The advanced statistical revolution has arrived in the basketball, just a few years behind its arrival in baseball. As documented in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, the use of sabermetric stats in baseball led to a dramatic turnaround for the woebegone Oakland A’s in 2002. Those same principles also played a big part in getting the Boston Red Sox their first World Series title in 86 years in 2004.

In basketball, statisticians like John Hollinger have developed metrics like Player Efficiency Rating (PER) in an effort to go beyond the often deceptive per-game numbers that have been in use for generations. The NBA 2K series has responded to this evolution by providing advanced metrics in its last several iterations, including stats like True Shooting Percentage, Effective Field Goal Percentage, the aforementioned PER, and others.

But there’s so much more they could do.

Advanced statistics are only the beginning for advanced anaylsis of the NBA.

Genuinely advanced analytics mean not just taking the stats we have and doing more with them but developing new ways to understand the game in motion, and there are already sites devoted to keeping track of these kind of statistics.

Clark Kellogg, Steve Kerr and Kevin Harlan even have commentary in NBA 2K12 where they talk about the project by STATS LLC to install multiple-camera setups in NBA arenas to capture a whole new range of positional data. In the real world, finding efficient ways to capture and categorize player position can be costly and time-consuming, but the beauty of the NBA 2K series is that everything is already numbers to begin with.

As a digitally generated virtual space, the court in a game of NBA 2K is already set up to precisely measure the positions of players when they take shots, rebound, and generally move through that space. If 2K Sports can begin to track the kind of stats that are likely already being generated somewhere in the software, the NBA 2K series could take a step beyond being just a game and move into something closer to true simulation. Below are several examples of advanced metrics that could deeply enrich the experience of NBA 2K13 and beyond.

Players could get a better feel for who's more valuable with advanced metrics.

Per-36 Stats

One of the primary shortcomings of per-game stats is that not every player is playing equal minutes in a given game. Key bench players like Manu Ginobili and James Harden and even entire starting lineups such as the San Antonio Spurs’—whose minutes have been carefully marshaled by Gregg Popovich as they have aged—play fewer minutes but are no less effective. Compare Jason Terry’s numbers from when he was starting for the Hawks to when he came off the bench for the Mavericks. As a starter in 2002-03, he averaged 17.2 ppg, while in 2009-10 he averaged 16.6 as Dallas’ sixth man. But in ‘02-03 he also averaged 38 mpg, while in ‘09-10 he averaged 33 mpg. Accounting for that difference we see that per 36 minutes, he scored 18.1 ppg in Dallas in ‘09-10 and only 16.3 ppg in Atlanta back in ‘02-03.

Per-36 stats level the playing field between starters and bench players and could help virtual GMs in the 2K series find diamonds in the rough who deserve more burn or figure out which starters seem to be playing well but are really inefficient.

Points per possession by play type

Aside from providing video of individual possessions from the past few seasons broken down by play type, Synergy Sports provides profiles for individual players that break down their points-per-possession by different play types.

This kind of information can help you understand what kinds of plays are best for a given player. A point guard might excel as the pick and roll ball handler but fall short in isolations or coming off cuts. Being able to pull up this kind of information in NBA 2K would be a boon to players hoping to build teams from the ground up. What players are the best in the post? What if you also want to run some pick and roll? Data like Synergy Sports’ would help a lot more than letter grades for Post Offense.

Shot charts

NBA 2K already provides shot charts in-game, but there’s no way to see a player’s season-long shot chart. Kirk Goldsberry at Court Vision does a wonderful job of creating clear and easy-to-grasp charts that help elucidate the difference between, say, Ray Allen and Jason Terry. With Signature Skills like Spot Up Shooter, Shot Creator and Corner Specialist in NBA2K13, there’s every reason to believe the game will be generating much more interesting and hopefully accurate shot charts for NBA players. It’s heartening to hear producer Zach Timmerman say that a big part of the reasoning behind Signature Skills wasn’t to make stars even more dominant, but rather to make the end of the bench more useful by giving guys who might not have high overall ratings specific skills the player can build around. Good, comprehensive shot charts would help bring this out as well.

Players could figure out which five man unit is best with advanced analytics.

Clutch stats and 5-man units

When it comes to the NBA, there’s nothing people like discussing more than who’s clutch. 82games.com has made it easy for you to see who’s been the clutchiest in the NBA by collecting stats from the last five minutes of a game or overtime where neither team is leading by more than five points and turning them into per-48 minute stats to even out the field. Stats like this in NBA 2K might or might not be useful in terms of the game itself, but having an online leaderboard that tracks the most clutch My Players or most clutch players in Online Associations would add another layer of bragging rights to the game.

Another valuable tool that 82games.com provides is breaking down teams by their most effective 5-man units. Here you can see the Minnesota Timberwolves’ breakdown from this past season. For players playing Online Associations and trying to build balanced rosters, this kind of information would be invaluable. Even if you just like to make sure you’re using the best rotations possible, this would be a helpful tool to include in future iterations of the game.

Player and team comparisons

NBA 2K already allows you to compare players to the averages for their position, but how much cooler would it be to be able to look at players side-by-side the way you can on NBA.com? And maybe even more usefully, you can do the same thing with entire teams. These kinds of stats would make for great cutaways in the action comparing the players on the floor across their careers or in the playoffs and would be quite useful for players as their Associations enter the postseason.

The above examples are all drawn from sites that are focused on creating useful tools for measuring basketball in the real world, but there are even crazier things that having complete control over the virtual physical space of the court could allow. What about keeping track of ball rotation on shots? What about keeping track of player acceleration? Average jump height? Average distance from other players on both offense and defense to keep track of spacing? All these things have to be accounted for in a game where everything is determined by ones and zeroes; the only question is keeping track of it and presenting it to the player in a useful way.

And who knows? Some truly innovative thinking in terms of stats and analytics in NBA 2K might just revolutionize stat-tracking in the real NBA.