Usage Rate and Minutes: The Base of Every Player Projection

A player's points in a game are mostly his minutes times his scoring rate. Getting minutes right matters more than any fine adjustment to the rate.

Usage rate

Usage estimates the share of team possessions a player ends while on the floor with a shot, a trip to the line or a turnover: (FGA + 0.44 × FTA + TOV) divided by his on-court possessions. High usage with high true shooting is rare and valuable.

Projecting minutes

We track a recent weighted average of each player's minutes when he plays. For a game, we remove players listed out, reduce questionable players, and rescale the rotation to 240 minutes, capped at 40 for any one player. When a starter sits, the minutes flow to the rest of the rotation in proportion.

Projecting production

Per-minute rates blend this season's numbers with the player's longer, time-decayed history, scaled to the expected pace of the game.

Honest results

In the four-season backtest, these projections missed actual points by about 5.0 per game, against 5.15 for simply using the season average: a real but modest gain. Single games are volatile, and we show the error next to every player projection.

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