Dishes and Dimes - A Close Look at Assists
by Aqeel Phillips
With the introduction of the new SportVu advanced statistics that the NBA has officially introduced at the beginning of November, I’ve been most intrigued by the new passing statistics now at the disposal of the fans. It’s been well known around stat-heads for a while that Assists are a flawed metric for measuring a player’s contribution to their team. They simply serve as a tally with no weight to them, a cross court pass to an open player in the corner yields the same number of Assists as a pass inside to a big man who does most of the heavy lifting by skillfully posting up. Though some public websites track the number of assists that lead to three-pointers as opposed to deuces, there is still no stat that accounts for passes that lead to free throws, and passers are robbed of rightful assists that they should receive when a play ends in a shooting foul. SportVu will be tracking these statistics, but I’m too impatient to wait for the season to progress and the sample size of SportVu to increase sufficiently, so I set out enumerate the contributions of passers from last year’s NBA season.
The Three-Pointers: Creating Valuable Shots
Let’s start by reminding ourselves of the Assist leaders from last year:
As stated previously, these assists merely serve as a tally of passes a player completed that led to field goals. We can gain a better picture of each passer’s contributions by taking a peek at a lesser-known statistic called Weighted Assists (shorthand AST+, courtesy of Hoop Data), which weights three-pointers as 1.5 as valuable as regular field goals. From AST+, we can easily calculate the amount of points from field goals that a player produced per game, by multiplying their AST+ value by two.
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