Kings Surprisingly in Top 10 of 'Catch-All' Advanced Metric

It does take time for a team to adapt to a slew of new players, but understandably fans had high expectations for this season, and the “win-now” trade to bring in Lavine didn’t dampen that. When the team is on, they seem to be able to compete with just about anybody in the league and this advanced stat may give some hope to fans that they will be able to make something out of this season. 

The team of Krishna Narsu and Tim/Cranjis McBasketball at Basketball Index developed a metric named LEBRON, which stands for luck adjusted player estimate using a box prior regularized on-off. That’s an absolute mouthful of course, but in layman’s terms it is a measure of a players overall impact on a game. It was named LEBRON becuase, well LeBron James was the leader in the metric from 2009-2020. 

Basketball Index just tweeted out the team leaders in LEBRON and Sacramento was number nine in the league sitting above the Los Angeles Clippers and right below the Minnesota Timberwolves. 

Now, this isn’t a measure of how impactful the team is as a whole, this is measuring how impactful the pieces are on their own (on average) and right now, it doesn’t seem like the adage “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” is holding true. 

The positive is that every team above Sacramento on the list is firmly in the playoff picture and playing competitive basketball right now, which could be a sign of things to come. If Interim Head Coach Doug Christie can push the right buttons with his lineups and schemes, the talent on this Kings squad could surprise some of the tougher teams coming up on the schedule. 

With 15 games left, the Kings will take on the Milwaukee Bucks, Boston Celtics, Orlando Magic, Indiana Pacers, Detroit Pistons, Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers, Phoenix Suns, and the Cleveland Cavaliers twice. 

This tough end of the season continues Wednesday with the first of two to come against Cleveland. 

The league leading Cavs will be a huge test to see if Sacramento is able to put it all together on both ends of floor against the best competition the league has to offer and make some noise in the postseason. 

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