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As I look around the basketball blogosphere, read journalist evaluations, and listen to fan opinions – it seems to me that we are really lacking an understanding of what it takes to win basketball games, and as a result we lose focus of which stats we should really pay attention to.  As far as I’m concerned, basketball is a game of possessions and opportunity cost. I don’t care if a team scores 75 points or 125 points, of if it concedes 80 points or 120 points. We all know that different styles of play can be successful, from San Antonio’s grueling half court sets to Phoenix’s lightning paced tempo. But what is important is how efficient teams and players are with the amount of possessions they do have. Essentially, if you have more ‘successful possessions’ on offense than your opponent does, then you win the game. It doesn’t matter if you beat your opponent 4-2 or 133-131 right?

Therefore through offense and defense the key is to make the most of your possessions while denying your opponent of successful possessions. Today I will evaluate the offensive side of the game and rate the players according to their stats in the 06-07 season. To do this I have created a unique formula that will calculate in detail how each player uses up their respective possessions. Practically all statistics that we use today have some sort of contribution to the analysis of possessions – its just that they have never been put into the right formula before.

 

So before I reveal my findings, let me explain a bit more about this business of ‘possessions’.

 

In basketball the goal IS actually to have more points than your opponent, but while points is the end product we are looking for, it is possessions that is the scarce resource that makes it happen. In other words, possessions are what creates points. Since a team has a limited amount per game, then it makes every bit of sense that teams and players should try turn as many possessions into successful possessions. For example a player giving you 4/5 from three point land is far far better than another player shooting 6/13 from the field, because he gets you the same points in 8 less possessions. With the first player, those 8 extra possessions instead of missed shots, can be turned into more points. Therefore we should analyze a player’s possession use efficiency to determine his offensive worth to a team. To calculate the efficiency we simply need to consider potential possessions and successful possessions:

 

One made shot is one potential possession, turned into one successful possession. Similarly, a missed shot is 0 successful possessions out of 1 potential possession. With an assist you are responsible for half of the successful possession with half the potential. Free throws similarly count as 1/1 in terms of possession use when making both, 0.5/1 when making 1 of 2, and 0/1 when missing both. Turnovers count as 0/1 in terms of possession success obviously.

 

After adding some modifications to take into account: free-throws that come as a result of and 1’s, giving scoring players half the credit when they score off of assists, and giving 3 point baskets 1.5/1 in terms of possession success, we can calculate a players’ possession success percentage. This is calculated by dividing all the successful possessions by potential possessions. (It is important to understand that by possession we mean that the player in question did something that led to the change in possession of the ball to the other team – either good or bad).

 

This percentage tells us simply what percentage of the time the player in question will help create two points when he uses the teams’ possession. So if someone has 80% successful possession ratio, it means that 4 out of 5 times the player will help the team secure two points – this could be a made shot, an assist, or freethrows made, the important thing is that the team ends up with 2 points. It obviously would make sense for teams to highly value players with good possession success % because they make the most out of a teams’ limited possessions.

 

So after some complex calculations that I won’t bore you with at this moment, here are the top 50 most efficient offensive players for the 06-07 season (500 minutes had to be played in order to be eligible): 

 

TOP 50: MOST EFFICIENT OFFENSIVE PLAYERS

 

Now, we should be careful when looking at this table to not make quick conclusions. The ranking does not suggest that Brent Barry is a better scoring shooting guard than Kobe and Wade…absolutely not. However, it does statistically prove that he was more efficient with his possessions than those superstars. You can see on the list that Steve Nash is number 1, and this should be no surprise to most as he always seems to make good things happen on offense. We can also see through this list that role players that are valued highly in coaches minds such as Battier, Lee, Najera, Hermmann, Barry etc all justify their worth as they manage to be more efficient than their superstar counterparts.

 

With that said, this ranking doesn’t do justice to those superstars that have so much more responsibility and have to keep producing despite fatigue and double teams, and are expected to produce on a consistent basis. Therefore, we should also see which players create the most useful possessions per game:

 

TOP 50: USEFUL OFFENSIVE POSSESIONS PER GAME

 

 

This is essentially a Top 50 of who creates the most on offense for his team. It is no surprise that the list is made up of the top offensive players in the league. The top 23 in fact are all in different teams (if we ignore that Iverson went to Denver in the middle of the season). This list on the other hand discriminates against players who don’t ‘ballhog’ and don’t get as many minutes. Therefore a better representation of a player’s offensive worth would be if we calculate the offensive successful possession surplus. This means, how many successful possessions does the player create after we subtract his unsuccessful possessions. This is a much better representation since superstars are still rewarded for having that burden to consistently contribute, whilst efficient players are still rewarded over ‘ballhogs’ for their more efficient performance. Since every successful possession in our calculations translates into two points, here is the ranking of top 50 players who contribute the most NET points to his team.

 

TOP 50: Net Points Gained aka “The Oytun Offensive Efficiency Rating” (OOER)

 

 

We should make it clear when looking at these numbers that the league average % chance of creating a successful possession is 51%. For conveniences sake if we assume that it is 50%, then we can understand that that average point surplus of the league is 0. This means that an average player will use half his possessions to create two points, and the other half will lead to nothing. Our list shows how many NET points these elite players contribute to their teams. Keep in mind that even if a player averages 50 points and 20 assists per game, he won’t be more useful than an average player unless his efficiency is above that of an average player. Having said that the above is a good representation of how many points the team would lose if that player was injured to be replaced by an average player. Of course there are flaws with this assumption, but it is still as good an understanding we will get of how much value a player has to his team on offense.  Therefore if the MVP chase was based solely on offensive contributions the above list should serve to rank them.

 

TOP 20: OOER per 40 minutes

Moving on to some more ‘fun’ stats. I don’t like ‘per 40 minute’ stats because it is highly misleading, but for those who believe in it, here are the top 20 offensive contributors if everyone in the league played 40 minutes.

 

 

TOP 20: Ball Hogs

Which players are most ‘active’ on the offensive end of the floor? Below are the top 20 biggest Ballhogs. (most possessions used per minute played)

 

 

 

So those Kobe fans who keep hearing how much of a ballhog Kobe is, they can now respond by saying that there are three other players who are bigger ballhogs than him, and also less efficient at the same time.

 

 

TOP 10: Worst Offensive Players

It is also useful to know who you do not want on the floor when you crucially need a basket. Here are the top 10 players who harm their team the most on a per 40 minute basis:

 

 

 

So keeping Bonzi on the floor for 40 minutes will lead to 9 less points for your team per game than the average NBA player. Minnesota fans might be concerned to see two of their key players on this list. (Sorry ‘Toine!)

 

 

End of Part 1 

 

Well that wraps up the offensive side of things. We’ve seen that in the 06-07 season, while Kobe created the most ‘good’ for his team, he doesn’t do it nearly as efficiently as Steve Nash. In fact, the 2 time MVP is way ahead of the competition when it comes to offensive performance. Some might point to the fact that the Suns play a much higher tempo game, but Nash is not even in the top 15 in terms of possessions per game. Furthermore, any advantage that higher tempo teams might seem to receive gets negated when we consider that successful possession percentage is on average 50% meaning that it shouldn’t lead to more surplus possessions. For the players that are over 50%, then a slight advantage arises but this is no different than players who are ballhogs, or play more minutes. We assume that players who play a faster tempo deal with lower quality shots, and apparent ballhogs are in fact so, due to their teams reliance on them – therefore at the end of the day, more possessions come at a price, and we can safely discard these discrepancies while still retaining a true view of the top offensive players.  

  

As most of us know (well most of us outside of the Golden State Warriors), in basketball offense is only half of the game. Therefore defense will take center stage in part 2 as we similarly rank the top players who help prevent opponents from creating sucessful possessions.