NBA Metrics 101: Which Players Have Had the Steepest Late-Career Declines?
Precious few NBA players end up retiring while they’re at their peak. The vast majority stick around far longer—which, we should note, they’re well within their rights to do, so long as they can convince one of the league’s 30 teams to keep signing checks.cheap new nike nfl jerseys
But when they move into the latter stages of their careers, they often significantly decline. The 2017-18 campaign’s crop of veterans proved no exception, as the production of plenty of elder contributors slowed as their ages progressed.
To objectively determine a baseline for these declines,cheap nfl jerseys nike china we’re turning to the formula for season score used in previous articles.
For every player in the NBA who’s logged even a single minute during each of the last five seasons, we pulled scores in four different overarching metrics: NBA Math’s total points added, ESPN.com’s real plus-minus wins, player efficiency rating nike jersey nfl cheap and win shares. The first two look at volume-efficiency combinations, while the third focuses on per-possession effectiveness and favors offensive production. The fourth element rewards those whose individual merits lead to more victories. Volume and time on the court matter more than they might in other evaluations.
To standardize four numbers that operate on drastically different scales, we found the Z-scores in each category and summed them to find a player’s season score. This was done individually for each of the last five campaigns, and the players featured throughout this article are the men 30 years or older who were subjectively determined to have undergone the most notable drop-offs.
Veteran contributors such as Andrew Bogut, Luol Deng and cheap youth nfl jerseys Joakim Noah were also considered. But the reason for the subjective judgment is notable: We wanted to highlight the men who have gotten the chance to spend time on the court and still looked like mere shells of their old selves.
