Hopefully, your home for everything you’d ever want to know about the data that comes from the annual NBA Combine. We collected all that data going back to 2000 in one place in order to make it easily accessible for you. We’ve also used that data to create an athleticism metric called bSPARQ (more on that below), as well as similarity scores that help you find prospects that most closely resemble a specific player, based on their body measurements and athletic testing results.

Where is this data from?

It’s all public data from the NBA combine. We’ve pulled it from NBA.com, but they have it separated by draft year and the body measurements and athletic testing numbers are also on separate pages.

What is bSPARQ?

bSPARQ is an offshoot of SPARQ, which stands for Speed Power Agility Reaction and Quickness, and it is a tool to measure the athleticism of NBA Draft prospects. SPARQ was originally developed by NIKE and some version of it has been used to measure the athleticism of athletes for several years. It is extremely popular among certain NFL teams, for example. By reverse-engineering the formula that was used to measure SPARQ for high-school athletes, we were able to create a similar metric to measure the athleticism of NBA prospects.

What if a certain player did not participate in a combine drill?

For similarity scores, we merely use the available data and compare that player to other prospects using only whatever body measurement figures and athletic testing scores they have in common. For some bSPARQ calculations, we estimate a player’s score in a specific drill by running a regression analysis on the scores of similar players.

How do I know when a player’s bSPARQ is good?

We use z-scores to represent how many standard deviations above or below average a player is at his position. Those z-scores then get converted into a percentile, which shows you where the player ranks compared to other prospects at his position. A 0.0 z-score and 50% NBA% are average; the higher the number, the better.

What can bSPARQ tell me about a player’s NBA potential?

We’re going to study this in the future!

What are similarity scores?

Similarity scores are exactly what they sound like. They’re a way to determine which players are most similar to one another, based on whatever available body measurement and athletic testing data we can find.

Who are you guys?

We are Jared Dubin, and Brandon Boyd and Colin Clapham. For all the “we” stuff above, just assume that Jared compiled the data while Brandon and Colin did the actual work.