Nylon Calculus: Why aren’t you using pbpstats.com?
Have an insatiable appetite for NBA stats? Greedy to gobble up basketball tidbits? Big fan of technology? Insufferable know-it-all?
I’ve got just the ticket for you. A golden ticket, actually.
Come along now. Down the harrowing digital tunnel of the internet and into a virtual landscape of fantastical NBA nerdom.
There’s no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There’s no knowing where we’re rowing
Or which way the river’s flowing
Okay — I can’t promise any Everlasting Gobstoppers, but there will be assist networks, lineup-specific shot charts, with-or-without-you on/off numbers, a possession finder that filters by the initiating action, team stats by scoring margin, and even G-League data.
Try some more — the D.J. Strawberries taste like strawberries, and the D.J. Snozzberries taste like snozzberries.
Developer Darryl Blackport created this magical place and now, here he is, climbing skyward in the Glass Stat-avator with you and your grandpa. In a minute he’ll explain that he’s actually going to let YOU have control of the site.
All you need to do is type “P.B.P.”…”stats”…”dot”…”com” in your web browser…and stay the hell away from his fizzy-lifting drink.
Next. When can we start calling somebody a ‘future Hall-of-Famer’?. dark
The most recent goodie to emerge from the Great Gum Machine at PBPstats.com is a metric for Shot Quality. The full description of the new stat can be found here; but, in short, it represents the expected effective field goal percentage of a shot based on court location and play context. For any player, you can compare how his teammates’ Shot Quality differs when he’s ON versus OFF the court.
To give you just a taste for what’s possible with the kind of data nuggets that are available on PBPstats.com, I made this Tableau dashboard that displays — for the Top-30 scorers in the league over the past four seasons (based on points-per-game averages in regular-season play) — the impact made on teammate Shot Quality.
Spend some time playing around with this dashboard and your immediate conclusion will be that Steph Curry is the best player in the league at creating easy shots for his teammates — something I talked about once before. But, the big picture message is that PBPstats.com is a really useful resource that keeps getting more helpful all the time. Or, as Willy Wonka might intone:
If you want to view paradise, simply look around and view it. Anything you want to, do it.
That’s not the tagline for PBPstats.com, but it basically should be.