Process-Oriented Player Evaluation Metrics for USports Basketball

This thesis focuses on quantifying the true talent of each individual player on the court of a Canadian USports basketball game. The paper explores both bottom-up and top-down approaches to assigning value to individual players. These assignments of value are then tested and contrasted to observe what measures should to be used to understand properly what a player can contribute to a team. In basketball the goal is to score more points than the other team and thus a player who can contribute to this end is valuable. However, due to the smaller number of games played by individual players at the Canadian University level as compared to professional levels of basketball, more noise is present in measures that focus on team outcomes. To combat this, a deeper examination is undertaken to understand the processes which predict better outcomes and tell a more salient picture of a player's true talent.