[Historical and Non-Current] Real Player Ratings User Guide, December 2007

IMPORTANT NOTICE: THIS IS A REPLACED USER GUIDE AND APPLIES ONLY TO REAL PLAYER RATING REPORTS PRIOR TO NOVEMBER 2008

ESPN PLAYER RATING
You can tell how well they played at a glance. Of the advanced statistics I have seen on the internet, this one seems to have the best balance between offense and defense. Many other advanced statistics are biased in favor of good defenders, and do not reflect the heavy importance of offense in basketball. Here is the formula for the ESPN rating of a player:

PLAYER RATING (GROSS) =

Points + Rebounds + 1.4*Assists + Steals + 1.4*Blocks - .7*Turnovers + # of Field Goals Made +1/2*# of 3-pointers Made - .8*# of Missed Field Goals - .8*# of Missed Free Throws + .25 *# of Free Throws Made

REAL PLAYER RATING
Here is the formula for Real Player Rating:

Real Player Rating = ESPN Player Rating / Minutes Played

The ESPN Player Rating and the Minutes Played are both usually used with a per game time frame, so the usage of this statistic will usually be:

Real Player Rating = ESPN Player Rating per Game / Minutes Played per Game

But you can calculate a Real Player Rating for any period of time you have the data for. Nuggets 1 will report out Real Player Ratings for each game, and it will periodically give the Real Player Ratings for all the Nuggets for the whole season to date.

The straight up player rankings are obviously heavily affected by how many playing minutes the various players get. With many teams, you can rely on the coach to give his various players roughly the playing time that makes the most sense for his team. Unfortunately, you can not rely on George Karl to award playing time in just about the best way possible. Therefore, it makes good sense to introduce a new and very important statistic that Nuggets 1 will call the Real Per Minute Player Rating which, as the name implies, is the gross ESPN player rating divided by the number of minutes.

This statistic allows everyone to see whether or not players who play only a small number of minutes are doing better than their low gross rating will indicate. At the same time, it will allow everyone to see whether players with a lot of minutes are playing worse than, as well as, or better than their gross ranking shows. This is another big improvement in the Nuggets 1 never ending quest to give readers total information about the Nuggets. This statistic allows the reader, at a glance, to see exactly how well each player is doing without regard to playing time. So it gives you pure knowledge not available anywhere else.