If you were to ask one-hundred shooting coaches “What’s the most important aspect to making a jump shot?” you will probably get at least fifty different responses. Answers may range from detailed such as the finger mechanics of the release or “shooting axis,” to broad, holistic responses such as “Find your repeatable comfort zone at…
In a fairly comical article back in February 2018, Bleacher Report identified the League’s Least Valuable Shooters. In this article, Adam Fromal examined players around the league by extracting their field goal percentage from four particular zones on the court: 3-10 feet, 11-16 feet, 17′-3pt, and 3PA. Fromal would then calculate each player’s points per…
On December 31st, James Harden dropped yet another 40+ points triple double on the Memphis Grizzlies in a 113 – 101 victory in Houston. It wasn’t the 43 points, 10 rebounds, and 13 assists that was the most impressive stat of the night, but rather the fact that Harden scored 43 points to spite making…
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…
Here’s a hill I will die on: The primary goal of spacing in basketball is to manipulate a defense into a providing a high quality shot for an offense. To me, as a former player/coach/scout/analyst/front office specialist, this is intuitive. However, as one Eastern Conference representative responded to me: I’m not sure about that. Spacing…
Over the course of the years, NBA Stats has released a variety of information about passing in games. A few years ago, we could directly query the “single-hop” passing network between players. It allowed me to then perform a topical analysis such as Kobe Bryant’s role within the Los Angeles Lakers’ offense. Unfortunately, little information…
Over the day following a Derrick Rose 50-point performance, Jalen Rose commented that Derrick Rose took 653 dribbles over the course of the game; contrasting to a 52-point performance from Klay Thompson that only took 56 dribbles. The aim of the comment was to identify the difference between the players’ role within the offense. Thompson,…
When we learn about computational mathematics, software engineering, or data science in general, one of the most important questions we have to answer is how many operations are required. The answer isn’t to show the prowess of our algorithm, but rather identify how quickly the algorithm can perform. We need to know if the answer…
Recently, we posted about a way to redefine gravity in terms of a joint model that can be used to quantify defensive interaction, offensive spacing, and spatio-temporal motion of a possession. The result yields a sparse N x 2P x Q x R x S x Z tensor that characterizes the interactions of players, locations on the court,…
When we measure the defensive impact of a player, typically the first arguments we make are the number of blocks and steals that player has obtained. We celebrate players like Dikembe Mutombo and Maurice Cheeks for their prowess in obtaining blocks (2nd all time) and steals (5th all time), respectively. In the latter case, a…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 