Suppose you wanted to rank the most impactful players of the 2026 WNBA season without using box score statistics. How would you do it?
A natural place to begin is to compare how a player’s team performs when they are on the court versus when they are off of it. The idea is straightforward—the most impactful players should create the largest on-off differences (or splits)—but it is missing context. It can be improved by adjusting for the strength of who a player played with and against, which is exactly what Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) is built to do.
