On February 7th, 1945, basketball was introduced to a new novelty that wouldn’t take hold for at least another 35 years: the three point line. In a game between Columbia University and Fordham University, Columbia head coach Howard Hobson, while on sabbatical from Oregon University (a couple years after winning the inaugural NCAA tournament), proposed using…
In a recent game between the Milwaukee Bucks and the Detroit Pistons, the Bucks employed their typical switch, slip, and show match-up zone defense to clog the paint and swat shooters off the perimeter en route to a 115-105 victory. The methodology is fairly straight forward: On the perimeter, try to slips guards and drop…
When we break down different types of actions on the court, we tend to look at play-by-play as a guide to understanding the play types. The most common break down we see is the shot type for a field goal attempt. From there, we have recently tended to discuss the differences between Klay Thompson and…
Suppose a game completes and three players post the following stat lines: Player A: 31 points, 13 rebounds, 3 assists Player B: 20 points, 11 rebounds, 9 assists Player C: 20 points, 21 rebounds, 0 assists Frequently, we ask who was the better player or which player contributed the most to the game. Unfortunately, most…
Over the previous couple seasons, I have written extensively about how Regularized Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM) is constructed, what the assumptions really mean, and how we interpret the results. If you’re curious for a refresher, feel free to remind yourself here. There’s an example in there that clearly breaks down how various forms of adjusted plus-minus…
How many five-man rotations have been employed in the league this season? How often do players play together on the court? What are the offensive and defensive ratings associated with every five-man unit this season? Does one particular line-up outscore opponents? Some of these questions can be answered with the following data below. Each link…
As of the morning of November 20th, the Four Factors line for the 7-9 Dallas Mavericks read off as follows: Effective Field Goal Percentage: 0.527 (8th in the league) Turnover Percentage: 14.4 (28th in the league) Offensive Rebound Percentage: 22.6 (18th in the league) Free Throw Rate: 0.22 (7th in the league) Opponent eFG%: 0.527…
A couple years ago, I presented an introduction to the Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney nonparametric test with respect to identifying whether scoring was indeed increasing in the NBA. This was in 2015; and now that we are a few seasons along, we can start tracking the year-to-year trends. The reason for this popping up once again is primarily…
Over the last decade, the subtle changes from offenses revolving around mid-range jump shots to long-range three point attempts have become much more explicit as teams such as the Houston Rockets had come off a 2017-18 campaign launching over 50% of their field goal attempts from beyond the arc. The mathematics is simple: “3 >…
To take a break from the heavy mathematics of recent articles, today we take a look at the early offense set called Pistol. Like many offensive wrinkles such as elevator doors, floppy, horns (etc.), a key goal of the offense is to force the opposing defense to be out of position. More importantly, not only…
