ratings (RPR) in less than half a year is now fully up and running. I am now certain that RPR is the best overall rating system in existence, and that it is now roughly as good as it will ever or can ever be.

    I recently developed a statistically valid way to rate the defending of players, that is, what they do to prevent scores other than rebounding, blocks, steals, and fouls, which were always included. Although the technique used had to be indirect and inexact, it validly awards the better defenders with bigger RPR bonuses. It has been validated by comparing results obtained with the defensive ratings shown on three different "advanced basketball statistics" web sites. Our results were shown to be extremely highly correlated with the results shown on the other sites.

    Point Guard Rodney Stuckey is so far the most valuable Piston in the 2008-09 regular season.

    DETROIT PISTONS
    REAL PLAYER RATINGS
    [QUALITY OF PLAYERS]
    2008-09 Regular Season
    As of Jan. 13, 2009

    Rodney Stuckey 0.816
    Allen Iverson 0.798
    Amir Johnson 0.773
    Rasheed Wallace 0.772
    Tayshaun Prince 0.744
    Antonio McDyess 0.706
    Kwame Brown 0.642
    Richard Hamilton 0.637
    Jason Maxiell 0.548
    Arron Afflalo 0.376

    Perfect Player? Is there Such a Thing? 1.000 and more
    Historic Super Star 0.950 and more
    Super Star 0.850 0.949
    A Star Player; An Extremely Good Starter 0.775 0.849
    A Great Player; A Solid Starter 0.700 0.774
    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

    Real Player Production (RPP) is the sum of all the good things minus the sum of all the bad things a player has done since the season began. There is no methodology as of yet for adjusting RPP for defending. Therefore, you should, in order to fairly evaluate the following ratings, remember that the better defenders have done some more for the team relative to the lessor defenders than the ratings are showing.

    DETROIT PISTONS
    REAL PLAYER PRODUCTION
    [QUANTITY OF PLAYERS]
    2008-09 Regular Season
    Through Jan. 13, 2009

    Tayshaun Prince 864.50
    Allen Iverson��* 764.10
    Rodney Stuckey 660.25
    Rasheed Wallace 644.45
    Richard Hamilton 541.85
    Jason Maxiell 301.60
    Amir Johnson 286.50
    Antonio McDyess 260.15
    Arron Afflalo 225.20
    Kwame Brown 193.10

    Congratulations and respect are due to RODNEY STUCKEY who has been leading the Pistons in quality basketball so far this season.

    [​IMG]

    Congratulations and respect are due to TAYSHAUN PRINCE who leads the Pistons in terms of total contributions so far this season.

    [​IMG]

    OTHER PISTONS STARS OF 2008-09
    ALLEN IVERSON
    [​IMG]

    AMIR JOHNSON
    [​IMG]

    RASHEED WALLACE
    [​IMG]


    USER GUIDE FOR TEAM REAL PLAYER RATING REPORTS
    Last updated January 13, 2009

    REAL PLAYER RATINGS IN GENERAL
    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 these days all of these counts are immediately 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 does.

    Not counting purely subjective and abstract factors such as leadership, and not counting 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 or shots during a possession of the opposing team well enough to change the shot or shots from becoming scores. In other words, what does the player do to make the possessions of the opposing teams worthless in terms of points other than what is already counted, which would be rebounds, steals, blocks, and personal fouls. Effective man to man defending and effective rotation on defense would be counted by scorekeepers 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.

    Real Player Rating or RPR is everything tracked by scorekeepers that a player does, good and bad, added and subtracted (with negative things such as turnovers and missed shots being subtracted). Very carefully calibrated factors, or weights, are applied to the different elements. The calibration, as you would expect, is done to reflect the different value toward winning games that different actions on the court have. 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.

    THE DEFENDING COMPONENT OF REAL PLAYER RATINGS-NEW AS OF JANUARY 2009
    As of January 8, 2009, Quest for the Ring is very happy to announce a major breakthrough that we have been talking about and working for and expecting for many months. We recently developed a statistically valid way to rate the defending of players, that is, what they do to prevent scores other than rebounding, blocks, steals, and fouls, which were always included in RPR. Although the technique used had to be indirect and inexact, it validly awards the better defenders with bigger RPR bonuses. It has been validated by comparing results obtained with the defensive ratings shown on three different "advanced basketball statistics" web sites. Our results have been shown to be extremely highly correlated with the results shown on the other sites.

    Where do we start? We use the most official and therefore presumably the most reliable data as the building blocks for rating the defense of NBA players. We start with the player minutes and points scored by the other team while the player was on the court that are shown in the plus/minus statistical section at NBA.com.

    After simply dividing points allowed by minutes on the court, we adjust that rate for the pace of the team and for the quality of the team's defense. The two adjustments are needed so that the ratings of players who are on different teams can be fairly compared.

    Players who are on teams with faster paces give up more points per minute through no fault of their own. Similarly, players who are on teams with less efficient defenses give up more points per minute, everything else held constant. You could not fairly compare players on teams with different paces and different team defense qualities unless you standardized, or in other words controlled for those differences for all NBA players.

    What we are doing is using an indirect and inexact yet accurate and statistically valid way to discover who the better defenders are. No two players are out on the court for all the exact same minutes. So although for every player, what the other players out on the court do defensively while they are out on the court is a very large factor determining what that player's points per minute allowed will be, when you look at many, many hundreds of minutes, what the individual player does, or does not do defensively, as the case may be, will eventually show up in that particular player's points allowed per minute statistic.

    In other words, what any individual player does defensively has to sooner or later show itself in the points allowed per minute. As the number of minutes rise above 1,000 and, for many players, above 2,000 and even 3,000 for a regular season, what a particular player does or does not do defensively becomes more and more exactly shown by the points allowed per minute number. This is very basic statistical sampling theory in operation. Statistical sampling theory is the easy to understand bedrock theory of statistics.

    Due to the necessity of a large sample of minutes, we will not do defending estimates for any player who has played for fewer than 300 minutes. Furthermore, quality of defending estimates will be slightly less accurate for players who have only played between 301 and about 600 minutes than they will be for players who have played for more than 600 minutes. We believe that the estimates are going to be extremely accurate for all players who have played 900 minutes or more. You get the idea: as the number of hundreds of minutes played goes up, the accuracy of this system improves, to the point where it gives you the same information you would have if you knew exactly how many possessions of the other team each player ruined with his defending.

    The final big step in the process is to translate the adjusted points allowed per minute into numerical terms that are the most useful. So we, with a very carefully designed translation scale, amplify the very small differences in different player's points allowed per minute numbers into much larger different RPR defending numbers for each player.

    Like everything statistical we do at Quest, we keep it as simple and reliable as possible, while at the same time spending as much time as necessary on design, quality control and performance evaluation. Unlike some other practitioners, we avoid what you might call layered complexity, which leads to formulas which can not be understood without studying them and which high traffic sites will not show on any of their web pages for fear that the public will rebel against the statistic. At Quest, we think that our rating systems can be understood and evaluated by most high school graduates, and we keep everything out in the open through User Guides such as this one.

    The range of possible defending adjustments to the base RPR is from 0 to about .200. In most cases, however, the adjustment will be between 0.030 and .160.

    EXACTLY WHAT REAL PLAYER RATING IS, AND A CAUTION
    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.

    A NOTE ABOUT REAL PLAYER RATINGS FOR INDIVIDUAL GAMES
    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.

    INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PLAYING TIMES, PLAYER RATINGS, AND THE NEEDS OF TEAMS
    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.

    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!

    MINIMUM PLAYING TIME RULES
    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. Furthermore, as described previously in the adjustment for defending section, only players who have played at least 300 minutes can have a defensive rating, or an overall RPR given to him. Both the 5% and the 300 minutes rules must be met for a player to be rated.

    REAL PLAYER PRODUCTION
    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 is no methodology for including defending (other than rebounding, steals, blocks, and personal fouls) in RPP at this time.

    THE FORMULA
    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 RATING
    A quality of defending rating of between 0 and .200 is added to "unadjusted RPR". In most cases, the defending rating is between 0.030 and .160. See above for an explanation of how we determine how to defensively rate the players.

    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 ONE LAST TIME
    RPR 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.
     
    Last edited: Jan 13, 2009

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