🏀 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:
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.
Filed under: NBA
You absolute legend - I was devastated to learn Disney had pulled the plug on RAPTOR, and a desperate, borderline hopeless Google search brought me here. This is exactly what I was looking for.
I've done enough social science to regard a correlation of .89 as extraordinary, and if you care to update your spreadsheet regularly I anticipate I will be using it a LOT this season - at least until the real thing gets back up and running. Thank you!!
Thank you, this is awesome! Is there any way to sort by highest and lowest raptor by player for only the current season?