APBRmetrics

Embid has improved on 3 other metrics but unchanged on PER. PER still the exception and exceptionally high relative to the others. Either he has improved based on the 3 other metrics or he hasn't based on PER. (Or split the difference, he has changed but not as much as the 3 indicate.)

Dredge from a few days ago has him at neutral, no impact. Lower than any of the other mentioned metrics including RPM by itself. By RPM he is 17th best center or about an average starter (or a bit better accounting for starting quality bench centers). By Dredge, less I think.

Barely above neutral on pt-pm (which won the team win prediction contest twice, fwiw).

Quite the range of estimates. But PER the greatest outlier from the average of all.

PER is better at saying What Kind of player he is than how good. But you could see that from just usage instead of from a highly influenced by usage metric.

Now or two weeks ago is not that important.

Embid is probably 2 turnovers, 1-2 defensive stops and maybe another made basket per game from greatness. 5 points. 0 or 1 or 2 plus 5, yeah that would be great and in line with where the other 3 metrics are right now. Plus 5 and PER would be great plus another almost equal serving of more greatness. That seems too much to expect or credit but we'll see.

Giannis A., 7 pt yr. to yr. improvement on BPM, 5 on RPM. Taking Middleton's value and something more. Team wins 1 more game out of 10 than last season. Big 56% win of time when Giannis is on court.

Joel plus Noel and Ilyasova, plus rest of Sixers equals 2 more wins per 10 games or 30ish%. 52% win of time with him on court. Nice step up but a long way to elite contention still.

Sixers are +2 pts/100 with Embiid on the court.
Without him, they're -12
http://www.basketball-reference.com/pla ... n-off/2017
Difference is +14 pts/100.
He brings the Sixers ORtg up by 5 pts while opponents are depressed by 9.

That is raw on/off. That is him and every other difference of players on vs off, his team and opponent.

RPM, now, gives him credit for about 15% of the total raw difference. Climbing, but come on. Are we back to that?

By RPM estimate not being Okafor is twice as impactful as being Embid (compared to a neutral, average player).

We don't know much about replacing Okafor with some other player on the Sixers, do we?
Here are their top 4 lineups with significant minutes both with and without Embiid in the mix: R Covington, G Henderson, S Rodriguez, D Saric, E Ilyasova, T McConnell, N Stauskas, J Okafor
http://www.basketball-reference.com/tea ... 7/lineups/
This doesn't account for opponents. It does cover 316 minutes, or 45% of Embiid's floor time. Apparently it's dinkier lineups that bring his Net down to +14.
Note that they're still terrible with Embiid and Okafor together (line 4).

The more minutes he plays, the more likely they are to win:

Robert Covington leads the Sixers in minutes, going just under 30 mpg.
It's his 3rd year in Philly; and as the team has gotten gradually better, his minutes have increased.+/- is actually called on-off at b-r.com -- on-court +/- minus off-court +/- ... so it's relative to the team.
All his summary stats are in decline thru the interval, except for BPM which is essentially unchanged.
Is he key to the team's defense? Would he be the weakest player to lead a team in minutes?
He first appeared in the NBA for the Rockets, 3 years ago today.

http://fansided.com/2017/01/31/nylon-ca ... nting-per/

I saw this article today and saw a typical misleading argument in regard to the "break-even fg%" in PER. Using Brook Lopez 2016 as an example, in which he takes 400 more FGA while converting 140 of those additional shots, which turns out to increase his PER when keeping everything else constant. The issue here is turnovers, and what we do when we just increase the amount of shots without increasing the amount of turnovers is creating a player with a significant better TOV%. Lopez had 11.6 TOV% in 2016, the increased usage without a turnover would drop that to 9.2 instead. He scores additional points while not using up as many possessions as we would expect for a guy with a 11.6 TOV%. If we not only increase his FGA by 400, but also add the expected 52 turnovers of a guy with 11.6 TOV%, Lopez' PER would actually decrease by about 0.5 points.

If Lopez would be able to just take more shots per minute without turning the ball over, that might just help the team overall to become better ... he can basically dish out some "Kobe assists" with his missed shots.

I think you missed the point there, and I'm surprised you're defending PER at all.

Did you notice I was ignoring FTs too?

The point was showing how the metric responds to points and FG%.

And I don't think you read that close enough: "Kobe assists" are already factored in because missed shots have an offensive rebound factor.

If you really think Brook Lopez taking 140/400 midrange shots is valuable, more power to you I guess.

And I chose midrange shots because those are easier to take without accruing more turnovers.

Thanks for doing this. A worthwhile project given PER's continued prominence.

Will Nylon Calculus be updating this regularly?

In the spirit of your other incremental improvements, would you still consider adding value of shot defense at RIM (points saved vs. expected)? I would encourage you to fill this biggest of holes even if rest of defense not covered by box score stats remains missing.

Would you consider doing a BPM2 and / WinShares2? Would you consider blending these revised standards, by themselves or with Dredge and PT-PM (and maybe DRE)?

AcrossTheCourt wrote:I think you missed the point there, and I'm surprised you're defending PER at all.

Did you notice I was ignoring FTs too?

The point was showing how the metric responds to points and FG%.

Does this:"Using Brook Lopez 2016 as an example, in which he takes 400 more FGA while converting 140 of those additional shots, which turns out to increase his PER when keeping everything else constant." misrepresent your example? Yes or No?

And I'm not defending PER here, but pointing out a common omittance when talking about efficiency of a player. It is rarely mentioned that it is not that easy to avoid turnovers while handling the ball more often. That is an important point when discussing the replacement value for a missed shot, because usually people overrate the success rate of a shot attempt by another player as well as underrate the chances for a turnover, especially when we have to consider that the ball doesn't magically ends up in the hands of that other player (there needs to be at least one additional pass). If Lopez has to pass up those 400 additional shots, we can easily say that the probability for turnovers is higher than 0.

A common theme with high usage players is that their teammates show increased eFG% and lower TOV% with them on the court. Overall it becomes an optimization problem, where the team's overall performance tends to benefit from optimizing the teammates' efficiency more than from optimizing the efficiency for that one particular high usage player. We can for example look at OKC in 2015 where Westbrook despite the fact that his scoring efficiency was below average while his TOV% was above league average made a bigger impact on the offensive end than the much more efficient Durant. The NPI values for them show +3.8 vs. +1.4 in favor of Westbrook. In fact, that is a common thing with the Thunder that Westbrook had a bigger positive impact on offense than Durant.

AcrossTheCourt wrote: And I don't think you read that close enough: "Kobe assists" are already factored in because missed shots have an offensive rebound factor.

Where did I say that it wouldn't be?

AcrossTheCourt wrote: If you really think Brook Lopez taking 140/400 midrange shots is valuable, more power to you I guess.

Where did I say that at all? Why do you feel the need to attack my argument with such a blantantly obvious strawman?

AcrossTheCourt wrote: And I chose midrange shots because those are easier to take without accruing more turnovers.

You didn't mention turnovers in regards to your choosen example at all. And the way the article is written, I seriously doubt that you had turnovers in mind.

To clarify one point here: I do not think that PER represents the benefits of higher usage with lower TOV% when having a lower eFG% correctly. But when we keep everything constant, a player like Lopez 2016 with a PER of 21.7 would see his PER going towards 15 when decreasing the FG% towards the "break-even" of 32.4%.

Turnovers are indeed an important piece of efficiency. And overall team impact more important than personal box score stats only.

BPM and RPM have Embid at a tiny bit above league average on offense. Offensive Rating considerably below at 103, where he in mid-December. PER still high.

PER2.0? Embid is higher but the scale has changed.