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Re:The Toronto Raptors are using IBM’s Watson in the draft by dogma1138 on Thursday June 23, 2016 @02:32PM (#11963329)
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.

Re:The Toronto Raptors are using IBM’s Watson in the draft by jsprogrammer on Thursday June 23, 2016 @05:37PM (#11964481)
A pair-wise analysis should be able to detect such magical players, those who increase the stats of those they play with.
Re:The Toronto Raptors are using IBM’s Watson in the draft by dogma1138 on Thursday June 23, 2016 @06:16PM (#11964700)
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.