Back in the good old days — before every NBA team had an analytics department — finding potential breakout players was a matter of simple math. Basically, calculate a player’s per game production in your preferred overall metric, calculate his per 48 minutes production in the same metric, and subtract.
Run a screen for age, and...voila — what I dubbed my Diamond Rating.
In the analytics era, teams pick off the low-hanging fruit during the season, which makes it a little tougher to find undervalued bench guys the coaches haven’t noticed is actually good.