FYI to the new guys, I get a little winded so I apologize about the long speach you are about to read ahead of time.
Just to give a heads up. I'm a lot quicker this season now that I've figured out a much faster process for compiling the stats after work since starting my new job. I do not have the time to run the numbers through while at the house but I'll be shooting the numbers to my work email and dumping into the spreadsheet. I've got the first three games for both conferences saved to my files right now so dumping them into the spreadsheet won't take me too long and I should have the first set of rankings shortly after. Now that I know I can just generate a report directly into PDF format from Excel, I can begin including a complete set of rankings for all players rather than just Top 25.
In the meantime, I am going to begin developing a new process that gives greater weight to those players that win games as well .... something that I know Xarn wouldn't take too well considering that Mina played at an MVP level on a team that was doomed for whatever reasons. However, after I do extensive testing on whatever process I come up with, I do not have any plans to give heavy weighting but rather include it as a small bonus to the overall score. This way, players like Mina that are MVP-caliber players that are stuck on bad teams won't be hurt too much by small bonuses.
Also, I will explain all of this next part again when I start up my Season 13 Player Rankings thread but I'm going to give a quick synopsis of a change I am going to be making for this season's rankings. After doing a bit of simple math, I have decided that I am going to bump the maximum amount of points a player can earn over 22 games up from 100 to 112.
There are 14 regular season Conference matchups and 8 regular season Non-Conference matchups. In order to determine how many points to award a player for taking the top spot for that set of games, I needed to determine the how to give weight to Non-Conference and give less weight to Conference games. The idea is give a balanced view while placing more importance on being able to play well against opponents you only see once a season versus opponents you face twice a season. The match was actually quite simple.
8*7 - 56
14*4 = 56
In other words, if Clay Chow of the Gavno (I know he's gone now) were to take all of the Top Spots for the Conference Games (remember, I don't seperate conferences when grading players anymore), he would earn 4 points for each of the 14 Confernce Games netting him 56 points. Same could be said if he would take the Top Spot for all 8 Non-Conf games, he would earn a maximum of 7 points for each game netting him 56 points.
Also, I am considering modifying how I normalize the Hollinger Game Scores. Minutes played has little impact on the Hollinger Game Score, the factor that plays heavyily into the player rankings. However, it is difficult to justify grouping a player that played 41 minutes with a player that played 45 minutes. Remember that I am taking their average HGS per minute and then multiplying the difference with the HGS/minute and adding it so basically a 41 minute guy could leapfrog a 45 minute guy quite easily if his HGS comes out a little higher. My inew plan now will only be adding up to 48 minutes to equal no more than 48 minutes.
Ex. 41 minute guy will be ranked as if he played 45 minutes (extra 4 minutes) whereas the 45 minute guy would only be ranked as if he played the full 48 minutes. It's not perfect but I saw too many times players with outstanding HGS scores be leapfrogged by a player with far less minutes. Basically, minutes were playing too heavy of a factor into the rankings, more than I intended.