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> We miss the perimeter shooter who positions themselves just so to pull two defenders out of position, but give credit to the point guard who makes the now-easy pass for the "assist".

The NBA has an advanced metric for that called gravity. As you could imagine Steph Curry's gravity is through the roof.

Another related metric is +/- for when a player is on the floor. That one is more nebulous and error prone but it is meant to describe a player's impact on the floor outside of things like assists, points, rebounds, etc.



Ice hockey also has the +/- metric, and as a defenseman that doesn't get a lot of goals and assists, I'm glad it's there.


> The NBA has an advanced metric for that called gravity. As you could imagine Steph Curry's gravity is through the roof.

Happen to have any additional reading on that? (only if it's a handy link for you, otherwise I'll google it). I've re-started watching NBA recently after about 20 years or so, and it's the first time when I hear about this concept, one which sounds very intriguing and interesting. Maybe it was also used 20 years ago, but back then I didn't have access to Internet and as I don't live in the States the local sports newspapers (which care more about football/soccer) weren't mentioning it.


Have a look into this ESPN article (http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/11744634/explaining-gravi...), it touches on the determining factors and how it's quantified.


I can't think of any one particular article that goes into the details of gravity and some of the related metrics (respect and distraction being the others). Maybe lookup NBA gravity scores and SportVU. I believe the company that sells the SportVU system are the primary ones tracking that metric (and delivering it to teams).


Gravity isn’t metricized (and it would be hard to do so), the best we can do at the moment is indirectly measure it via +/- or other stats like what SC30’s teammates’ true shooting percentages are with him on and off the floor.


I think it's something that might be quantized through SportVU and the advanced analytics they provide, but not published anywhere to the public.


Second Spectrum has supplanted SportsVU for tracking, and is also the generator for all the advanced metrics that are now provided for the NBA as well as ESPN.




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