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…
As a kid growing up in the Los Angeles area, playing in AAU, the Nike leagues, and the Marmonte; we had a team that was a little ahead of its time: take three’s, switch everything, run teams into the ground by scoring before the defense was set, and force every opponent shot in the short…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
Over the past decade a true emphasis on three point shooting has emerged. This can be credited to the understanding of effective field goal percentage being a better underlying parameter for points per field goal attempt than raw field goal percentage. And it’s become an emphasis for some top-tier teams such as the Houston Rockets.…
A tried-but-true strategy in pick-up (and grade school) basketball is the “dump-and-chase” offense. This offense takes as many jumpers as possible, regardless of capability, fully knowing that the team can either out-hustle their opponent for rebounds; or they have a behemoth of a rebounder on their team. As players become older, or more technically sound…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 