Inside Guys (Or If I Had Done This Metric Last Summer, Jeremy Lin Might Still be A Warrior)

Just to be clear, I started working on this before Jeremy Lin blew up this week. And the data shown below are for 2009-2011, not this season.

In my last post, I calculated adjusted mid-range FGA over the past three seasons (2009-2011). For this post, I decided to combine inside attempts and free throw attempts (actually, 0.44*FTA, which represents “equivalent shot attempts” in this case) together to come up with an index for “Inside Guys” — the assumption being that most shooting fouls tend to come on inside attempts.

To remind you of what these data represent, this analysis is similar to the way that adjusted +/- (APM) is done (actually, it’s closer to how RAPM is performed), and the interpretation is therefore similar. On offense, a rating of +1.0, for example, means that while Player X was on the floor he would add 1 inside-FTA-equivalent shot (per 100 possessions) either by his own shooting prowess, or perhaps, by helping his teammates in some way (i.e. through assists, floor spacing, drawing defensive pressure, etc.). On defense, a -1.0 rating means while Player X was on the floor, his presence resulted in the opponent having one less inside-FTA-equivalent shot opportunity. To calculate the total rating, I subtracted the defensive rating from the offensive rating (so a good two-way player should have a more positive total rating).

These tables show players that had greater than 500 possessions last season.