Dean Oliver’s Four Factors have been a staple of advanced NBA analysis for as long as this author can remember. While not the be-all-end-all determinants of a team’s success in a single game, let alone for an entire season, it can paint a telling picture of a team or player’s effectiveness in the aggregate.
The four factors are as follows
- Effective Field Goal Percentage (eFG%)
- Turnover Percentage (TOV%)
- Offensive Rebound Percentage (ORB%)
- Free Throw Rate (FTr)
Furthermore, these four factors can be divided further into offensive and defensive categories.
- Offensive eFG% measures a team’s shooting efficiency, taking into account the fact that threes are worth more than twos. Defensive eFG% is a measure of how teams can coax opponents into inefficient shooting.
- Offensive TOV% measures a team’s ability to take care of the ball, while defensive TOV% measures how effective a team is at forcing opponents to turn the ball over.
- Offensive ORB% measures how often a team can rebound their own misses and prolong possessions, while defensive ORB% measures a team’s effectiveness at defensive rebounds and preventing opponents from rebounding their own misses.
- Offensive FTr measures how often a team can get to the free-throw line, while defensive FTr measures how disciplined a defense is with regard to fouling.
An informative thread by analyst David Lee on X (formerly Twitter)
made use of the four factors to determine which players are currently the “most influential.” Of course, this analysis by doesn’t take into account “general” influence that someone like Steph Curry would have, in the sense that as the spark of the three-point revolution, the modern NBA is now based on shooting and spacing principles that Curry and the Golden State Warriors once monopolized.
Rather, this analysis breaks influence down into two main categories: possession influence and shooting influence:
Lee, in painstaking detail, explains his methodology via his thread, which is a great read and something worth checking out. To expedite toward crux of the matter, when taking into account the composite four-factors influence among players who have played a minimum of 500 minutes this season, the player who is at the top of the list is a Warrior — not named Steph Curry:
Jimmy Butler has been a four-factors darling this season, but one who is intimately knowledgeable about Butler’s game shouldn’t be surprised. Butler has been a boost in terms of the Warriors’ ability to control the possession game and their ability to generate efficient shots.
In terms of the possession factor, Butler has been touted as one of the league’s best low-turnover, high-usage stalwarts. With the ball in hands, one can be assured of a possession that ends in a shot attempt, rather than a wasted pass that ends up in the opponent’s hands. Per Cleaning the Glass, the Warriors’ TOV% improves by three percentage points — from 17.4 percent (fifth percentile) to 14.4 percent (57th percentile) — whenever Butler’s on the floor. Butler’s ability to keep possession is enough of an influential trait to offset the miniscule effect he has had in forcing opponents to cough up possessions.
But that is just one half of the equation. Butler’s ability to influence the possession game is aided by his ability to influence the shooting game. While Butler himself isn’t considered a shooter by all means — he’s a career 33 percent from beyond the arc, while his 38.3 percent mark this season is on extremely low volume (2.3 attempts) — it’s his ability to create open shots for his teammates that ranks him high on the shooting influence category, per Lee’s analysis.
Butler averages 10.9 potential assists per game, 26th among 199 players who have played a minimum 25 games this season and average at least 20 minutes per game. For people attuned to the manner through which Curry creates advantages, it can be jarring to watch the difference in the way Butler creates advantages, in the sense that he does so mostly with the ball in his hands (as opposed to Curry, who employs a blend of on-ball advantage creation through ball screens and off-ball advantage creation through his constant movement).
I’ve already written countless examples of how the nature of the Warriors’ offense changes with Butler as the sole advantage creator on the floor. Suffice to say, Butler performs his job extremely well — despite the prevailing criticism of him being that his contract isn’t worth his perceived production (which, in most cases, is just a long-winded way of saying that he isn’t providing enough raw scoring to justify his large contract).
While Butler does indeed have to score when the situation calls for it, he performs the connective tasks at such a high level that it boosts the Warriors’ collective offensive attack:
Furthermore, another aspect that greatly boosts his four-factors influence is his stratospheric free-throw rate of 64.5 percent, all while making 86.6 percent of his free throws. Per Cleaning the Glass, his shooting-fouled percentage — that is, the percentage of shot attempts a player is fouled on — is 24.3 percent, 100th percentile among forwards in the NBA. An expert at luring defenders into illegal guarding positions and creating contact, Butler’s gift for the grift has created extra points for the Warriors aplenty.
Which is why Butler has been misconstrued as a player based on his box-score numbers. Across a number of metrics — including the four-factors analysis by Lee above, as well as Estimated Plus-Minus (in which Butler is a plus-4.2, ranking 15th) — he is rated highly despite having relatively “pedestrian” averages of 19.8 points, 5.6 rebounds, and 4.9 assists, with a shooting split consisting of 54.3 percent on twos, 38.3 percent on threes, and 86.6 percent on free throws.
The value he brings in the things that matter toward winning, however, have been overt in the many subtle ways through which he impacts the game — and that has been enough justification for his contributions to this team, despite their middling record and mediocre performance so far this season.
