- Adding free throws would have been an easy adjustment and something I should have done. I tried to keep the stat simple, but that was plenty easy. My bad.

- Factoring in touches would make more sense but it’s not totally plausible. Even if it was, like I said earlier, I wanted it to be simple.

- Finally, things such as assists sometimes being acts of selfishness may be true. But like I said in the article, there are obviously exceptions to any stat. It would be difficult to account for all those little differences.

Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting!

Offensive fouls and turnovers can result from selfish play, but not necessarily. After all, Steve Nash and Jason Kidd turn the ball over quite a bit, but I wouldn’t say it’s because they’re selfish.

I’d wonder if stats like turnovers or offensive fouls would be useful here too, since both can tend to result from selfish play.

and how about players who are on the team just to catch and shoot open 3 pters.. or open shots at the rim..? its way way wya too crude to tell u anything significant.

I do however see a lot of rookies and young players (Thorton, Thad Young, Beasley) which I think is the mentality of “i gotta show what I got so I get minutes/paid”

In fact, you could construe it the opposite, sometimes players force a pass (say from the top of the arch to the post) instead of working it through the wing, which would have a lower chance of turnover. In that case, if a player at the top of the arch successfully makes the unnecessarily risky pass they get an assist, but it was actually a more selfish play than working it through the wing.

Cool idea, though. I’m guessing getting a timestamped record of every time each player touches the ball isn’t really easy to come by…