1. Quality Shot Setups – Every pass that leads directly to a quality shot (a quality shot is basically an open shot or a shot that results in a shooting foul). You would also want to include passes that were mishandled by an obviously wide-open teammate in position to score. These don’t happen a lot, but certainly a few times per game.

2. Count assists for FTs if the pass led to the shooting foul.

3. If you want to get crazy like this article, you need to keep track of the player who took the shot on every potential assist. If the player took a bad shot, this is partly the passers fault for passing him the ball when it wasn’t a good scoring opportunity(he should know if his teammate has a tendency to take bad shots). You also need to track where that player was setup, so you know how good of a position it was for them personally to score. Using per player stats you can get a perfect picture of the shooting % gains.

1. Only count potential assists when they actually lead to made baskets.

2. Count any potential assist, but weight it according to the expected number of points scored on the resulting shot.

So, let’s say Player A passes to Player B, who fires up a two-point shot that has, for the sake of argument, a 55 percent chance of going in. By reckoning number 1, Player A will get a full assist 55 percent of the time. By reckoning number 2, Player A will get 1.1 assist all of the time. On average, reckoning number 2 yields a result that is exactly twice as high (as a result of being counting expected points rather than expected baskets).

It seems to me that (outside of counting treys as 1-1/2 times as valuable as deuces) what this does is just reduce the variance on the result. Over the course of a season, for instance, you’d expect the two reckonings to be pretty well correlated (modulo the treys again, natch). Is that so, or am I missing something else?

It also seems that what one could do here is account for the opportunity cost of making the pass. Player A could have shot the ball. In some cases, Player A’s shot might even have been better. You don’t want players who, whatever happens, DON’T take the shot, but always pass. Accounting for the opportunity cost would reflect that. Of course, this would be a heck of a lot of work to encode in processing video–and highly-paid human work, too, is my guess. But maybe some of it could be done by grunts. :)

Replace Dwight Howard with Chuck Hayes, and suddenly all of Jameer Nelson’s dunk assists are “close shot” assists. As the above poster points out, this would actually hurt the team, since those close shots aren’t converted at anywhere near the rate that dunks are.

While I really admire your work, Haberstroh, I think your system of valuing assists needs a lot more work before it can be taken seriously. The true measure of an assist is whether it creates an easier shot for your teammate, and just how much easier you’ve made the shot. Simply rewarding point guards for potential shots is silly since it is much easier to create lots of bad shots that are potential assists rather than getting a few easy buckets.