On defense, it looks at factors like how often the player was the nearest defender on an opponents’ shot and how often those shots went in, 3 how many points and rebounds were scored by opponents at the defender’s position, and how often the player induced offensive fouls. On offense, for instance, in addition to using traditional statistics like points, RAPTOR accounts for factors such as how many of a player’s field goals were assisted and how valuable these assists were, 2 the value of different types of offensive rebounds, time of possession and various measures of floor spacing, such as the number of contested 3-pointers that the player took. Essentially, this is the same technique that BPM used, only RAPTOR uses play-by-play and player tracking statistics in addition to traditional ones.
For instance, a player with an offensive RAPTOR rating of +2.1 boosts his team’s performance by 2.1 points per 100 offensive possessions while he is on the floor.
It highly values two-way wings such as Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. RAPTOR thinks ball-dominant players such as James Harden and Steph Curry are phenomenally good. RAPTOR likewise values these things - not because we made any deliberate attempt to design the system that way but because the importance of those skills emerges naturally from the data.
NBA teams highly value floor spacing, defense and shot creation, and they place relatively little value on traditional big-man skills.