Methodology

Court Signal is an independent NBA analytics project. It is not an aggregator of other people's ratings — the original metrics below are our own transparent formulas, and the classic metrics are recomputed from public data.

Original metrics Court Signal

Each original is era-relative: it is a z-score of a box-score formula against that season's qualified players, scaled so 100 = league average that year (like OPS+ in baseball). A 1962 and a 2024 season are directly comparable.

• CHEF — three-point dominance: quality-weighted makes (3PM/g × 3P%). Three-point era only.
• KOBE — on-ball creation load / "engine": how much offense runs through a player (usage + playmaking). The ball-dominant creator tier.
• WEMBY — defense-first box index: rim protection + defensive activity. A box proxy today; the real version needs play-by-play.
• BUCKETS — scoring punch: volume × efficiency (PTS/g × TS%).

These are v1 formulas and will be tuned. They are honest box-score estimates — powerful, but blind to lineup context. That is what CORE is for.

Classic metrics

PER, BPM, Win Shares, VORP, TS%, and USG% are public-formula metrics sourced from Basketball-Reference season tables. We show them as familiar reference points; we do not claim them as our own.

CORE — the flagship impact metric live

Box-score metrics can't see who was on the court together. Court Signal's flagship metric, CORE, is a possession-weighted impact estimate (RAPM — regularized adjusted plus-minus) built from real play-by-play: it accounts for teammates and opponents and reads in net points per 100 possessions vs. the modeled average (positive is better). See the Impact tab.

It is an honest, early build. Current CORE covers a partial 2023-24 season (the games whose play-by-play reconstructs to an exact final score), so it is a provisional single-season baseline — RAPM is noisy at this sample, and it is not yet prior-informed or split into offense/defense. Coverage and stability grow as more games are ingested. The per-season box tables still show CORE blank until this is joined in.

Data & honesty

Historical box data is Basketball-Reference-derived. Coverage varies by era — three-point, steals, blocks, and usage simply weren't recorded in early decades, so those cells are blank rather than guessed. Nothing here is a commercial product; it's an independent research project.