Here at the dawn of the NBA’s era of big brains and fancy thinking, basketball statistics are more complicated than ever. The best ones, though, still answer dead-simple questions: Which players are good? Which players are not? And of course: Which players are rarely passed the basketball? I stumbled into the answer to that last one back in 2013, and it’s about time for a 2016 update, because the NBA landscape is still dotted with players who do not know where to stand.
The formulation is pretty simple: The NBA’s player-tracking SportVU technology now provides the number of passes each player has received, which I divided by the player’s minutes and then normalized to passes per 36 minutes.