PAPER Player Ratings Are Up

The national PAPER ratings are up and they do surprisingly well in the sniff test. Some of the positional assignments are still a little bit off, but they should get better fairly quickly. (Positions in the system are assigned based on a regression model using five rate stats, and this early in the season there's still some slack in that line.) In addition to PAPER, there are a couple other reports available. The first lists the line stats of each player who's played at least 10 minutes per game, translated into a BCS-league environment. The second consists of each player's rate stats, also translated into a BCS-league environment.

The conference-only reports are also updated with information from the current season, and will continue to be updated as conference games are played. Those reports are going to be wacky until everyone's played at least 3 or 4 conference games, so don't read much into them until the middle of January or so.

Conference-Only PAPER Is Live

For space reasons, there are separate files for BCS leagues, non-BCS majors (which I define as the Atlantic 10, Conference USA, Missouri Valley, Mountain West, West Coast, and WAC conferences), and everyone else. The first two contain lines for every player who has seen the floor in conference play, while the latter only contains players who've logged 25% or more of their team's floor time. Included in each file is each player's net offensive and defensive contribution, wins added, plus a translated per-game line which places each player into a league-average offense and league-average pace. There are links to each file in the sidebar, and I plan on updating these daily for the remainder of the season.

PAPER in Translation

All of the bugs are now worked out, and the national version of PAPER is up and should continue to be updated at least a couple times a week for the remainder of the season. It takes about 25-30 minutes to run the whole simulation and I haven't written code to automate it to run when I'm not around or awake, so until that happens it'll probably only be updated on Mondays and Fridays.

The column headers on the report are pretty self-explanatory, but there is a new feature, and it's actually what the report is sorted on: Wins Added. This represents the number of wins over the course of a 16-game conference season that the player would add to an average BCS-League team relative to a league-average player at the same position. So, for example, if you replaced a league-average power forward on a .500 BCS-League team with Blake Griffin for 33 minutes a game, that team would be expected to win 71% of its games against other BCS teams.

The ratings in the PAPER report are based on all games played between Division I teams. Just as in TAPE, each team and individual performance is translated from the actual statistics into a hypothetical performance against an average BCS team. The individual translations are now available for all players who have logged at least 10 minutes per game.

The translations report is sorted by a column marked PARTOBS, which is my preferred quick-and-dirty way of measuring performance. It is simply Points plus Assists plus Rebounds minus Turnovers plus half each of Blocks and Steals. While there's only a moderate correlation between PARTOBS and actual value--it's possible for players to run up gaudy counting stats while still doing their team more harm than good--there is a very strong correlation between PARTOBS and perceived value. Check out any league's all-conference team and it's a good bet that most if not all of the players selected are at the top of the conference's leaderboard. In any case, I sorted on PARTOBS because it's better than just points or rebounds.

Reading either of these reports in HTML form is kind of a drag, so feel free to download either PAPER (csv, xls, ods) or the Translations (csv, xls, ods) into your favorite spreadsheet software, where you can filter and sort to your heart's content.

The next item on the punch list is conference-only PAPER for each of the BCS leagues. If all goes according to plan I should have more on that by the early part of next week.