The NBA has an advanced metric for that called gravity. As you could imagine Steph Curry's gravity is through the roof.
Another related metric is +/- for when a player is on the floor. That one is more nebulous and error prone but it is meant to describe a player's impact on the floor outside of things like assists, points, rebounds, etc.
Happen to have any additional reading on that? (only if it's a handy link for you, otherwise I'll google it). I've re-started watching NBA recently after about 20 years or so, and it's the first time when I hear about this concept, one which sounds very intriguing and interesting. Maybe it was also used 20 years ago, but back then I didn't have access to Internet and as I don't live in the States the local sports newspapers (which care more about football/soccer) weren't mentioning it.
I can't speak for programming but in soccer this is well-known. It's just very hard to Value just like an employer would in terms of having that person on board for morale. Fortunately the better people get it and understand that that person should be value even if they weren't directly involved in making the change but they were definitely a part of it.
This is what plagues me with most corporate companies in the United States. It should be about teamwork not about what this person did or I did, rather what the team did.
Sure you can value people individually, but teams trump individuals all day long in the long run.
Just something about knowing a person is an amazing and knowledgeable resource and he’s choosing to work here of all places is a subtle morale boost. When they decide to leave, others might start asking “well if that guy left, am I still making the right decision to stay?”
I’m sure we’ve all experienced someone important leaving our company and having a waterfall of turnover that follows it. That is very disruptive and more should have been done to keep that one employee or at least keep the rest that followed them out the door.
Moving on is a fact of life, more so now that ever. My parents both worked for the same company over 35-40 years before they retired; I don't think I can imagine that'll be even close to the norm for many in the workforce now (especially software / other tech).
(a) despite the existence of better stats, a lot of people still care about goals/assists, because they're much easier to understand.
(b) the difficulty of measuring these stats in low-scoring sports (soccer, hockey) is greatly magnified in business; instead of scoring O(1) points per hour, a small software team may "score a point" every couple weeks or quarter or year. Additionally, the number of people contributing is often greater, and we see fewer "identical lineup, but with player A swapped out for player B" situations (and ~never for long enough to get meaningful stats about "points scored").
That's why they have a million statistics, these days. Goals, assists, distance covered, top speed, region of the pitch most used, etc.
They especially undervalue actions that happen "away from the play" (the software-engineering equivalent might be something like rewarding a teammate who steps in to help you fix an critical block-ship bug, missing the person who had the foresight to write a test case two years ago that prevents a bug from occurring in the first place).
And also the guy who pressured the opponent into attempting a difficult pass so that his team mate could win the ball in the first place.
We miss the perimeter shooter who positions themselves just so to pull two defenders out of position, but give credit to the point guard who makes the now-easy pass for the "assist". It's entirely possible for the person most responsible for a play succeeding to never touch the ball. You really want something like value-above-replacement, but that's pretty hard to measure without a clear definition of what "success" is and reams of data.