With the Celtics twenty games into the season I collected the data for my Player Tracking Plus Minus (PT-PM) model, with a big assist from Darryl Blackport for the data scraping script.
With the data through December 15th, Tyler Zeller had been the Celtic's most productive player on the roster based on his extremely efficient scoring and solid rebounding for an estimated plus 1.8. Jared Sullinger is a distant second among rotation players at plus .45. Meanwhile,Marcus Smart was a tantalizing plus 1.35 in minutes limited so far by injuries.
Below are the production rating for the whole team to date.
One clear thing to note is that none of the Celtics players are in the plus side on both offense and defense, though Zeller is close on defense. This reflects not only the Celtics' 'eveness' as Brad Stevens says, but also the challenge Stevens has in making line ups, since there are not enough all around players to make the mixes easier to fit together
I also have the standardized scores for each player by the model's elements (any score above zero means the player is above average in that category, negative means they are below average).
Obviously, with this year's Celtics one has to talk about Rajon Rondo. His line here is interesting, the passing catagory includes both points created per forty minutes and the assisted per pass, which are stable contributors to offensive efficiency in the model. Rondo scores over four standard deviations above the average player there, tops in the league. He also scores well in gaining possessions on the defensive end with his rebounding, but has been below average in scoring, extending and holding offensive possessions, rim protection and on court team defensive efficiency.
Here is the table above as a chart(click to enlarge):
In the chart you can actually see how polarizing Rondo is even statistically say compared to a guy like Bass, who scored near average in each category, Rondo has been great in a few things and rather poor in others with little in between.
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