Over the course of this week, our Drew Cannon has introduced a new offensive rating for college players he calls Four Pettinella Score, or PET. Using data from Basketball-Reference.com, I applied the same method to the NBA. Here’s the top 10 so far this season (minimum 200 minutes):
Player ORTG Usg PET
LeBron James 121 33.0 120.0
Kobe Bryant 106 39.7 119.2
Carmelo Anthony 107 35.4 117.0
Kevin Durant 113 31.9 116.5
Louis Williams 118 28.2 114.8
Kevin Love 115 28.7 114.4
Andrea Bargnani 111 28.7 113.3
Derrick Rose 115 27.1 112.9
Kyrie Irving 107 29.5 112.8
Russell Westbrook 101 31.6 112.5
As you can see, PET conforms to conventional wisdom a bit better in the NBA than it does in college. I find this instructive in terms of reinforcing that the biggest issue with any kind of comprehensive college metric is accounting for strength of schedule. Applying a team-level adjustment to player stats may not go far enough.
In the NBA, we don’t really have that problem, so even after just three weeks, seven of the top 10 players were All-Stars a year ago. Andrea Bargnani’s scoring ability has never been the question, and he’s off to a great start; rookie Kyrie Irving might get there sooner rather than later. The only real fluke in this group is Philadelphia’s Louis Williams, a career 33.5 percent three-point shooter who is making 41.7 percent of his triples thus far this season. (By the way, neo-Peja StojakovicRyan Anderson is just outside the top 10, ranking 11th.)
This comes as no surprise to me; Four Pettinella Score utilizes the same logic as the offensive portion of WARP. The way I get to individual offensive rating is somewhat different and I make a slightly smaller adjustment for usage (adding one point of Offensive Rating per point of usage, rather than 1.25), but the only philosophical difference between the two metrics is my inclusion of an adjustment for floor spacing. So I certainly think there’s merit to using PET, especially among players with similar schedules.
