Introducing NBA NET
Drawing inspiration from The Athletic’s John Hollinger, I made a variant of his BORG statistic. I’m calling it NET, because it is meant to measure a player’s net contribution to his team over the course of a game. Here are a few definitions to lay the groundwork:
- NET: Tells us how many points a player is worth per 100 possessions. In the image below, we can see that Giannis Antetokounmpo was worth 10.10 points every night for the Bucks throughout the regular season (pre-bubble).
- Adjusted NET: Modified version corrects for players whose small sample size boosts their NET rating.
- Estimated NET: Uses a formula to project a player’s NET rating in 2021.
With that in mind, here were the top 25 players from last season in terms of NET:
Not bad, right?
The purpose of NET is to provide another data point for player evaluation. NET isn’t meant to be a definitive metric, but rather a tool to help fans inform their opinions.
For example, Donte DiVincenzo had a higher NET rating than Russell Westbrook last season. We know this isn’t right, but it signals maybe we should be higher on DiVincenzo than we are currently, and cooler on Westbrook.
With that said, a top seven of Antetokounmpo, James Harden, LeBron James, Kawhi Leonard, Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic and Anthony Davis accurately depicts the cream of the crop from a season ago.
Giannis, Harden, LeBron, Luka and AD made All-NBA First Team, and Kawhi and Jokic were second-team selections.
The biggest eyebrow-raisers are Karl-Anthony Towns finding a spot in the top ten, and the inclusions of Christian Wood, Ivica Zubac, Shaq Harrison, John Konchar and Hassan Whiteside in the top 25.
I wish I could somehow factor in how Whiteside leads the league every year in Whitesides — a stat for when a player allows an easy putback because he took himself out of rebounding position to wildly chase a block attempt.
Harrison and Konchar are the reasons Adjusted NET exists. More on that in a second.
How are NET, Adjusted NET and Estimated NET calculated?
NET is pretty easy. It’s a combination of four publicly available metrics: BBall Index’s LEBRON, ESPN’s RPM, Basketball Reference’s BPM and 538’s RAPTOR. Toss those four numbers together, take the average and congratulations, you have NET.
For Adjusted NET, I set 1,500 minutes (basically a full season of rotation-level tick) as the threshold for minutes played. For players who failed to meet that threshold, I subtracted their minutes played from 1,500 and added in “replacement-level” production of a -2.50 NET rating.
(Think of replacement-level production as the level of play a team would receive from its 11th man.)
Let’s take Harrison for example. He played 484 minutes at a 3.30 NET level, so I added in 1,016 minutes of -2.50 NET production, which puts his Adjusted NET rating to a more realistic -0.63 — a quality rotation player.
I followed this process with all players who fell short of 1,500 minutes played last year as a way to simulate them regressing to the mean. There were a few notable exceptions, however, like Steph Curry, Kyrie Irving and Zion Williamson, among others.
This group played fewer than 1,500 minutes because of injury, not because they couldn’t crack the rotation. As such, they shouldn’t be punished for small sample size.
For the 2021 estimates, I used the following formulas, inputting their ages for the ’21 season:
For players 21 and younger: ((6+Adjusted NET)*(1+((27.5–21)/30)))-6
For players 22–32: ((6+Adjusted NET)*(1+((27.5-Age)/30)))-6
For players 33 and older: ((6+Adjusted NET)*(1+(27.5–33)/60)))-6
This method simulates the progression of players as they age, with increases and decreases being more significant the further away a player is from 27.5 years old — about the age when NBA athletes peak.
The leaders in Estimated NET are as follows:
- Giannis Antetokounmpo: 10.90
- Luka Doncic: 8.38
- Kawhi Leonard: 7.03
- Nikola Jokic: 6.78
- LeBron James: 6.68
- James Harden: 6.58
- Jayson Tatum: 6.15
- Anthony Davis: 5.86
- Karl-Anthony Towns: 4.51
- Rudy Gobert: 4.46
Again, not bad, right?
Who is overrated? Who is underrated? What was your biggest surprise? I made NET to help start NBA conversations, so let’s hear it.