This video is now part of the Stats Series playlist (designed to be watched in order): kzfaq.info/sun/PLtzZl14BrKjTJZdubjNEY5jU0fGOiy51x Really enjoyed the comments and discussion below so far...

Even when I'm confused, which happens often, I'm still entertained 😂

I would love there to be some sort of "Stops" stat that can be shown for how a defender impacts an offensive possession that forces a missed shot. Lets get some better mainstream ways of judging defense outside of steals and blocks.

Having the gif of Bird falling into the scorers table while asking how much he impacted the scoreboard was a nice subtle touch

Center is my favourite 92-93 and 93-94 Bulls player

One day you're going to put out a video proving that Kentavious Caldwell Pope is the actual GOAT and we all gonna roll with it.

The “how good is the guy your replacing?” Question is interesting with a situation like the Celtics with kyrie and kemba

As a statistician I couldn’t express how great my appreciation to your channel is. I hope I could tie up every one of friends who constant bring up sTaTs without understanding the implication and intuition behind each number and force them to watch every video of yours. Heuristic biases are just way too big among basketball fans

Wins aren't linear numbers. Taking a 10 wins team to 20 wins is much easier than taking a 60 wins team to 70 wins. Add synergy into considering, measuring a player with only win/loss change is almost impossible. Maybe we need to quantify the value of each win from 1 to 82 to a sheet of numbers. And we need to take out the system(offense/ defense scheme) multiplying effect to get a meaningful stats.

the shade on Russ 11:20 🤣

This content....right into my veins, please! Aaah, feels so good.

When u are a data scientist and a hoop junky at the same time

I love your videos but is there any way that you can make a video about kyrie’s “negative impact” on the Celtics or his other teams, I would like to see if there is really some validity to it. I’ve noticed that people often try to point out how his teams win without him. For example people try to point out that the Celtics are doing way better but in reality they have 2 wins (Bucks and Mavs) and 3 loses (76ers, Nuggets and Clippers) actual playoff contenders and up to this point most other wins are form teams that are 8th-7th seed teams and garbage like the Knicks (3 times), Cavs, Warriors, Hornets, Suns, and Nets (without Kyrie and LeVert their best scorers). Not that they are not a good team but you can just pull stats out of your ass with little to no context and justify whatever you say especially if there is a big market fan base that hates him and will further the claims that they are not where they could be because of him.

There will be no "Holly Grail of stats" until the impact of the defense can be properly measured.

This is crazy quality content. Keep up the work, you're the best!

I will watch this tomorrow, enough numbers for today.

insanely good video. Thank you for the effort and quality of your work. I'am glad to be your patreon.

Love this Ben, along with Seth Partnow in my opinion the two of you are the best basketball thinkers/ analysts working in the public sphere. Always thoroughly enjoy your analysis and learn from it.

Honestly Stats+eye test+context is how to evaluate a player

Watching it for the 10th time still the best video on this website

I would love to some sort of advanced "gravity" statistic, measured by like help steps per drive or something like that. I'm not exactly sure how that would work but it would be interesting to see how many people require attention away from their primary assignment

As a Canadian who knew next to nothing about basketball and started to tune in when the Raptors made their run, your videos have been essential in helping me understand this game. Thanks so much for these videos

Knowing how complex the sport actually is.. versus the simplification and use of biased heuristics (generated by our confident best-guessing brains)... makes you wonder how management/coaching staff can reliably determine not just who to hire but also which combinations of players produce the highest global impact for the team. From a community level youth basketball coach perspective... these lessons help me maintain perspective as to what can be expected.. as well as my grudging acknowledgment that no matter how much I want to find a formula to winning games... reality doesn't care about my feelings & goals.

dang your channel making me feel like a basketball stat wizard

I thought the holy grail of player impacg judgement was the 2k teammate rating?!

You’re my favourite KZfaqr! Amazing content

u r the holy grail for sports analysis for the layman!

Keep this shit going, most people don’t think deep enough.

In the end, nothing replaces basketball knowledge and feeling. That's why a good coach can make a big difference. You can compile all the numbers you want, basketball is a group activity (hence the complexity) but you'll never understand humans :)

I don’t understand what’s going on, but at the same time I understand

I think grading ability is better for individuals but it doesn’t quantify value. Every team has a different combination of players which may result in different outcomes just like chemical combinations, meaning certain players playing together can reach a different ceiling than & then certain combinations of players might play well against some and weak against others, regardless of how good those players are. So I think value might be one of the hardest things to measure considering there’s so many variables.

A few questions: how do you measure for the 1980 Celtics' belief that they were a better team with Larry Bird as opposed to the 1979 Celtics without him? I mean the emotions of the players who were on both teams? What about the 1994 Bulls' belief that they weren't as good a team without Michael Jordan as they were in 1993 with Michael Jordan? Also, how do you measure for other emotions players might feel, like a previously capable role player fading into the background as Bird's star rose? How does that affect his play over the course of a season? Or maybe a Bulls players' relief in 1994 that they don't have to put up with an arrogant, driven megalomaniac anymore. Might that allow a player to be a little looser, able to play a little better? Also, which players were in contract years and striving for a big payoff? Which players had signed a contract and were in cruise control? These stats can be interesting, but they treat players like automatons, some with finer tuning than others. That's not who players are. They are wildly emotional, and their emotions can have a serious bearing on how they play and how others on their team play. But because you can't quantify those emotions, you have to set them aside to engage in the argument of "who's better?" Also, how much granularity do you really need? Does it matter how much better Ernie Grunfeld was compared to M.L. Carr (or vice versa)? Does it matter if James Edwards wins the battle of soft, jump-shooting centers over Bill Cartwright? I think you can reduce your list of player evaluation to: 1. Great. 2. Really good. 3. OK. 4. Not very good. 5. Poor. This engages fewer numbers but it does engage what you can see with your own eyes.

Wooooah I'm digging the new background music!

Please keep using Crumpled Jumper’s art for videos it looks sooooo good

5:42 “really, never do this” (citing plus minus for individual games) SKIUUUUPPPPPP

Truly great concept for a vid. You'll never see this content on Undisputed or first things first

Kyrie roasted!!!! hahaha that was beautiful. "The ball is a flat disk!"

This channel would lose their mind when you make a GOAT video

Love this series, and everything you put out. Small note, given how often you reference Part 1, 2, etc. of this series, could you put those numbers in the titles of the videos?

This sort of depth is reaching baseball levels of analytics

Love this nuanced explanation. Thanks!

As always, thank you so much for such a high quality content. Would you do a video on other impact measuring metrics like PER, PIE,...??? What those really measure and how to best utilize them? Especually, PER is referenced a lot but I know there are lots of people who do not believe in PER at all.

Takeaways from this video: Read More

luv this channel really

Please do more!!!

This plus minus statistics doesn’t seem to me very effective just because it really depends on who plays with whom. In most cases, starters play against opponent’s starters and bench players play against other bench players. For example, a plus minus of a bench player can be much higher than a starter, just because he is playing against a weaker team all the time. In order to solve this, we should also look at situations like a starter plays as a bench, and a bench plays as a starter. But of course, coaches don’t do this most of the time.

As a hockey fan, I'm amazed by how much effort there is in basketball to quantify player value. I think there are way too many variables, and inconsistency in the availability of the data surrounding those variables to ever reach the "holy grail" you are looking for. So much of a player's impact is contextual. It's probably more realistic to evaluate a player's impact at the end of his career than at a particular instance in time.

I love your videos but I hope new basketball fans take what you're saying with a grain of salt, because you can't fully equate basketball to any scientific median. Otherwise this is the best and most thought out content on youtube, you deserve way more subscribers bro

Could you upload more videos per month please? You are truly one of the best basketball analyst out. I’m dead ass too

You're videos are so insightful and I love it

Estimated wins added is a great stat

I love the jab at westbrick s stat padding

Hey, where are you getting those player's cartoons/portraits you show in the videos? They are so cute...

I love ur player animations

Thx for another video!

If I have time: may convert the graph “APM Ballparks”, at 9:35 in the video, to a log-log scale. This may reduce the sensitivity of the graph and, further, allow a multi-dimensional representation with other stats to see if they’re scale invariant to APM.

Great breakdown of this :D Something to note is this: fit and synergy. Let say you have someone who really hums on a certain team. • You could pick Klay Thompson. He might go down as the best off ball moving 3 point shooter (I just made that up) ever. Above Reggie Miller and Ray Allen. Move him from Golden State, who encourages this style of play, to some static team. His rating would go down - IF how GS uses him is his best way of playing. Even though he is the same dude, and still a great player. • Likewise with James Harden, one of the best ISO players currently. Put him on the good GSW team, and he would not have as dominating effect. • Whilst Draymond was gold on those GSW teams, would his D and O be as good on a team without KD, Iguodala and Klay (team D) or KD, Klay and Curry (team O)? It is the synergy and being able to use a skillset, that is also hard to measure. Great questions and answers from you Ben!

11:20 haha Westbrook sneakin

When will part 6 be out?

don't think a player's value will ever be captured by a single stat. you might get a good idea of how someone played in a single game through a stat sheet, but film needs to be utilized too. if you never watched a game and just saw stats from warriors games, you'd never know how easy steph curry made the game for KD.

I miss these videos...

You mentioned how changing a players PPG by just 2 can change their ranking a TON for mid level players are just a little with Top Scorers. I checked with Giannis '20-'21 Season. 28.1 PPG (Ranked 5) reduced by 2 PPG only drops him to 13th. So that would only drop him 8 spots. Pretty nutz.

Why can I never find someone to debate this data with at parties? Oh...I have an idea...ooh...

I don't know dude it's almost as if you have to watch guys play and not only look at % to figure out what's going on. Great video, keep it up.

11:30... And this is where you can get into the wonderful world of microstats (I'm coming from the world of hockey, but it seems like people could certainly track boxouts, boxouts from certain locations, probably some other stuff in rebounding alone) also I will say, QoC, in hockey at least has a very small impact on individual players, you usually end up going against the star players of the other team around the same % of your toi compared everyone else on your team, coaches can't control who the other team has out, I would assume it's somewhat similar in basketball

So many calculations. Hopefully one day we get unified calculation that looks into all factors including when players are sick, depressed, and insomniac.

"Basketball is my favourite sport I like the way they dribble up and down the court"

This is a delicious mathematical meal that I'll have to enjoy again to fully appreciate!

Love your videos man!!❤️❤️❤️

Have always been interested on how the weakness of the eastern conference contributed to LeBron high stats vs the toughness of the western conference contributing to the stats of someone like Kobe.

Talking about impact and not talking about nash's impact on the 2004-2005 suns

Can we create a 2k rating system, a FIFA like rating system for Current NBA players that updates weekly for the NBA pros to accurately gauges how well they are playing further cementing MVP future races between the top 5 NBA stars going forward. hmm hmm.

i’m a big fan of Evolving Hockey’s RAPM in hockey, which is based on the basketball version

I really like your advanced thinking on this stuff. Though I do realise you really have to understand the game before you can interpret the numbers. I love how you distuingish for context. Next stop, psychology and likebility in the mix? I saw in one of your video's an example of Anthony Davis not passing to Caruso, and I thought that he is perhaps not trusted as much as other players, and Davis might not have missed the pass, but simply not trusted Caruso enough to pass the rock.

The only number that can justify their greatness is the number worn on their backs

the first year bird played was the year the 3 point came in though. that could be a large factor too

That’s cool but with all your stats who’s top 10 all time

Very nice video on plus minus. Would be great to see another video focusing on details of the more advanced versions. Also, are any professional teams still using any form of RAPM, or has it been replaced by other metrics by now?

I got a way to measure a players impact, it’s called the eye test! Great video btw, as always

Very interesting. But hard to do. It's cool to keep thinking though on all points

All I know when Jordan left, the Bulls became a semi deep run playoff team to when Jordan was on it, they were a dynasty. Biggest difference right there

This is the best math ever

There should be more measurement of intangibles: 1. Open Man/Defensive Lapse leading to opponent bucket 2. Contested Shots against opposing players resulting in a miss 3. Help defense movement resulting in turnovers

this sounds like trying to quantify something that's not actually quantifiable (although this doesn't mean that the attempt is not without it's own merits)

Love yo channel bro

Can you reupload your analysis on Kawhi Leonard?

I think the noise about “how good is the player replacing you?” Or “how good are your teammates?” is ridiculous. It sounds like excuse making, especially when the focus is supposed to be the impact of one particular player, not all the rest of the players on the team. It gets even more ridiculous when you have to do the same calculation for every replacement player ad infinitum. The most intuitive approach is to look at the addition or the absence of the player in question. Especially when the only difference is THAT player in THAT season. It muddies the waters to factor in (for example) the age or health of every other player on the team since those factors would stay the same WITH the player in question versus WITHOUT him. It just all smacks of apologism imo. Excuse making. Trying to justify someone’s (cough* MJ *cough) surprisingly low impact by including or excluding factors that perhaps shouldn’t be. Sometimes the simplest approach makes the most sense. Said another way: the most convoluted explanation isn’t necessarily the right one.

There's just no way to calculate perfectly a player's value. You'd need a time machine and the ability to run multiple scenarios in the future.

We need a video on dennis rodman

There is also no way to calculate how important a player's presence is to his team in terms of confidence, leadership, and intelligence.

This ruled, thanks!

LMAO Perfect Westbrook cameo 11:24

Ben I think a video titled "Why PER needs to be retired" would do well

I came here looking for answers. 😐

You should do a skill nd defense video were the 90s and 80s players really plumbers and I wanna see who guarded mj to

What programs do you use to create your graphics and graphs?

highest level of art and science. you are better than bob ross and neil tyson combined.

This Shit let me feel like Im in School again so complex

The isolating impact analysis can possibly show that Kobe wasn't carried by others for his chips

Yes rings and mvps