Does the NBA have a WAR like statistic?

[Yankeeknickfan]

I'm really into analytics in baseball, but not so much in basketball. War is basically the stat that shows how good a player actually is, in terms of how many wins he contributes to the team. Does the NBA have a stat like that?

[Baller1234a]

Win share

[Bolivar]

Win share is win share, but I suppose PER is a bit more of a general "higher equals most efficient season".
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/per_season.html

[clyde21]

I'm not really familiar with WAR but WS/48 and VORP in the NBA seem like similar metrics.

[Yankeeknickfan]

https://www.fangraphs.com/library/misc/war/ WAR in case anyone wants the definition

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic. You should always use more than one metric at a time when evaluating players, but WAR is all-inclusive and provides a useful reference point for comparing players. WAR offers an estimate to answer the question, “If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a freely available minor leaguer or a AAAA player from their bench, how much value would the team be losing?” This value is expressed in a wins format, so we could say that Player X is worth +6.3 wins to their team while Player Y is only worth +3.5 wins, which means it is highly likely that Player X has been more valuable than Player Y.

[JunkYardDog6ix]

Baseball is a game of numbers where advanced stats can actually be pretty accurate, in basketball there are too many moving factors at all times you usually have to watch the games , no one stat will help you

[meekrab]

Win share is win share, but I suppose PER is a bit more of a general "higher equals most efficient season".
https://www.basketball-reference.com/leaders/per_season.html

PER is decent, but badly skewed in favor of guys who dominate the basketball and put up lots of shots; stats like Win Shares and VORP and RAPM aren't as much.

[ImSlower]

Baseball is a game of numbers where advanced stats can actually be pretty accurate, in basketball there are too many moving factors at all times you usually have to watch the games , no one stat will help you

Yep. I love baseball stats, but this is definitely why complicated analytics are much tougher for basketball than baseball. In baseball, at any one instant, almost every important individual action can be isolated and interpreted statistically. Swinging, pitch location, baserunning, a great majority of the sport can be associated with a single individual action at any time. Basketball is so much tougher, as a guy who isn't necessarily contributing a specific individual action is very hard to evaluate with numbers. Sure Curry nailed that shot, but it was a sweet double screen around Green and Pachulia that got him there for it. It'll just never be possible to give Pachulia some sort of counting stat versus what would have happened with another big, etc. That's why things like PER can be a bit misleading, as the counting stats available in a basketball game will never be able to properly assess a player.

That said, stats are still pretty important to gauging a player's direct offensive contribution, which is not an insignificant factor when we're all arguing over LeBron vs MJ vs Curry vs Simmons and all that message board fun.

[HeartBreakKid]

WinShares are supposed to do this.

[NyKnicks1714]

Eh, what is it good for?

[CptCrunch]

https://www.fangraphs.com/library/misc/war/ WAR in case anyone wants the definition

Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic. You should always use more than one metric at a time when evaluating players, but WAR is all-inclusive and provides a useful reference point for comparing players. WAR offers an estimate to answer the question, “If this player got injured and their team had to replace them with a freely available minor leaguer or a AAAA player from their bench, how much value would the team be losing?” This value is expressed in a wins format, so we could say that Player X is worth +6.3 wins to their team while Player Y is only worth +3.5 wins, which means it is highly likely that Player X has been more valuable than Player Y.

This is almost exact definition of VORP, though VORP is centered around -2. A replacement player is a -2. This is interpreted as a replacement player has a -2 point impact on your team efficiency over 100 possessions.

WS tries to attribute wins to certain players. You can't get Winshare if your team doesn't win. VORP is correlated with winning, but you don't need to win to have good VORP. I am not going to look up WAR to figure out if you can accrue WAR without winning.

But to OP, if you want a single number to judge how good/bad a player is, the best ones are

Top Tier:
ESPN's RPM (ESPN's RAPM with modifications)
RAPM (The current end all be all stat, takes into account teammates, opponents, calculates impact from possession level stats) or PT-PM (Blended advanced stat with camera tracked stats, box score stat and RPM).

Medium Tier:
BPM and VORP and TPA (They are effectively all the same stat)
NBA's Camera Tracked Stats (Advanced camera tracked raw defensive and offensive numbers on stats.nba.com)

Low Tier:
PER (How much someone fills up boxscore, hugely overvalues rebounds and high field goal, ie centers who only dunk open shots)
Winshare (How many wins a player contributes to, can't have win share without wins. In theory, you could have a really good player on a bad team and his win share would be fairly bad since his team doesn't win, but you could argue he isn't that good because he can't single handily win his team games)

Garbage Tier:
Offensive Efficiency, Defensive Efficiency (Effectively team stats)