Capela ranked higher than Papa, Dorsey, Johnson and Garcia. I think its safe to say these stats are not weighed correctly.
It appears that you are right, but you shouldn't be. There were plenty of games played last year and the year before to judge a player like Jones. Rookies are the only ones that should be having a shortage of data. The changes in the data from last year seems way to drastic.
Data appears to be based too much on blocks. Anthony Davis and Capela are both getting a disproportionate amount of credit for the few plays that they get blocks and not enough discredit for other plays.
xRAPM has been extensively studied. We know how they value previous seasons. RPM? Who knows? It is a black box algorithm. Do we know if it appropriately weights previous seasons? xRAPM uses three previous seasons to weight its current scores. Jones is one of those young players who realistically has only one season of usable data. That in itself to larger margins of error than veterans in xRAPM calculations. I am intentionally trying to be skeptical here. Otherwise who knows where this conversation is heading?
It's pretty easy to see that Jones's 4 games are weighted significantly more than his data from last season at this point in the season. I suspect the RPM numbers will be a lot better by the end of the season and that the weights for prior seasons are static instead of dynamic (i.e. the more minutes you play this season, the less weight your prior season(s) have).
Interesting...Chris Bosh is presently ranked 220 in the league with a -1.15 RPM. Highest paid player on his team by far and Deng, Chalmers, Wade, Cole and McRoberts ahead of him. Just for reference, Capela has a -1.32 and is number 235. There are only two centers in between them. Tarik Black is much higher at number 171 with a -0.56. Terrence Jones and D. Mo both with positive RPM. D. Mo at number 81 with a 1.03 and TJ at number 75 with a 1.16 although his RPM should be taken with a grain of salt just like Capela's because of limited game action. I just found these numbers interesting considering what Bosh makes, what these particular stats say about his production in Miami this year as the franchise player, and how badly we wanted him. He is having an okay year by other metrics, but it appears his days as an elite player may be behind him and he still has 4 more years of max money left on that deal.
