The KFC Big Bash League launches Official Player Rankings

The 5th KFC Big Bash League season will feature the Official BBL Player Rankings. The Rankings, devised by esteemed QUT Professor Steven Stern separates batters, bowlers and all-rounders. The system uses performances from both current and past Big Bash matches, weighted on a sliding scale from the 3 most recent seasons, with BBL5 games to carry a full weighting in order to provide the most accurate, updated measure of player performance. Professor Stern is the man who also lends his name to the Duckworth-Lewis-Stern method used for recalculating rain-affected run chase targets.

He formulated the Official Rankings system for the tournament with Cricket Australia in the build-up to the season and explained that the concept is largely based around the comparative impacts of each individual player in a match.

“It’s an aggregate measure, based on total performance of players over the games they’ve played, so there will be some upping and downing through the season as players get more games. The most straightforward way to explain it is, in each game, suppose we took a player’s actual performance out, and substituted in for it what the average of all the other players in the game would have produced in his place. How much difference would that make? Basically each player gets the difference – positive or negative – between what they actually did and what the average of the other players would have been expected to do, if they had played the same deliveries in the match,” Stern told bigbash.com.au.

“That way you’re allowing the performances of the players themselves to tell you what the average conditions are, and if you outcompete the other players in terms of what they would have done in your place, then you get a positive component to your aggregate for the season, and if not, you get a negative. In that way, players will go up or down after each match in which they play,” he added.

Stern said the notion of an all-rounder in T20 cricket provided an interesting challenge in formulating an algorithm that accurately reflected all-round performance, with the quick-fire nature of the shortened format often resulting in matches decided by small, yet significant, contributions. Consequently, this adds to the likelihood of tail-end batsmen or part-time bowlers playing a decisive role in a match, thus increasing their aggregate in the Rankings system.

As such, all players were considered as potential all-rounders, with the algorithm then refining the list by rewarding players performing well in both disciplines.

“Basically in order to be considered an all-rounder for the Rankings, all you have to do is make an overall positive contribution for both batting and bowling. However, my personal view is, if someone is just on the border of contributing positively versus negatively for one discipline, they’re probably not performing in an all-round manner. On that note, if you look at the initial all-rounder list, you might not consider some of those players to be all-rounders, but those players happen to currently be providing positive contributions in both disciplines.” Stern explained.

“To limit the all-rounder Ranking exclusively to players who already have that ‘all-rounder’ tag is somewhat arbitrary, because who decides whether a guy is good enough – or not good enough – in both skills to be judged in that way? And that’s the whole point of these Rankings – they’re objective and performance-based. That being the case, though, the system is designed to give preference to those who are evenly contributing in both disciplines. So for example, if a player has a rating of 19.5 as a batsman and 0.5 as a bowler, well technically they count as an all-rounder, but if someone else has ratings of 10.0 in both disciplines, they are clearly the better all-rounder and the system will reflect that. As the season progresses, I strongly suspect we’ll see the players with the more even contributions rise to the top of that ranking,” he concluded.

Throughout BBL5, the website will reveal regular updates for the Top 10 batters and bowlers, and the Top five all-rounders.