Harpreet Brar: Woefully Misused by Punjab Kings

Amidst a season of bad decisions from Punjab Kings, one player's reduced involvement stands out.

With their loss to Rajasthan Royals in the 66th match of IPL 2023, Punjab Kings have been eliminated. If a winning season is considered to be one where a team makes the playoffs, Punjab Kings are amongst the IPL’s biggest losers, only making the playoffs two times in their 16 seasons: IPL 2008 and IPL 2014. It’s been nearly a decade since they’ve been to the knockout stages of the competition.

Let’s say a marquee player is someone the franchise bought for over US$1.0 million. In that case, Punjab’s marquee players are Shikhar Dhawan, Shahrukh Khan, Liam Livingstone, Sam Curran, and Kagiso Rabada, only the latter of whom is considered an out-and-out bowler. Therefore, Punjab’s bowlers are understandably below the standard that the franchise’s management would like, but this is a conscious sacrifice considering their batting prowess: with a minimum requirement of 50 balls faced, eight of Punjab’s batters struck at more than 135 in this year’s IPL. Still, to maximize the potential of this squad, careful planning and usage of the bowling unit has to take place.

It didn’t. We know that’s the case by looking at Harpreet Brar. 

Brar is a tall, slow left arm orthodox bowler, which already makes him a valuable commodity. Purchased for ₹3.8 crore, or US$480,000, Brar is the least visible and worst known member of Kings’ bowling unit. I have no way of measuring this other than maybe Instagram followers, which I am not going to cite here, so ask yourself this: Do you know who Brar is? Does your dad know who he is? Did my introduction of him actually help you?

Assuming the answers to those questions are ‘no’, ‘no’, and ‘yes’, you know nothing about Harpreet Brar. Allow me the privilege of explaining him to you.

You can find Brar in the bottom-left corner of this graph, meaning that of all Punjab Kings’ bowlers, he was the best at combining both the ability to prevent giving away runs (economy rate of 8.02) and also to take wickets (strike rate of 18.11).

With raw performance data like this, you’d expect Brar to have done a lot of bowling for Punjab this season.

He didn’t. He only bowled 2.08 overs per match. Despite being a full-time bowler with the best statistics of any Punjab King, he was treated as though he was a part-timer. In the 13 matches he played, he didn’t even bowl twice. 

There has to be some explanation to this. The first possibility one could consider is that Brar was failing against a specific type of batter, and was being exploited this way repeatedly, to the point where bowling him would be a liability.

This doesn’t seem to be true when looking at Brar’s statistics against right and left handed batters, though. He performs pretty well regardless of the type of batter he’s facing. Of course, this table doesn’t account for the nuances that distinguish individual batters, so there might be value in looking at how every single batter that faced Brar fared.

The only batters who really won the battle against Harpreet Brar were Rilee Rossouw, Faf du Plessis, Phil Salt, Rahul Tripathi, Ishan Kishan, and Sanju Samson. I don’t think there is really anything to unite these batters, in turn making it difficult to identify whether Brar demonstrated a specific weakness that made it easy for opposition teams to plan against him. Really, he restricts a lot of good batters to very few runs. You could maybe say that the more balls a batter faces the higher their strike rate against is Brar, but for one, we’re dealing with a small sample size here, and two, my guess is that’s the way it works for all bowlers.

Brar passes all of the raw data analysis tests. The only thing to then look at is whether or not in context other Punjab Kings bowlers deserved to be given more overs than him. We’ve seen that Brar demonstrated a better economy and strike rate than most of his peers, but that metric disregards match state. If Player A was to take the wickets of three objectively terrible batters in three balls, but Player B took the wickets of two objectively good batters in three balls while also conceding a boundary, you’d say that Player B bowled better, despite having worse statistics than Player A.

Luckily, a model already exists to calculate performance in regards to pressure: ESPNCricinfo’s “Impact ratings”. I’m unaware of the actual formula that goes into these ratings, but they usually feel accurate, and are useful for narrowing down performance to a single rating. 

We can’t just look at total Match Impact though. That brings Punjab’s batters into the discussion, which skews the debate towards a player like Sam Curran, who’s batting performances covered up his poor bowling this season. We have to look at Bowling Impact, but if we look at total bowling impact, we are skewed towards the players who played more games. We also can’t look at this on a per match basis, because as we’ve established, Brar bowled less per match than his teammates.

Therefore, we must rank the Punjab Kings bowlers by Bowling Impact per Ball. This is the metric which will most evenly analyze the performances of the bowlers in question in relation to one another. How does Brar fare here?

By this metric, Harpreet Brar was Punjab Kings’ best bowler this season. Only Nathan Ellis is in the same ballpark as him, and even he’s an entire Liam Livingstone off.

Brar is by no means an “excellent” player. If he was, you would have heard of him by now. But he played pretty damn well this season, and Punjab did not capitalize off of that. With a bowling attack as poor as theirs, you’d think they’d try to be as shrewd as possible. 

In a recent interview, Shubman Gill spoke about Shikhar Dhawan, revealing that Dhawan often actually forgets what bowlers he has in the field. Maybe Punjab just forgot Brar was their player. Millions of dollars go into each game of the IPL, with dozens of people involved in making decisions on the field. And yet, it is entirely possible that the Punjab Kings simply forgot about a player who could have transformed their season had he been given the opportunity.

We’ll never know how he would have fared had he been given that chance. What we do know, however, is that Punjab Kings have missed the playoffs once again. In their 16 seasons of existence, they’ve missed the playoffs 14 times.

This is what failure looks like. Harpreet Brar tried his best to stop it, but maybe the Punjab Kings are just too used to failing to let it go.