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…
Synergy: Breaking Down Field Goal Types With the creation of Synergy, the basketball world gained valuable access to previously hard-to-obtain data on all field goal events in the league. One of the biggest introductions was the “primary defender” tag on field goal events. With play-by-play data, when a player drives to the basket or attempts…
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…
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…
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,…
In the era of tracking data, a need for a new style of analysis has emerged. Long gone are the regularized regression models and the simple counting techniques. Instead, we require leveraging shot-noise distributed systems such as Dan Cervone’s competing risks model, or Matthias Kempe’s self-organizing maps, or Peter Carr’s Imitation Learning. The list is…
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,…
Back in 2014, STATS Inc. introduced the notion of gravity, which was explained by Kevin Pelton as a series of two measures: gravity score and distraction score. In Pelton’s explanation, gravity score measures the relative distance a primary defender strays from their offensive counterpart and distraction score quantifies the amount of attention that same defender…
Squared Statistics: Understanding Basketball Analytics 