Mathias Lessort is playing 21 minutes a game, which is roughly what he played last season. In those minutes he has gone from a PIR of 10.4 to 21.2.

Same man, same job, same amount of floor time, twice the output. That is the sort of thing you half-notice in October and then argue about with a friend, and until now there was no quick way to check it.

Better or Worse? is the check.

What it does

It measures a player against the only opponent that matters for this question: himself, a year ago.

The trick is in how it counts. Comparing five games of this season to a full season of last one is not a comparison, it is a trap, because a long season includes the bad nights that a hot October does not. So the tool takes the first five games of this season and the first five of last season, and puts them next to each other. Same number of games, same point in the calendar, same legs.

Anyone averaging at least 15 minutes in both sets qualifies. Right now that is 103 players.

The question everybody asks next

A number going up is not interesting on its own. The useful question is why it went up, and there are only two answers: he is producing more per minute, or he is simply on the floor longer.

The tool answers that on every player, and the two kinds look identical from the outside.

  • Lessort: PIR up 10.8, minutes up 1.4, points per 36 minutes up 6.2. Real.
  • Jean Montero: PIR up 9.0, minutes up 6.4, points per 36 up only 1.2. More minutes.

Montero has not got worse. He moved from Valencia to Olympiacos and he is playing a lot more, which is its own kind of good news. But the two players are not having the same season, and a raw per-game number would have told you they were.

It works the other way too

The fallers are harsher reading. Gabriel Deck has gone from 12.7 to minus 1.0 across his first five games. Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot, now at Real Madrid, is down nearly 15 points of PIR with ten fewer minutes a night.

Those two are different problems. One is a player struggling in the minutes he has. The other is a player who has lost the minutes. The tool separates them, which is the difference between "he is finished" and "he is behind somebody".

Go and look up your guy

The tool opens on the biggest risers and fallers in the league, which is the fun way in. The search finds anybody else. Building and sharing cost nothing, and a free account lets you save what you find and come back to it when the sample is bigger.

Two names will come back empty or odd, so it is worth knowing why. Anyone new to the EuroLeague has no last season to be measured against, which is why Jonas Valanciunas, Patty Mills and Dario Saric show up blank. And anyone who changed clubs over the summer is being held up against a different job, not just a younger version of himself, so read those comparisons as a change of life rather than a change of form.

Go and look up your guy. Five games is not a verdict. It is a very good argument.