And that something is, the rosters of 2017 and 2018 were hilariously bad. When Emmanuel Mudiay or Frank Ntilikina are subbing in for you, it’s not a lot to ask that the team play worse

Counterpoint: Ron Baker doing okay in +/- is some stone cold evidence of the uselessness of that statistic

As I’ve said many times, you must also include quality of team analysis, whether he was bench player or starter, how good those units were and look at it over multiple years covering many lineups etc…

Pure RAPM broken up by offense and defense does much of that fairly well for you, but you also need to look at multuple years.

I’ve come around to liking defensive RAPM, not so much because I think it’s very accurate but because imo it’s way better than boxscore at capturing defense and some other contributions not in the boxscore.

If I see a good on/off that’s not explained by boxscore and I see a positive defensive RAPM, I uderstand better what’s going in.

So IMO if you look at multi year on/off, have a feel for the quality of the team, look at pure RAPM offense/defense with no boxscore added in you are way ahead of the game relative to boxscore.

If you take it another step with team makeup and lineup analysis, IMO you are going to get even closer to reality.

I think Baker’s career postive on/off signaled he was probaby not as bad as boxscore metrics made him out to be. You also know he was a bench player and those teams sucked, so he’s clearly not as good as his on/off. Defensive RAPM suggests he was around neutral on defense and may have been contributing something on offense that was not very apparent. So call him a -1 or -2 player like RAPM suggests. That’s not nearly as bad as perceptions.

IMO defense, hustle, switchability, making the right pass, not stopping the ball, spacing and things like that tend to be underrated by boxscore, most observers of the game and maybe even still the NBA. Lack of defense, which imo can be huge, is under appreciated in the opposite direction.

Take a look as Jordan Clarkson over the last few years.

https://www.nbarapm.com/player/Jordan_Clarkson

The posts and thoughts of farfa.

Ron Baker was one of those guys that every metric imaginable said totally sucks at basketball, but the team (albeit a bad team) managed to be better with him on the court. I think he was a neutral to barely plus defender/energy guy and those kinds of things are still very underrated because they aren’t measured well, but his offense was just too bad to be in the NBA.

Counterpoint: Ron Baker doing okay in +/- is some stone cold evidence of the uselessness of that statistic

It was the player option that gave him a de facto no trade clause. Can’t remember the specifics as to why, but it was a key reason the deal was panned, since it could have been structured differently to avoid it as, with THJr, Mills was bidding against himself to a large extent.

KP
THJR
Kornet
Doug McDermott