An improvement to OPR

[IKE]

Originally Posted by Citrus Dad

I agree that the OPR is better than nothing--it still had a 0.91 correlation with our offensive scouting data. However, it tends to miss the outlier teams that may be hard to pick out otherwise. Our OPR was 27 points less than our actual offensive average--more than 50% off. But if your team has sufficient resources to calculate the OPR on the fly then you probably have enough to do full scouting. On the other hand, you might be relying on the OPR calculated with one of the apps tracking the competition, in which case then that's the best you have.

.....

Outliers happen. They tend to be worse if teams have a lot of variation, and the fewer the samples, the worse it is...

Being more than 50% off is rarer, but not unheard of. I once saw an OPR of 15 assigned to a team that had only competed in 2/8 matches. And they didn't score 60 points in those two matches...

Another killer of OPR is if a team that reliably does very well has a bad match with your team. For instance, in Archimedes, 469 ended up with an OPR over 80 points. they had a match where their shooter had an issue right from the start and I believe they only scored climb points. Unfortunately to their partners, the OPR calculations will likely penalize those other teams..

For these reasons, and many others, it is very important to scout.

OPR does accurrately though show that some teams are worth less than they score on average. Yep, you heard me right, there are many teams that are worth less than their average score. This is especially true of slow that used the middle shooting position to start their climb. While they would frequently get their 30 points, they would often cost the alliance many missed shots from cyclers that were 75%+ at taht position but 50%- from outside shooting positions. Yes, the climber did score 30 points, but the other two partners that usually put up 30 disc points, and only got 20 results in a -20 total points from them. Some of this if it occurs on a regular basis will get attributed to the climber team. This will also explain an imbalance if you summed the auton, disc points, and climbing OPR.