Passed Out: A New Metric to Preview the League's Best (and Worst) Playmakers

Featuring the obvious (and not-so-obvious) candidates

Is it really the NBA offseason if I don’t come out with a metric I’ll use once and never again?

Every 4 months or so, I’ll get a spark of creativity and decide to put together an all-in-one metric for one particular part of the game that ends up being at least decent before not referencing it ever again — though maybe I’ll revisit RADAR and SNIPR at some point.

This time around, I want to take a look at the players for this upcoming season who are coming off great playmaking years. These are the guys who are the quarterbacks of their teams, even if they’re not all officially labeled as point guards. To do so, I’m putting together another metric — an admittedly less-creatively-named one — the Playmaking Metric, or PMM for short.

PMM takes into account a couple of things:

• A player’s percentage of minutes in which they are holding the ball

• A player’s assists, normalized to 100 possessions

• A player’s potential assists (shots that could’ve been assists if their teammates didn’t miss), also normalized to 100 possessions

• Bad pass turnovers per 100 (as opposed to simply turnovers, as I’m only counting the passing part of it, not the “ball stolen” or “offensive foul” ones)

Some of these factors intertwine in interesting ways in PMM. For example, a player’s bad pass turnovers per 100 is made relative to the number of assists and on-ball percentage, so a player with more opportunities to make bad passes is less penalized if they make more than someone who barely ever holds the ball at all.

The same applies to potential assists, which are worth 80% of a full assist for all intents and purposes here, and it prevents players from being completely dragged down by their teammates.

In the end, for you mathematical folks out there, the formula looks like this:

\(\text{PMM} \;=\; \Big( \text{Ast/100} \;+\; 0.8 \cdot \text{PotAst/100} \Big) \cdot \log \big( 1 + \text{OnBall\%} \big) \cdot \frac{1}{1 + \dfrac{\text{BP TOV/100}}{\text{Ast/100} + \text{PotAst/100} + 1}}\)

That’s a lot of stuff, I understand, and I didn’t even touch on the logarithmic side of the on-ball percentage, but you don’t need to worry about that for now.

With the calculations out of the way, let’s take a look at the results, which show the league’s best (and worst) playmakers from this past season…