Advanced Basketball Analytics – Who Are Your Best Players? 
If you are at least five games into your season, you have a great opportunity to really determine who your most productive players are using the Hoopsalytics Player Impact analysis tool.
Rather than showing individual stats, Player Impact shows team stats when a player is on the floor. This will show your coaching staff who has the biggest effect on team offense or team defense, or other categories such as rebounding, turnovers, or forcing turnovers. It’s the modern way top coaches gain insight over traditional stats.
Defense in particular is not well evaluated by traditional stats. There are no stats for a defensive-minded player who gives proper help, communicates, is an on-ball stopper and boxes out, but you can see how that player’s effort is reflected in Defensive PPP (points per possession).
For your best two-way players, look at the Net PPP number. In the screenshot above, you can see how Joel Soriano from St. Johns is one of the least effective two-way players, in spite of his reputation and offensive prowess.
Click here to zoom in on the above screenshot.
Another amazing case study: One of our summer league teams had a player who was last in points, second to last in assists, yet had the highest offensive impact of anyone on the team. You can read more about him here.
Player Impact Measurement Options
The Hoopsalytics Player Impact tool gives you a few different views of overall impact. You can see just when a player is ON the floor, when they are OFF the floor, or the NET (ON minus OFF).
You can also do this same analysis for player pairs or groups of 3. And you can exclude garbage time from your analysis to give an even better measurement. Here’s how the options appear:
Accounting for Coat-Tailing
The numbers for an individual can be impacted by other players an individual is paired with – we call this “coat-tailing”. Using the Player Stats tool, you can exclude players, and see how all the other player’s stats are affected when one or more player’s time on the floor are excluded from the measurement. Here we exclude Dingle, and see that Soriano’s Net PPP is below some of the other players:
Accounting for Games Missed Against Weaker Opponents
For some players who have missed games due to injury, the difference in strength-of-schedule can be a factor. You can click on the number of games next to any player to redo stats for just those games. For Cruz Davis, clicking the “4” game badge next to his name will show these same stats for just these 4 games.
Explainer Video
This video shows how to use the Hoopsalytics tools mentioned above to make accurate player evaluations:
Start Now!
No matter where you are in your season, it’s never too late to make use of Hoopsalytics to get the best possible insights into your players.
Contact us today to learn more or get pricing.
Really like these features. The comparison on games played only is a big recalibration that was needed. Well done!