The Detailed Player Rating: an elaborate approach to rating NBA players

Making correct decisions regarding player trades is important for NBA teams, in a league where every team is bound by the same salary restrictions. Therefore player rating tools can be useful for NBA teams to support these decisions. In this thesis we design a new method for rating NBA players, called the Detailed Player Rating (DPR). Our method has the added information over the current player rat- ing methods, that it not only estimates a player’s skill level, but also what aspects of basketball are most important for winning and how each player contributes to these aspects. We have shown that the DPR method shows comparable results in terms of predictive power, but provides more useful information and does not overvalue offensive skills, which most current player rating methods do.