Introduction

I spent a while this past week checking out all of the publicly available passing statistics from NBA.com with the intention of developing a new passer rating. This is intended to be somewhat of an open exhibition on the thought process of developing a new statistic. It’s not perfect, as every statistic is inherently biased toward what can be measured, but I think it’s pretty cool nonetheless. I will not claim to be an expert when it comes to crafting new metrics, but I wanted to try my hand at it. If you just want to see how my passer rating is calculated — skip to Part 2, down below.

So I have these two spreadsheets (available on my Github) — passesMaster.csv and passing.xlsx . The former is player-level data from NBA.com which includes an estimate of the number of shots taken as a result of passes from one player to each of his teammates. That was aggregated via NBAstatR, the ever-useful package by Alex Bresler.