Identifying the Best Scorers by Playtype

3 min readAug 24, 2020

Synergy is one of the two main data tracking providers for the NBA. Information collected by Synergy is provided on the official NBA stats page.

This data summarizes the rate at and efficiency with which players score, when running a certain type of play (an explanation of different playtypes can be found here). For example, Harden has scored 15.8 points per game on 51.9% effective field goal percentage this season off isolation plays. He is the best isolation scorer in the NBA by a wide margin, but the “Percentile” column lists him at the 90.3 percentile for this season. Courtney Lee is listed at the 100th percentile. This is because he has scored the most points off isolation plays per possession this season.

However, Lee has only 11 isolation scoring attempts this season, compared to Harden’s 904 isolation scoring attempts. Lee simply does not have enough scoring attempts under his belt to be considered the game’s best isolation scorer (100th percentile) this season.

The takeaway here is that points per possession alone is not enough to identify the best scorers in each playtype. Volume has to be taken into account, as well. An all-encompassing scoring metric that takes into account volume and efficiency was introduced in a previous blog post. That same methodology will be used here to rank the best scorers in each playtype. The general formula is shown below.