🏀 2023-24 NBA Estimated RAPTOR Player Ratings and Wins Above Replacement 🦖

Do you miss the old FiveThirtyEight RAPTOR ratings? I sure do. But while those are no longer updating via Disney (I don’t know their long-term future fate), I have taken it upon myself to create the next best thing — a more basic version of RAPTOR that uses pace-adjusted box-score and on-vs-off data to estimate what the more full-fledged model (with player tracking/etc) would have said about a player.

You can find that stat — and many others — for every player not only in 2023-24, but also going back to the ABA merger (since 1976-77), here:

NBA Player and Team Stats

And here are the 2023-24 season leaders in Wins Above Replacement:

🏀2023-24 NBA Estimated RAPTOR leaderboard 🦖

For those interested, I recreated the 1997-2013 (i.e., pre-player tracking) version of RAPTOR via regression, added a mild position adjustment and a team adjustment such that each team’s efficiency gap vs. league average on offense or defense is equal to 4.5 times the minute-weighted average of its players’ ratings on either side of the ball (to account for score effects). The result is a fairly basic “statistical plus-minus” model that had a correlation of 0.89 with “full” RAPTOR from 2014-2023.

(To read more about how it works, click here.)

I’ll probably be using these throughout the season in my NBA writing, so feel free to hit me with comments/suggestions/etc. about the ratings.

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Filed under: NBA