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Introducing WNBA RAPM
- Updated: September 29, 2016
While the NBA has seen a surge of advanced stats and a whole universe of new metrics and stats over the past few years, the WNBA has remained mostly unexplored. Most WNBA stats compiled are basic ones, and the advanced sections have old metrics borrowed from the men’s game, like Win Shares and PER. This is unfortunate because the WNBA has been given too little attention for basically its entire existence already, and the public sports analytics community has long had the power to help rectify that.
Thus, I’m enthused to share one of the basic building blocks of advanced stats in men’s basketball: RAPM, or ridge regression adjusted plus/minus, for several seasons of the WNBA. Plus/minus is a way to measure a player’s value independent of traditional stats, giving people a gauge of impact without relying on basic box score stats which can often be misleading or tell an incomplete story.
For those unfamiliar with the WNBA, there are some important differences between the league and the NBA. There are fewer games and fewer minutes per game — 34 and 40, respectively. Consequently, the data set is slightly smaller in general. But there’s one difference I want people to understand before the unveil the RAPM numbers — there’s far more variation in the league at the player level. For …
