Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009...8:50 am

Advanced Box Scores

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You may know Joseph Treutlein from his work at DraftExpress. A few months ago he launched a must-bookmark site called Hoopdata.com. Hoopdata is a treasure trove of statistical riches. Click the link, check it out.

After the launch of Hoopdata, Treutlein reached out to a few bloggers, myself included, for feedback and suggestions for his site’s direction forward. My big wish was for Hoopdata to push the box score into this century-the traditional box score is increasingly archaic and unhelpful. And, boy, did they come through.

Earlier this week, Hoopdata unveiled an advanced box score, one that is current with contemporary analysis. It’s available shortly after each game and should prove a tremendous help in understanding what actually happened between the buzzers. For an example, scan the advanced box for Monday’s Clippers-Spurs contest.

And for you naysayers, this isn’t really about fancy new metrics. It’s actually the small things that make the advanced box score project so promising. I’m happy to see the inclusion of simple things: charges drawn, points contributed, assist percentages. The sort of things that we already talk about, but which we had no easy way to monitor. Until now.

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4 Comments

  • Martin
    December 23rd, 2009 at 9:27 am

    Tim,

    The site is great and sheds a lot of light on different dimensions of performance.

    One thing that the site could improve is to include a more detailed glossary/explanations of the metrics, as some acronyms are not defined anywhere and it turns out to be difficult to read.

  • Joe Treutlein
    December 23rd, 2009 at 9:29 am

    Thanks for the love, Tim.

    Since I’m sure it’s going to be asked about, we don’t yet have a glossary to define all the abbreviations on the new box score pages. That’s definitely something we’ll be adding in the coming days to make it easier to process for people unfamiliar with a lot of the metrics.

    I’ll clear up some of the commonly asked ones now.

    CHG = Charges Drawn
    AFGM = Assisted Field Goals Made
    BLKD = Own Shots Blocked

    I think the Shot Locations are pretty simple enough, but if you’re unfamiliar with eFG%, it just gives extra weight to threes to compensate for their extra points scored.

    USG = Usage Rate
    AR = Assist Rate
    TOR = Turnover Rate
    ORR/DRR/TRR = Rebound Rates
    TS% = Scoring efficiency measure that accounts for Free Throws and Threes
    %AST = Percentage of player’s FGM that were assisted

  • Martin
    December 23rd, 2009 at 10:39 am

    Joe,

    Thanks for the heads up…it will be great to have those in your page…

    Anyways, the advance stats are super cool!

  • Colby
    December 23rd, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    Joe,

    Love the site. one suggestion I have is simplifying the game IDs on the boxscores’ urls. Unless I’m missing a pattern, they seem a bit random. Having a standard pattern (say: 20091219INDSAS) would make it easy to automate the link for some web programmers. Just a minor suggestion.

    Keep up the work. I’ve been searching for an easy way to find advanced stats for a while now. Thanks.

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