Defense And Real Impact Advanced-Metric

Apr 15

Welcome to DARIA-M,

the NBA basketball metric that measures Real Overall Impact. Most advanced statistics fail to tell the whole story. Whether it be a ultra-clutch player not being correctly graded for that direct contribution to winning, or a mainly defensive player’s rating being knocked for not having numbers that show up on the box score, or a hyper-available player always staying ready, DARIA-M makes sure those players are credited for their individual strengths (and weaknesses), and weighs all of it together to see how they truly stand against the leagues finest.

What Makes DARIA-M Special?

While including traditional statistics such as points per game, assists, steals, blocks, etc, DARIA-M uses specifics and advanced statistics to accurate rate players based on attributes that are not always mentioned when talking about how much a player impacts winning. Player’s individual strengths that are typically not included when grading players are their impact in the clutch, their individual defensive metrics, and Cumulative DARIA-M measures their overall availability and seasonal impact. DARIA-M boosts players who retain these specific impactful talents while at the same time knocking players who go cold when it truly matters or simply give up points.

The Basics

Advanced statistics do a good job of telling a better story, but the basics will always be the focal of a player’s impact. The core of DARIA-M uses points per game, assists per game, assist to turnover ratio, offensive and defensive rebounds, steals, and blocks to help accurately measure per-game performance. Cumulative DARIA-M, or CDARIA-M also factors in games and minutes per game played to either rise or sink a player’s rating based on their availability for the season.

The Advanced

The development of advanced statistics has been monumental for understanding a player’s impact in ways that we could not before. DARIA-M uses a few that may sound complicated, but are quite simple. The first one used is True Shooting %, a measurement that divides points by field goals attempted and free throws attempted, with free throws multiplied by a coefficient of .44 to even out free throws from and-ones, technicals, and other non-2 shot free throw attempts. This gives a near perfect scoring efficiency percentage, giving credit to 3 point shots as they are worth more.

DARIA-M also takes into account clutch points per clutch game and clutch True Shooting %. This is critical for the statistic as it helps us understand a real impact that a player has to winning close games, as being clutch can be one of the most important skills a winning player can have. However, using only clutch stats can skew statistics because players on very good teams or very bad teams simply do not play as many clutch time games, giving them less opportunities to raise or lower these stats. Because of that, DARIA-M also uses Win Share/48, which measures how much a player impacts winning a game (1.000) in 48 minutes (one full game). For reference, an average win share is 0.100, meaning their share of the win is 1/10th. This boosts players that effectively win games that are not in clutch time, and lowers players that lose.

The goal of DARIA-M is to show a players individual impact, and defensive stats are very hard to use when actually evaluating a players defense. To give DARIA-M as accurate of a method as possible, the formula uses defended field goal % in the restricted area as well as defended field goal % on 3 point shots. These were specifically chosen as these are the most prominent shots in the league - teams want players to take mid ranges and deeper paint attempts as they are on average lower percentage and impact shots. This gives us an idea of how often a player gets scored on, and combining this with weighted steals and blocks nearly rounds out how a player affects the game defensively. It still does not tell the whole story though, so finally, DARIA-M uses estimated plus-minus and defensive estimated plus-minus, to round out the overall player’s impact. EPM and DEPM was created and is available thanks to dunksandthrees.com.

The Formula

DARIA-M = fx=(PPG+(TS%-0.5))*100)+(ClutchPPG*2)+((ClutchTS%-0.5)*50)+(APG*1.5)+((APG/TPG)*2)+(OREB*1.5)+(DREB*0.75)+(STL*0.5)+(BLK*0.5)+(EPM*2)+(D-EPM*1.5)+((0.65-RA-DFG%)*100)+((0.37-3PT-DFG%)*80)+(WS/48*50))*0.85

CDARIA-M = fx=DARIA-M((GP*MPG)/2000)

DARIA-M is a per game, or average player rating, while CDARIA-M is a full season rating.

DARIA-M typically gives a rating between 0 through 100. The average player rating is around 34. Historically great player impact can exceed 100, such as Nikola Jokic (25-26) with a DARIA-M of 104.9, or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander (25-26) with a DARIA-M of 109.9.

Try it out on your favorite player! Did they land where you expected them to? Let me know below!