Read Online Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion by Andy Glockner - Free Book Online
Authors: Andy Glockner
Ads: Link
now have this kind of access, just imagine what NBA teams actually have, and the many different ways they are using it in order to create and sustain competitive advantages.
CHAPTER 3
Analytics Believers and Doubters
Teams are trending towards taking less mid-range shots, and that appears to be a sound strategy. So, these teams’ efficiency attacking the rim and knocking down perimeter shots should be a good indicator of the teams’ success (at least on offense). If restricted area and 3-point shots are the most efficient looks on offense, and teams are trending towards taking more of these shots, then a team’s ability to defend these areas must also increase in importance.
—Dr. Stephen Shea, mathematician and coauthor of Basketball Analytics: Objective and Efficient Strategies for Understanding How Teams Win
W ith every NBA team having equal access to the raw SportVU data and subscribing to some level of Synergy’s service as well, it appears that Catapult’s Brian Kopp was right: teams derive their advantages from what they can find in the data and how creatively they can implement ideas on and off the court. How they’re doing it, though, varies very widely from team to team, and a lot depends on the amount of money invested and proprietary work being done at the franchise.
In Kevin Pelton’s February 2015 NBA analytics rankings, he labeled twelve of the league’s thirty teams as being either “believers”or “all-in” on analytics (which foots fairly closely to what research for thisbook determined independently). The four teams described as “all-in” were the Philadelphia 76ers, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, and Dallas Mavericks, all of whom also made the overall top ten in ESPN’s 122-team combined ranking of NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL teams. Those four NBA teams also double as perhaps the league’s most secretive.
The difficulty in establishing long-term strategic advantages, though, stems from the simple fact that, eventually, you have to show people what you’re doing (except in the areas of player health and wellness, which is why according to a growing number of NBA personnel, developments in that area ultimately will dwarf the current evolution of on-court strategy). Whether it’s in player acquisition, draft philosophy, or on-court strategy, there’s going to be a video and paper trail that everyone else in the league can dissect, and they can eventually figure out some part of your plan.
That ability to dissect applies to writers, as well, so below are breakdowns of some unique ways in which three of those four all-in teams are thinking differently about conventional NBA strategies.
The Spurs and (the One-Season Fall of) Strategic Roster Management
The cramped interview area tucked just outside the visitor’s locker room at Denver’s Pepsi Center felt like the perfect setting for legendarily gruff San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich to discuss his team’s highly compressed early-season schedule. It was mid-December, just six weeks into the 2014–15 season, but Popovich and the Spurs—who for years had been well ahead of the rest of the NBA in terms of managing their roster to endure the strains of an eighty-two-game regular season while still winning enough to position themselves for postseason success—seemedto be meeting their match in terms of balancing performance and player workloads.
The Spurs entered this particular tilt with the homestanding Nuggets with a perfectly reasonable record of 16–7, which projected to around fifty-seven wins, which was a typically normal Spurs haul in the Popovich era. Popovich’s concern, though, was that the schedule, along with a spate of injuries, was already taxing his team—especially his aging core of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker—to a degree that was much worse than in previous seasons. November already had seen the Spurs play eleven games over an eighteen-day stretch, and this
CHAPTER 3
Analytics Believers and Doubters
Teams are trending towards taking less mid-range shots, and that appears to be a sound strategy. So, these teams’ efficiency attacking the rim and knocking down perimeter shots should be a good indicator of the teams’ success (at least on offense). If restricted area and 3-point shots are the most efficient looks on offense, and teams are trending towards taking more of these shots, then a team’s ability to defend these areas must also increase in importance.
—Dr. Stephen Shea, mathematician and coauthor of Basketball Analytics: Objective and Efficient Strategies for Understanding How Teams Win
W ith every NBA team having equal access to the raw SportVU data and subscribing to some level of Synergy’s service as well, it appears that Catapult’s Brian Kopp was right: teams derive their advantages from what they can find in the data and how creatively they can implement ideas on and off the court. How they’re doing it, though, varies very widely from team to team, and a lot depends on the amount of money invested and proprietary work being done at the franchise.
In Kevin Pelton’s February 2015 NBA analytics rankings, he labeled twelve of the league’s thirty teams as being either “believers”or “all-in” on analytics (which foots fairly closely to what research for thisbook determined independently). The four teams described as “all-in” were the Philadelphia 76ers, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, and Dallas Mavericks, all of whom also made the overall top ten in ESPN’s 122-team combined ranking of NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL teams. Those four NBA teams also double as perhaps the league’s most secretive.
The difficulty in establishing long-term strategic advantages, though, stems from the simple fact that, eventually, you have to show people what you’re doing (except in the areas of player health and wellness, which is why according to a growing number of NBA personnel, developments in that area ultimately will dwarf the current evolution of on-court strategy). Whether it’s in player acquisition, draft philosophy, or on-court strategy, there’s going to be a video and paper trail that everyone else in the league can dissect, and they can eventually figure out some part of your plan.
That ability to dissect applies to writers, as well, so below are breakdowns of some unique ways in which three of those four all-in teams are thinking differently about conventional NBA strategies.
The Spurs and (the One-Season Fall of) Strategic Roster Management
The cramped interview area tucked just outside the visitor’s locker room at Denver’s Pepsi Center felt like the perfect setting for legendarily gruff San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich to discuss his team’s highly compressed early-season schedule. It was mid-December, just six weeks into the 2014–15 season, but Popovich and the Spurs—who for years had been well ahead of the rest of the NBA in terms of managing their roster to endure the strains of an eighty-two-game regular season while still winning enough to position themselves for postseason success—seemedto be meeting their match in terms of balancing performance and player workloads.
The Spurs entered this particular tilt with the homestanding Nuggets with a perfectly reasonable record of 16–7, which projected to around fifty-seven wins, which was a typically normal Spurs haul in the Popovich era. Popovich’s concern, though, was that the schedule, along with a spate of injuries, was already taxing his team—especially his aging core of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker—to a degree that was much worse than in previous seasons. November already had seen the Spurs play eleven games over an eighteen-day stretch, and this
Similar Books
