Possession-Level Player Impact in the Pre-Play-by-Play NBA Era: A Video-Reconstructed RAPM Database, 1984--1996

Abstract

Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) is the standard framework for estimating individual player impact in basketball. Its application requires possession-level stint data -- records of which five players shared the court for each contiguous sequence of possessions -- a form of data the NBA did not systematically record until the late 1990s. This paper describes the construction, methodology, and validation of the first possession-level player impact database for the pre-play-by-play NBA era, covering the regular seasons from 1984--85 through 1995--96, spanning twelve published seasons. As of this writing, 2,179 regular-season games have been reconstructed across twelve published seasons, comprising 435,760 total logged possessions and 1,012 distinct player-seasons. Every game was manually reconstructed from broadcast video: lineup changes were logged at every dead-ball substitution, possessions were tallied directly from footage, and points scored by each lineup were recorded. RAPM is estimated via weighted ridge regression applied to the reconstructed stint data, using the identical mathematical framework applied to modern play-by-play records. We provide a rigorous treatment of the reconstruction protocol, the formal properties of the estimation procedure, uncertainty quantification through posterior credible intervals, a multi-criterion validation framework, and an analysis of sampling properties at partial coverage. The resulting database is the only possession-level individual impact record for this era and provides a foundation for historical analysis that has until now been technically inaccessible.