Making More Reliable Lineup Data
Since the 2010’s, five-man lineup data has become very popular. Being able to break down the net, offensive, and defensive ratings of any lineup has led to new insights. Finally, there was something to cite when a coach’s rotations were brought into question. However, you do need to be careful with how you use lineup…
Predicting Future Shooting Performance: Shooting Percentages vs Shot Making
Predicting a player’s future shooting performance is a difficult task. Analysts spend hours poring over box score stats like Effective Field Goal%, trying to find evidence to build their predictions around. In the last decade, Shot Making stats have come onto the scene. They work differently from shooting percentages by looking at how a player…
Defensive Playmaking: The Ultimate Defensive Box Score Stat
Trying to capture defensive value with stats has always been a difficult thing in basketball. Steals and blocks are probably the box score numbers you are familiar with when trying to proxy a defender’s impact. In the arms race of advanced data, offensive fouls drawn and deflections were added to the mix in the 2010s…
2025-26 NBA Player Rankings
Here are my top 75 players heading into the 2025–26 season. I project less than other people who make these lists, and instead place a greater weighting on what they have done. If you think players should be higher or lower in the same tier, you probably could convince me with a long enough chat….
Play Type Scoring Efficiency Rankings 2025
I was going through some of our three-level scoring and play type efficiency data and thought it would be fun to list the most efficient players for each shot location/type from the 2024-25 season. I often talk about keeping tabs on players or situations and this is one of the ways I do it. Breaking…
Creating More Predictive Stats
The point of stats are to proxy or estimate how good a player is in a specific area of the game. Does a player average 30 points or 5 points a game, 12 rebounds a game or 2? Conclusions can be drawn based on how players perform relative to each other. One of the biggest…
Basketball Index’s 2025 All-Defensive Teams
Below are the BBI staff picks for our All-Defensive teams. We do three teams every year instead of two, there are three ALL-NBA teams after all, why shouldn’t defense get the same love. A few metrics mentioned in the article are D-LEBRON our overall defensive impact metric, Defensive Playmaking, which takes into account steals, blocks,…
2025 BBI ALL-NBA Teams
Below are the BBI Staff ALL-NBA Selections. Metrics that matter: Some metrics cited in the article are LEBRON, Playmaking Talent, Shooting Talent, and Defensive Playmaking. LEBRON is our in-house all in one metric that estimates a player’s overall value. Playmaking Talent looks at a player’s gravity, passing volume, quality of looks a player creates, and…
Is Net Rating Still King?
Net Rating has long been the gold standard for evaluating team strength, and for good reason. Over the last decade (2015-2024) NBA Finals teams have ranked 5.5 out of 30 on average. Net Rating works by looking at the combination of how many points a team scores and gives up per 100 possessions. Based on…
A Guide To Passing Stats
High level passing is one of the most valuable skills in basketball. However, determining a player’s passing skill is a difficult task. Simply passing the ball to a teammate may or may not be valuable. The Assist was invented to attempt to quantify when a player makes a valuable pass. A player records an Assist…