The BaselineBums Community Game Grades Project

[scott]

Greetings everyone,

I wanted to introduce a fun project I've been working on and enlist your support.

As you might imagine, we can't really rely on timvp's grades anymore. But, I don't want to see the tradition of Game Grades fade into the trash bin of history. Accordingly, I've developed a Game Grade database and dashboard.

The idea here is that I will be providing grades (numerical only, no write ups) but also soliciting and compiling Baseline Bums community grades. This will allow us to see the communities aggregate opinion of a player's performance over the course of a season.

I've built a dashboard with mock data (it will look unrealistic because it's just randomly generated for now). You can interact with it at this link.

Here is a screenshot of what the Dashboard looks like. You can click on any player (or Mitch) and it the bottom half of the Dashboard will populate their information and a chart of my grades and the Community's grades over time. You can use any of the filters on the top of the page to slice the data in various ways (for example, only want to see home games? Home games against the west? Home losses against the west? All are doable).

Please play around with it and try to break it! I've got a little time to work out any bugs before the season starts. I'm working on how to collect the Community Grades from you all, so information on that will come soon. I'm also toying around with the idea of a 3rd line on the chart (to compete the fiesta color trio) that is a aggregate of "Community Gurus". I don't know who those guru's should be... but who's takes are so good you think should be included in this?

I'm also toying around with the concept (if possible) of logging grade responses to individual user names, so I could actually add that as a filter and anyone could chart out any specific users grades. Let me know what you think of that or if that is too invasive.

Thanks all.

 

[scott]

Quick follow up note: I'm working behind the scenes to try to figure out how to be able to embed this directly into the forum, which would be cool AF.

 

[Corso]

Amazing. Thank you Scott. This is a game changer.

 

[ginobilized]

I'm in! My first grade goes to:
Scott.....A+
What a gift, thank you!!!!

 

[Ariel]

That'd be great, thank you. Honestly the fact that the people who started / took over this site are engaged as they are is already enough for me, the basics are already in place (stable platform, guaranteed season funding, critical mass of users) and we can wait a while for extra perks.

 

[Thunder1]

Even though I watch most games, I rely upon the 'grades' for info. I may have missed/overlooked..thanx very much for doing this!!..

 

[NotoriousHOP]

The game grades were one of the primary drivers for my visits to SpursTalk. I'll do anything I can to help this project forward.

Of course, with the community helping provide grades, we can expect to see people giving Fs to Devin and Keldon no matter how they actually perform.

 

[Thoodee]

awesome idea and honestly love game grades and reading summaries when sometimes I have to miss a game. Sorry if I'm throwing a cog here, but also wouldn't hate game grades from only a few respected members. Or if possible a some members getting greater weight in vote. Might be overkill to try to incorporate, just afraid of trolls voting biasedly without even watching the game.

 

[heyheymymy]

OP is the real timvp

 

[Seventyniner]

Of course, with the community helping provide grades, we can expect to see people giving Fs to Devin and Keldon no matter how they actually perform.

I'm not expecting a high level of objectivity when it comes to those two plus Sochan.

 

[spurraider21]

@scott i also think i recall some brief segment of ST history where timvp assigned some games to other users to do the grades writeups. We could also have something here like a sign-up sheet for engaged users who can commit to watching the full game do the full on write up.

Could still have community grades but the writeups/assessment provide something more tbh

 

[Sugus]

Hey @scott, this is amazing work, thank you!

I'll gladly report the first known bug: for some reason, the single menu option "Select a Period" is translated to [Spanish in my case, though I'm guessing it'll auto-default to whichever country's language the user is browsing from]:

https://imgur.com/hHdQTdE

Obviously a small detail and not impactful in any way, but since you asked for feedback I'm glad to oblige (also btw, what does "Opp Abbr" stand for? I can't think of any other word than "abbreviation" that starts like that in English, is that it?)

The dashboard is otherwise flawless. I'm interested in how are you planning to collect users' grades - if you haven't thought of anything specific, I'd recommend a simple Google Forms sheet with multi-option grade selection for each teammate, maybe with a default "N/A" value (so users aren't forced to grade every single player on the team for every single game, just change the default on whichever players they feel they can vote/judge on). But that's just a personal rec since I've found Forms to be great for work related stuff.

As for exceptional members to nominate, that's tough! I can only recommend Ex, I love the slightly acidic takes he brings...

 

[koriwhat]

Cool idea and awesome data collection!

 

[scott]

Will respond to some questions/comments shortly, but first wanted to update that our real MVP @ffadicted helped me work out the bugs I was running into trying to embed the dashboard into a post, and it's now live!

 

[koriwhat]

This shit is so cool. I love data collection/aggregation.

 

[spurraider21]

that looks amazing, and so awesome to have it embedded directly like that

 

[scott]

Thanks everyone to the positive response and feedback so far.

A few further clarifying notes and comments:

1. On game grade write-ups. By no means am I saying they can't happen or aren't allowed or something like that... I'm just not going to be doing them as part of this (or otherwise). I personally don't have an interest in writing them nor do I think anyone would even want to read my write-ups. Honestly, nobody even wants my numerical grades, but I'm including them because I want them, it makes the charts look better, and it's my project so I can do what I want
2. I kind of want that third line on the chart just so I can have all three fiesta colors. It's silly, but it makes for a good graphic. I might play around with overlaying something like GameScore on a secondary axis (or maybe just an even simpler +/-). It could be interesting to see how grades and those simple box score metrics correlate. Let me know your thoughts here.
3. @Sugus these next few notes are for you - weird about the Spanish on that one particular drop down! I'll play around and see if I can figure that out (because it's not something I set up)
4. "Opp Abbr" is Opponent Abbreviation, it allows you to filter by the opposing team. I'll see if I can rename that button, because it's not clear (that's just the name of the column header in my database that translates the opponent from the data feed).
5. Yep, I plan on the intake being a Google Form. I'm playing around with a way to build it out and then embed it into the top of post of the Game Thread, so that everyone knows where to find it, but I've got that part pretty much figured out with a seamless feed from the Google Form into my database. Honestly I've got all the data streams already wired up (including box score stats and game results), it's just a matter of the games going live and turning them all on. I had ChatGPT generate 60 games worth of dummy data so I could build this out, but as soon as the regular season starts this will be easy to turn on. I'll probably look to start testing the Google Form in the next couple of pre-season games to make sure it is working properly.

What does everyone think about the idea of the Google form collecting usernames? I don't want to start using this to bully people, but it would be fun (for example) to do something like "Hey [whatever user here]... you say you've always believed in Sochan, but your grade history shows otherwise!". I could build a filter so that you could add any user's grades onto the chart... but I'm also not sure I want to mess too much with it at this point since I've got it in a really nice stable state

 

[heyheymymy]

This is amazing. The integration into the forum really makes BB next level. Maybe have a guru grade with like Lebowen and trusted members only and then casual BB member grade to control trolls giving F- to players they don’t like. You can see a true basketball assessment but also see the social trends that may deviate from unbiased grading

 

[scott]

This is amazing. The integration into the forum really makes BB next level. Maybe have a guru grade with like Lebowen and trusted members only and then casual BB member grade to control trolls giving F- to players they don’t like. You can see a true basketball assessment but also see the social trends that may deviate from unbiased grading

I like that idea if I can get a team of "Gurus" committed.

I'm hoping that we can eventually use this to post on other sites "hey look at this cool tool these guys are doing" and encourage folks to join our community. I could see the reddit sniffers eating this up "OMG I've got to get over there to give VassKelChan 5s before they spoil their reputations!"

 

[LeBowen]

Are we going to use 1-5 for grades? 1-10? A-F?
If it's numbers, we should keep it at .5 increments and agree on a baseline for average performances. Should it be 2.5 or 3?

The tricky thing that could skew the data is that everyone obviously has their subjective view of what's average.
But eventually most of us will be in sync abour what's a 3/5 and what's 5/5.

 

[Seventyniner]

After a bit of a sample is built, it could be possible to rate the graders based on how well their grades correlate with something objective like Game Score. I wouldn't expect anything near perfect correlation for even the best graders, but someone who is not close to Game Score very often, especially if they are consistently off with one or more specific players, should be suspect.

 

[scott]

Are we going to use 1-5 for grades? 1-10? A-F?
If it's numbers, we should keep it at .5 increments and agree on a baseline for average performances. Should it be 2.5 or 3?

The tricky thing that could skew the data is that everyone obviously has their subjective view of what's average.
But eventually most of us will be in sync abour what's a 3/5 and what's 5/5.

1-5, integers only. The .5's will come through as averages get calculated. Allowing half point ratings is really just turning it into a 10 point scale, which IMO (and I have this conversation all the time in my professional) is too complicated and the ratings tend to lose value. One of the VPs who works for me is a huge proponent of the 7-point scale actually being the most perfect (in a different context). There is a lot of psychology around this and we could go round for days on it. But I'm just gonna be a dictator and tell you it's 1-5, integers only

I can put some guidelines on what I view as a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (honestly it's F, D, C, B, A) but at the end of the day this will all be subjective and there is no way around that.

 

[scott]

After a bit of a sample is built, it could be possible to rate the graders based on how well their grades correlate with something objective like Game Score. I wouldn't expect anything near perfect correlation for even the best graders, but someone who is not close to Game Score very often, especially if they are consistently off with one or more specific players, should be suspect.

This is interesting, though I'd also point out that GameScore is an imperfect statistic (as it's just an amalgam of counting stats). I like GameScore as a quick and dirty catch all stat, but it's got it's flaws (same with PER and any other catch all counting-metric)

 

[spurraider21]

1-5, integers only. The .5's will come through as averages get calculated. Allowing half point ratings is really just turning it into a 10 point scale, which IMO (and I have this conversation all the time in my professional) is too complicated and the ratings tend to lose value. One of the VPs who works for me is a huge proponent of the 7-point scale actually being the most perfect (in a different context). There is a lot of psychology around this and we could go round for days on it. But I'm just gonna be a dictator and tell you it's 1-5, integers only

I can put some guidelines on what I view as a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (honestly it's F, D, C, B, A) but at the end of the day this will all be subjective and there is no way around that.

i give this analysis a solid 8/13

 

[rjv]