Half-Season Player Tracking Plus-Minus Rankings

Mandatory Credit: Kyle Terada-USA TODAY Sports

This offseason I created a statistical plus-minus beta metric, called Player Tracking Plus-Minus (PT-PM), that used SportVU player tracking data along with traditional box score stats. You can read more about the development of the metric both here and here, if you’re into that sort of thing, as well as my preseason predictions using PT-PM.

Heading into All-Star weekend, I re-ran the numbers using my current version. Big headline is that it turns out that Steph Curry is good at basketball.

Here’s the top twenty-five based on PT-PM with at least 400 minutes played in the first half (approximately) of the season. In addition, to the raw score I have the elements of the metric to breakdown a little bit why the player gets the rating they do. For example, Curry scores two standard deviations above the average player in scoring and even higher in passing, while he is only below average at retaining and gaining offensive possessions.

The starters for the Golden State Warriors pretty much dominate the list, with the entire starting five and David Lee in the top twenty-five. The list also indicates a changing of the guard in the NBA, with Curry, Anthony Davis, Kawhi Leonard, Hassan Whiteside[1. Whiteside is projected to see his numbers fall in my simple replacement regression and his relatively small sample size, to say nothing of Meyers Leonard] and Klay Thompson sitting a top the metric.

Of course, there is also the other end of the scale, the bottom twenty-five of the list. On that end we see a number of rookies and members of the Sacramento Kings. Nik Stauskas ticks both boxes, so he inevitably falls into this bottom list.

In addition to highs and lows listed above, in the link here I have all of the PT-PM scores for players with four hundred plus minutes through February 9th.