There are actually many advanced statistics available to NBA teams via SportsVu. It can measure who passes to who, how far people travel on a possession, gravity (how close opposing defenders are drawn to the offensive player, how much someone dribbles, and a host of other stats. I don't think the system is in place at many colleges (if any).

The tricky thing with the draft is finding players that have a high ceiling and can perform far in excess of what they were able to do in college. Sabermetrics can help you identify that some of the time but I think attitude, ability to improve specific skills, and innate physical attributes are things a team would have to evaluate in person to uncover undervalued talent.

There are many invented advanced statistics that supposedly fill those intangible gaps. For example, the defensive win shares stat is supposed to measure defensive impact.

As per my other comment, I _believe_ that for the actual application, they did use Watson Tone Analyzer / Sentiment Analyzer / etc, to figure out the "fit" of a player to Raptors culture and with other team-mates.

I've seen a demo where as part of the app, they scrape player's interviews, twitter feeds, etc to get a personality representation.

There are more stats than this, average points participated, win participation, time with ball, all of those are normalized for amount of games played and time on court. But at the end those stats you've mentioned matter, hoops scored, rebounds caught, penalty shots, and score passes/assists are what "wins" a game.

An important part of a statistical model is to also be simple and cheap enough to implement to gain actual statistics, the chance that there is some magical player that doesn't score high on stats but somehow has a meaningful impact on the game that isn't somehow scored is very very slim and in Basketball specifically probably non-existent since it's only a 5vs5 sport which means that every player handles the ball.

A pair-wise analysis should be able to detect such magical players, those who increase the stats of those they play with.

But it's unlikely to increase without increasing the stats of these "magical players", as they need to have an impact of the game to increase the stats of other players and that counts as assists, rebounds caught etc.

Basketball is a small court, 5 people on each team, defense is very important but this hardly is football/rugby or even soccer level of defense everyone handles the ball quite a bit. Time with ball is also a stat that is counted, and often other stats are normalized to it.

Honest if potentially naive question: why can't you just measure points per minute by the player's team's opponents when the player is on versus off the court?

Because this doesn't guarantee a uniform background.

Let's say we have two teams, the Ayyys and the Bees; each has two defenders, Schlub and Superman play for the Ayys, and Scrub and Slacker play for the Bees. Let's assume that they all suck equally, except for Superman, who is great.

Now we run your statistic: we compare how the Ayyys do with Schlub on/off against how Scrub does on/off.

The problem is, when Schlub is off, Superman is playing, whereas when Scrub is off, Slacker is playing. This means the Ayyys do quite well when Schlub is off, but the Bees do about as well when Scrub is on compared to when Scrub is off. By this comparison, Schlub is a much worse player than Scrub, even though in actual fact they might be equivalent.

ESPN introduced a stat called real plus-minus in 2014, which adjusts for teammates and opponents. It also takes both offensive and defense plus-minus into account. The top two players in RPM this past season were Lebron James and Draymond Green, followed by Chris Paul and Steph Curry [1]. It was received with a lot of skepticism back when it was introduced, but that shouldn't surprise anyone.

1. http://espn.go.com/nba/statistics/rpm/_/sort/RPM

Yeah, that occurred to me but I figured it would average out over enough games. It would be super bad luck to always get subbed in and out in sync with your opponents' best players all season.

They do measure that, and they also measure +/- for a similar purpose.

FYI "+/-": A metric that looks at how teams perform with a certain player on the court, how they perform with a certain player off the court, and calculates the overall impact that player has on team success.

>My limited understanding with basketball stats is that they are only somewhat useful

One of the major fallacies surrounding sports analytics is dismissing information that isn't all-encompassing. Not picking on you, but "those stats are no good because they don't capture X!" is a common refrain.

Some data is better than no data.