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Late in the third quarter of a game that Jayson Tatum will win with a memorable 3-pointer, Derrick White makes another play that won’t show up in a traditional NBA box score. After watching Philadelphia’s Tyrese Maxey beat Malcolm Brogdon off the dribble, White slides over from the weak side to prevent an easy bucket. As Tatum does the same, White leaves his own man to provide help at the rim.

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Around the same time Maxey picks up his dribble, White plants his left foot into the hardwood to either block the shot or increase the difficulty of it. On this occasion, he does the latter. Together with Tatum, White leaps into the air to impact Maxey’s plans. Though unable to swat the shot away, White helps to prevent it from falling through the hoop. With his hustle and timing, White helps force Maxey to take off farther from the rim than he likely would have preferred. Instead of being able to drive all the way to the hoop, Maxey settles for lofting a left-handed floater over the extended arms of White and Tatum. The shot rattles around the rim before popping out.

Though the traditional box score will leave no sign of White’s impact on the play, the NBA does have a statistical category that will reward him. Later on, his father, Richard — a “stat nerd,” according to his son — will scan the league’s defensive tracking data to monitor the game’s contested shots and other hustle metrics.

It’s perfect, really, that White’s dad owns such an appreciation for the numbers that go deeper than points, rebounds and assists. Though Derrick has never been one of the NBA’s leading scorers, his impact has always been seen more clearly in advanced statistics. In this case, a math wiz raised a darling of modern basketball analytics.

“People always say, ‘Oh yeah, the eye test,’” says Richard. “Well, the eye test is biased. Because if you like a person, no matter what they do, you can’t talk them out of it. So, the numbers are the numbers. The results are the results.”

This season, the numbers rank White as one of the most impactful players on one of the NBA’s best teams. The Celtics have outscored opponents by 342 total points during his playing time, putting him at sixth in the league in overall plus/minus. Of course, that is dictated largely by team success, which is why the top-six solely includes players from the Nuggets and Celtics. Still, Boston has been about an average team this season with White on the bench. When he’s on the court, the Celtics have blasted opponents by 10.5 points per 100 possessions. Their offensive efficiency and defensive efficiency have both jumped significantly with White in the lineup.

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Like simple on/off metrics, catch-all stats come with a lot of noise, but many of them value White highly. He ranks second on the Celtics and 40th in the league with 5.3 win shares. Value Over Replacement Player (VORP) also puts White second behind Tatum among Celtics players, while placing him 45th in the NBA. ESPN’s Real Plus/Minus slots White at 50th in the league, three spots ahead of Jamal Murray, five spots ahead of Jrue Holiday and seven spots ahead of Trae Young.

Even while White ranks 110th in scoring average, the overwhelming evidence suggests that his overall contributions put him in a much more exclusive company. He excels by making the right play over and over again, consistently tweaking the odds in his team’s favor as fans like his father can appreciate.

Richard, who works in the computer field, says he has always had an affinity for numbers. In baseball, he grew obsessed with batting averages and other stats. He says he became “pretty maniacal” about the game Strat-O-Matic, which allows users to simulate baseball games with the roll of dice while controlling the decisions of a manager. If sports analytics departments had been built up when he entered the workforce, Richard says he would have looked for that type of job.

“Gathering the data and then giving my assessment on what the data actually means,” he says. “Because if you have a representative sample size — and that’s where the eye test fails you, because the eye test is like, ‘Hey, I want this to happen’ even though the numbers aren’t there. With me, it’s like, whether it be lineups or teams or whatever, you have to look at different trends.”

Derrick’s ascension to the NBA has given his father reason to add another numbers-based hobby. After games, Richard can sometimes be found on Twitter complaining that the league has not released its tracking data in a timely fashion.

Someone needs to restart the nba defensive database service/server. Not updated since Thursday

— Richard White (@RamblinWreck34) February 25, 2023

Bump they are now 2 games behind. Frustrating for us that care about defense

— Richard White (@RamblinWreck34) February 26, 2023

Defensive data is in for Philadelphia game

— Richard White (@RamblinWreck34) February 27, 2023

“So, he just found this new tracking (data), and, so, it just gives him more numbers and more things to look at,” says Derrick. “He doesn’t necessarily tell me about it. He used to, and then, he kind of stopped. But yeah, he’s a stat nerd, and he loves numbers, and he’s just having fun with it.”

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Defensive metrics in basketball aren’t perfect. Many of them actually leave a lot to be desired. Still, Richard knows the numbers that are readily available shine light on some of the ways his son lifts the Celtics. Back in San Antonio, where he started his career, Derrick used to have a running competition with LaMarcus Aldridge and Jakob Poeltl over who would block more shots. Often, Derrick would win despite giving up at least seven inches to each player. He has long been one of the league’s best shot blockers his size.

Naturally, Derrick also contests far more shots than the average guard. Among all players shorter than 6-foot-7, White ranks fourth in contested shots per game behind Draymond Green, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Bogdan Bogdanovic. At that size, only Green has contested more 2-point attempts per game. He’s one of the best defensive big men ever. White is a 6-foot-4 guard.

“You could turn on any media outlet and they can tell you how many points Luka (Dončić), LeBron (James) or Jayson Tatum score,” says Richard. “But they rarely dig down into the defensive numbers. When he was in San Antonio, I found the player tracking. And then, when I looked, if you looked around at guards, he was one of the top players. You can’t really stop NBA players. They have unlimited dribbles, unlimited space and they can get wherever they want. But if you’re contesting the most shots, their percentage goes down a little bit. … You can look at (contested shots). They keep track of charges (taken) and those kinds of things. It was a way to kind of validate his defensive (impact) because what he’s doing in Boston is what he did in San Antonio, but nobody knew. Or nobody even cared.”

The Celtics cared. They sent Romeo Langford, Josh Richardson, a 2023 first-round draft pick and a 2028 pick swap to San Antonio for Derrick prior to the 2022 trade deadline. After arriving in Boston, Derrick factored heavily into the team’s stunning midseason turnaround. He fit in seamlessly, giving the Celtics a little bit of everything. He could play on the ball or off it. He could defend bigger players or quicker ones. His shot abandoned him at times but he focused on improving it over the offseason. In other ways, it became clear immediately how well Derrick complemented Boston’s other best players. That failed to surprise the Whites.

“He thought that what he does would work with what they do,” says Richard. “The fact that he could be in the backcourt playing defense, with his defense, and then oh by the way Marcus Smart’s over there. Now you’ve got two of them?”

Like Derrick, Richard values defense. As a middle schooler in Georgia, Richard says he once took enough charges in a single game to foul out three players. Derrick grew up playing next to several talented scorers. Richard would constantly preach the value of playing the game the right way. He wanted his son to do whatever the game dictated.

Derrick must have listened. The numbers favor him the way they do because he does just about everything at a high level. He hustles around screens. He delivers the extra pass. On a Celtics team loaded with talented players, he has been able to take on a bigger role when necessary, but has also been willing to step back into a complementary fashion. During Smart’s recent 11-game absence, Derrick averaged 20.1 points, 5.8 assists, 4.6 rebounds and 1.0 blocks per game on 49.1 percent shooting from the field, including 43.6 percent on 3-point attempts.

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“The way he plays — and he’s kind of always does this, sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad — is he’ll do what the team tells him to do,” says Richard. “He’s almost like in case of emergency, break glass. He morphs himself into whatever the team needs. … That’s the big thing which is a plus that I like is that he doesn’t have an ego.

“There are other teams with egos where it’s like, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’ The Clippers, they have to try to figure out how to make things work. Well, if you have somebody like Derrick, you don’t have as much trouble making things work because he can do whatever you need him to do. If (Jaylen) Brown’s got it, Tatum’s got it, let them go, let them cook. If you need somebody to step in, he’s ready to go.”

For Richard, much of this still feels surreal. Derrick had zero scholarship offers at the time of his final game for Legends High in Parker, Colo. After watching Derrick lose a nail-biter in the high school playoffs, his father says he thought he might never see his son play organized basketball again. Instead, Derrick, who started his college career at Division II University of Colorado Colorado Springs (UCCS), flourished on a most unlikely path. Even now, the extent of his value on the court can’t always be found on a stat sheet unless one knows the right numbers to hunt down.

“The thing with his contests is that if you’re contesting, they’re moving the ball around or they don’t get to fully extend to the rim because you’re in the way,” says Richard. “And that allows off-ball (defenders) like Rob (Williams) to come in and get shot blocks. When you have a lot of people with the same mentality that they want to attempt to play defense, it makes it a lot easier.”

As the numbers show.

(Top photo: Rick Osentoski / USA Today)

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