Every NBL club runs imports, and every season a big chunk of the SuperCoach relevance in the league belongs to players who have never taken an NBL possession. You have to price them with no local data at all.
Most coaches guess. You don't have to — because a large share of NBL imports come through the NBA G League, and G League production translates to the NBL far more cleanly than anyone expects.
The claim
Past returns aren't a guarantee of future returns. But they are a bloody good indicator.
Take an import's G League box-score line, convert it to a SuperCoach-equivalent score using the NBL SuperCoach scoring weights, and compare it to what he actually went on to average in the NBL. Across a large sample of players, the two numbers land remarkably close together — typically within a couple of SuperCoach points.
The evidence
Here's what that looks like across a set of imports who came to the NBL with G League experience. Predicted score is their G League line converted to SuperCoach; actual is what they averaged here.
| Player | G League (SC equiv.) | NBL actual | Differential |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jaylen Adams | 36.1 | 36.0 | −0.1 |
| Shawn Long | 33.1 | 33.8 | +0.1 |
| Tyson Walker | 26.4 | 27.1 | −0.1 |
| Scott Machado | 34.0 | 33.1 | −0.3 |
| Antonious Cleveland | 30.2 | 30.9 | +0.65 |
| Xavier Rathan-Mayes | 28.9 | 27.2 | −1.1 |
| Vic Law | 35.2 | 34.4 | −1.2 |
| Rob Edwards | 25.4 | 26.3 | +1.2 |
| Patrick Miller | 30.5 | 32.0 | +1.5 |
| Matt Hurt | 35.0 | 33.5 | −1.5 |
| Bryce Hamilton | 26.3 | 28.4 | +1.8 |
| Jesse Edwards | 28.9 | 25.9 | −3.0 |
Eleven of twelve inside two SuperCoach points. That is a genuinely useful predictive tool, and it's available to you before the player has played a minute in this league.
How to run it yourself
1. Find his most recent full G League season. Points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers, per game.
2. Convert to a SuperCoach-equivalent score using the NBL SuperCoach scoring weights.
3. That's your baseline prediction.
4. Adjust for role — this is the step that separates a good projection from a bad one.
The adjustment that actually matters
The raw translation works because the G League and the NBL are broadly comparable in standard and pace. What it cannot know is how much of the ball this player is about to get.
So before you trust the number, ask:
Is he "the guy" here? A player who was the primary option in the G League and arrives to be the third option on a stacked NBL roster will underperform his translation, sometimes badly. The projection assumes he keeps his usage. Usage is the first thing a crowded roster takes away.
Can he contribute without the ball? Related, but distinct. Some players' production survives a usage cut because they rebound, defend and pass. Others need volume. Run the [points-dependency test](05-bursting-bubbles.md) on his G League line — a high-dependency import arriving into a reduced role is the single most reliable way to lose money on an import.
What's the depth chart at his position? Same question as any other player. Minutes first, everything else after.
What system is he walking into? Pace, spacing and freedom matter. A guard arriving into a high-tempo, high-three-point-attempt system with a coach who lets him play will beat his projection. The same guard in a grind-it-out half-court team won't.
Note the direction of the misses. In the table above, the biggest miss was a big man who underperformed his projection by 10%. Bigs are the least reliable group to translate — rim protection and rebounding numbers depend heavily on the scheme and on who else is on the floor. Guards and wings translate more cleanly. Weight your confidence accordingly.
The club-level lens
There's a second, coarser tool worth keeping alongside the translation: import hit rates by club.
Track every import each NBL club has signed over the past decade and sort them into tiers — elite impact, serviceable contributor, didn't hit the mark, short stay. Some clubs have a genuinely strong record of identifying and integrating imports. Some don't. Recruiting departments, coaching philosophies and player-development structures persist far longer than any individual roster.
It's not deterministic and you shouldn't treat it as such. But when you're weighing two imports with similar projections, the club's track record is a legitimate tiebreaker — and the historical tables are an outstanding evergreen content asset for the site, because they only need updating once a year.
The bottom line
You will never have NBL data on a first-year import. You will almost always have data from somewhere. The mistake isn't using overseas numbers — it's using them naively, without adjusting for the role he's actually walking into.
Translate first. Adjust for usage second. Then decide.