[supersonics.com] The Sonics Play Moneyball

Long four-parter, but great read. Props to the Supersonics website.

Link: http://aol.nba.com/sonics/news/moneyball050119.html

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The Sonics Play Moneyball: Part One

Kevin Pelton, SUPERSONICS.COM | January 19, 2005

"Part of me is partial to the Sonics because they're the closest thing the NBA has to the Oakland A's in terms of their willingness to let the numbers tell the story."

John Hollinger, the NBA's most prominent statistical analyst in the media, wrote that about the Sonics in his Pro Basketball Prospectus: 2003-04 Edition. Several months before the 2003-04 Prospectus was published, Michael Lewis had already introduced the A's front office and their use of statistics to the world with his best-selling book, Moneyball.

The phenomenal success of Moneyball forced sabermetrics - the statistical analysis of baseball, so named for the baseball research society, SABR, which spawned many of baseball's top analysts - into the parlance of even casual baseball fans. It also helped spur fans in other sports, including basketball, to ponder whether a similar revolution was possible.

However, Moneyball wasn't the catalyst for attempts to reinvent statistics in the NBA and the NFL. By the time Moneyball was published in the late spring of 2003, Hollinger already had one Prospectus in print and was working on the follow-up while writing for CNNSI.com. And Dean Oliver, considered by his peers the leading NBA analyst, was in his third year of consulting for the Sonics.

Since Hollinger wrote about the Sonics prior to the 2003-04 season, they have actually stepped up their use of statistics. Through this fall, Oliver consulted for the team on a limited basis while working as an environmental engineer and writing his basketball opus, Basketball On Paper. Just before the Sonics started training camp this fall, they brought on Oliver full time. While he still lives in the Bay Area and remains a consultant in title, Oliver's influence has grown, as he has worked with the coaching staff - with their blessing - as well as the front office.

There is at least one person in virtually every NBA front office that is well-versed in the language of statistics, but Oliver remains an anomaly. No one else plays as large of a role as Oliver based solely on their ability to use statistics, but Oliver is not alone in Seattle in his use of statistics. Sonics President and CEO Wally Walker holds an MBA from Stanford University and used analytical methods during his time as a money manager for Goldman, Sachs. Assistant GM Rich Cho worked as an engineer for Boeing before joining the Sonics and is also known for his analytical skills.

It was when Walker hired Cho as an intern nearly a decade ago, at the end of his first full season as general manager, that the Sonics began their development into the NBA's most statistically-minded organization. Cho's first project was, with the help of Microsoft engineers, to create a program, Sonics Explorer, that tracks the statistics and contracts of players throughout the league - a first of its kind.

"In the old days - I know, my first year here - you start talking about a player in a trade and you start breaking out the old NBA Guides," says Walker. "'Here were his stats the last three years.' That's just the way it was always done. To be able to see, 'Well, maybe there's a trend on a per-minute basis over the last four years, the player's productivity is going down or going up,' is a little better than just dragging out the old books."

It was another analytical mind in the Sonics organization, area scout Yvan Kelly - who teaches economics at a small college by day - that introduced Oliver to the Sonics front office, adding another dimension to the Sonics use of statistics.

So what does this mean, that the Sonics play Moneyball? Using the name of the book in the title of this series means more curiosity. The average NBA fan, having read or at least heard of Lewis' book, will have their interest piqued by the controversy Moneyball spawned. At the same time, Moneyball has become a loaded word, one that divides a new guard interested in what the numbers have to say and the traditional theory that favors sight and feel. Like many characterizations of Moneyball, drawing that divide is an oversimplification, but that's what's bound to happen when complicated theories are brought to the general public through the media.

To some, Moneyball merely means the use of statistics, but that's too simplistic. After all, some statistics have always played a role in managing basketball teams, just in a more haphazard and less scientific manner. There's also the statistical star of Moneyball, on-base percentage, but its role was overrated by the book and there is no exact basketball equivalent. In this case, the most accurate description of "Moneyball" is probably this - using statistics to find undervalued skills, strategies or players so as to make the most efficient use possible of money and salary-cap space.

"When I thought about it (Moneyball) in basketball terms," says Walker, "I do think we get carried away with athleticism at times, which you need - you always want athletes - but sometimes at the expense of looking at a player's productivity and skill level."
Statistics have traditionally been less useful in basketball than in baseball, where play is not continuous and most action occurs in the isolated pitcher-hitter matchup. Context is key in basketball. While in baseball, a good hitter is a good hitter with little regard to who surrounds him in the lineup, an NBA specialist like Fred Hoiberg (shooting) or Bruce Bowen (defense) has more value when playing alongside a superstar like Kevin Garnett or Tim Duncan.

That's where Oliver's work, as well as analysis of lineups and plus-minus data, has helped the Sonics grow beyond individual statistics in recent years. Oliver's player analysis starts with looking at how the player fits into the six individual roles he identifies as necessary for a successful team - outside shooter, ball distributer/passer, rebounder, foul drawer, interior defender, perimeter defender.

"I think if you're consistent with your analysis as you put together a team, you stand a better chance of having a balanced team," Walker says.

One measure of Moneyball is something Lewis wrote in the introduction to the book: The A's caught his eye because of their remarkable performance in a metric invented by the late sabermatician Doug Pappas, Marginal Wins/Marginal Dollars, which evaluates team efficiency in spending money. The A's ranked second by this measure in 2002 and first in 2003.

Last year, I adapted Pappas' method to the NBA. Thus far this season, the Sonics have faced intense competition from other front offices, as two of the other top four teams in the league - Phoenix and San Antonio - also boast payrolls barely above the NBA's salary cap. Real GM.com's Kevin Broom reports that, excluding the expansion Charlotte Bobcats, who are bound by a different salary cap during their first two years, the Sonics rank third in the NBA in Marginal Wins/Marginal Dollar, trailing the Suns and Spurs.

For a team like the Sonics, which has had one of the league's lowest payrolls in recent years, front office efficiency is critical to the success they've achieved this season.

"We have to be efficient," says Walker.

The Sonics aren't the Oakland A's, but don't be surprised if you see Michael Lewis hanging around The Furtado Center in the next few weeks.

 

The Sonics Play Moneyball: Part Two - The Outsider

Kevin Pelton, SUPERSONICS.COM | January 27, 2005
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What would you do to follow your passion? What risks would you take? What sacrifices would you make?

Dean Oliver quit his job.

At the age of 34, Oliver gave up his comfortable work as an environmental engineer for Environ in order to try to make a living out of what had formerly largely been a hobby, statistical analysis of the NBA. But Oliver's journey to the NBA began long before he went out looking for a new job in January 2004.

For the entirety of his adult life through quitting his job, Oliver had balanced work and basketball, taking advantage of his love and aptitude for math and science in both work and play.

While an undergrad at Caltech, he played point guard and later served as an assistant coach. Division I experience it was not, but the experience would prove invaluable when Oliver began working with basketball lifers. It was while at Caltech that Oliver developed many of his methods, beginning from his critical discovery - the importance of possessions to evaluating teams who play at different speeds on a level playing field and determining the value of various events on the court.

Oliver described the balancing act best in the introduction to the unpublished NBA annual, Basketball Hoopla, he wrote at the tender age of 19:

"There were many physics quizzes that had notes written on them like: 'Is the three-pointer hurting the offenses of the NBA? Check development since '80.' In the back of one of those blue test booklets used to take a math final, there are workings of a study to determine why Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has stayed in the league the past five years despite low rebound and blocked shot totals."

Oliver earned his PhD at North Carolina, the perfect place for a basketball junkie to further his education on and off the court. Oliver met legendary Tar Heels coach Dean Smith - who, he'd already learned, had been using possessions to evaluate his team for decades - and worked as an area scout for the college scouting service operated by Lakers assistant coach Bill Bertka.

After Oliver settled into his career as an environmental engineer, he could hardly shake basketball. So he wrote about it online, at About.com and his personal Web site, the Journal of Basketball Studies. He consulted for several teams, most notably and most frequently the Sonics. He helped a budding statistical analysis community by generously sharing his knowledge in a basketball statistics discussion group online.

Oliver enjoyed his work. It was fulfilling and useful. But it wasn't basketball.

So he quit.

"I talked to a lot of people who had started their own business and friends who had done some crazy things - they convinced me that taking the chance is worth it and, even if things went horribly, life wouldn't be over," Oliver says. "It was a long decision, but easy to make after I gathered all the information."
The NBA's Moneyball movement still being in its infancy, Oliver couldn't exactly walk into an NBA front office and demand a job.

Getting permanent employment would require meeting a lot of people and selling himself, a process made easier by the fact that, in the fall of 2003, he published his first book, Basketball On Paper - something Oliver refers to as "a giant business card."
Oliver attended the NBA's Pre-Draft Camp in Chicago, meeting with several executives around the league. (While also noticing a Georgia alumnus named Damien Wilkins whom he would mention to the Sonics as someone worth signing for their summer-league team.) He did the same at the Long Beach and Rocky Mountain Revue summer leagues.

There was plenty of interest from NBA teams, but far less money.

In the end, all roads led to the Sonics, the team Oliver most closely identified with because of his consulting work and his mother's and step-father's residence in the Seattle area.
The Friday before the Sonics began their 2004 training camp, when they were finalizing deals for training-camp invitees, they inked a 34-year-old free agent, a move that would go unreported in the agate type of the newspaper but stood the potential of having more long-term impact than anyone else they could have signed.

That explains how Dean Oliver got here, to a position with Seattle the team terms an "experiment". (The Sonics and Oliver agreed to a one-year position as a paid consultant with the understanding that, if things went well, Oliver would ascend to a more formal position in the future.) What it doesn't explain is how Dean Oliver became Dean Oliver, and why he would want to work for an NBA team at all.

After all, the comparison that often pops up in reference to Oliver from his fellow NBA analysts is the "Bill James of basketball." It's an accurate description to the extent that both are figureheads for the statistical revolution in their respective sports, but the similarities break down after that. James considered himself a writer who used statistics in his work; Oliver generally considers himself an analyst who writes to spread his ideas. James didn't go to work for a baseball team (the Boston Red Sox) until he'd been an icon amongst fans for nearly two decades; Oliver quit his job so he could go work for a basketball team.

Ironically, it was James' own struggle to become an insider that convinced Oliver. While James came to relish his role as outsider, using it to his advantage by exposing the many mistakes made by baseball's front offices, Oliver took a look at what happened to James and decided he'd do whatever he could to get inside a front office.

Oliver wasn't the only impressionable basketball fan who read James' Abstracts in the 1980s and wondered whether the same logic could be applied to basketball; far from it. With varying success, people like Bob Bellotti, Dave Heeren and Martin Manley created player-rating formulas, wrote books and were touted as the Bill James of Basketball. None of them can claim, however, to have matched Oliver's longevity or influence.

The reason for that, it could be argued, is that Oliver realized very early on in his dorm-room calculations that the linear weights formulas favored by most basketball analysts even now just didn't work as well as James' Runs Created, amongst others, had summed up baseball (at least hitting). How much of that was Oliver's practical experience playing, coaching and scouting the game?

"As a coach and a scout, I didn’t care who was the best," says Oliver. "I wanted to know what plays I could run with certain players and when, what players could do to become better, what their strengths were and how to enhance those strengths. Linear weights addressed none of this."

Oliver went further than his peers dared. Like James, he decided to rate players the same way he rated teams. In baseball, that meant runs - hence, runs created. In basketball, it meant points per possession. To call Oliver's work simple would be a misstatement; his offensive rating formula alone takes up seven pages in the appendix of Basketball On Paper. The logic behind the ratings, however, was simple: How much of his team's offense or defense - measured in possessions - was a player responsible for? How efficient was he with those possessions?

"From James' work, I quickly did a lot of baseball stuff, recalculating things he did to get the concepts in my head," says Oliver. "I started work on basketball pretty seriously in late '84 or early '85, just trying to adapt James' methods. It was in late '86/early '87 that I broke from trying to adapt his work and took a completely different approach. That approach is what took me where I am now."

Even in that framework, Oliver always viewed rating players as more of a necessary evil than a starting point. More than any of his peers, Oliver has considered coaching issues, helping him work with the Sonics coaching staff on a more subtle and profound level than saying, "Smith is good. He should be playing more."

At its heart, Oliver's work, like James', is founded on a simple premise. How do teams win? He most accurately addressed this point with the creation of the Four Factors system, which breaks down offense and defense into the four most critical components - shooting, rebounding, free throws and turnovers. (More on the Four Factors)

"It was impossible to ape James," Michael Lewis wrote in Moneyball. "The whole point of James was: don't be an ape! Think for yourself along rational lines."

Dean Oliver is no ape, a fact further proven in 2004 when James endorsed the paperback edition of Basketball On Paper.

"There are a lot of math guys who just rush from the numbers to the conclusion," said James. "They'll tell you that Shaq is a real good player but his team would win a couple more games a year if he could hit a free throw. Dean is more than that; he's really struggling to understand the actual problem, rather than the statistical after-image of it. I learn a lot by reading him."

It's now more than a year since Dean Oliver quit his job to take a chance on himself. There were tough moments along the way, but he wouldn't change a thing.

"These days I am working so hard to do studies on holes in our team, on improved defensive measurement, on potential draftees, or on our next opponent that I don't really think about how I got here," says Oliver. "But I see my friends and they - the ones who really helped me feel comfortable with the decision - tell me that they're awed that I did it. After a brief moment of fear while thinking, "You're surprised and you helped convince me to do it?!?", I do then look back at the last year and realize, wow, I did it."

 

The Sonics Play Moneyball: Part Three - The Front Office

Kevin Pelton, SUPERSONICS.COM | February 2, 2005
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The negotiations between Wally Walker, then the Sonics general manager, and the agent for one of his team's players seemed to have stalled when the agent claimed his player was the best in the NBA. (He wasn't.)

Walker didn't lose his cool; he pulled out a printout listing where the player ranked amongst players at his position in various statistical categories. It having been established to the agent's satisfaction that the player was not, alas, Michael Jordan, he and Walker hammered out a deal.

Fast forward to this past summer. Having drafted their center of the future, Robert Swift, the Sonics looked to move center Calvin Booth for a rebounder who could help address the team's weakness on the boards. With only a few clicks of their mouse, Walker (now president and CEO), GM Rick Sund or Assistant GM Rich Cho could call up a list of all the NBA players they could trade Booth for straight up who were above their minimum rate of rebounds per 48 minutes.

From this list, one name jumped out: Dallas forward/center Danny Fortson, whose contract was virtually identical to Booth's and who had led the league in rebounds per 48 minutes (19.2) in 2003-04. The Sonics made a deal for Fortson, and midway through his first season in Seattle, he's averaging 8.9 points and 6.2 rebounds per game and has played a key role in the Sonics emergence as one of the NBA's top rebounding teams this season.

Were these scenarios what Walker imagined when he told a prospective intern, Rich Cho, in 1995 that he wanted to make the Sonics into the NBA's most technically advanced team? Yes, as were many more that have come to fruition thanks to an NBA player evaluation system unlike any that had ever been used before.

After being hired by Walker, Cho, an engineering major at Washington State University who worked for Boeing before going back to law school and joining the Sonics, set to work building a software system that would integrate player statistics, scouting information and contract details, giving the Sonics the opportunity to quickly get an overview of all the pertinent information about a player they were considering signing or trading for. Cho also saw the tool as valuable for contract negotiations with players already on the Sonics in terms of looking at the contracts of comparable players.

"I tried to envision myself in the shoes of a general manager," says Cho, "and asked myself what tools would not only help make my job easier, but at the same time would assist me in my decision making process and perhaps allow me to gain a competitive advantage over other teams."

In exchange for Sonics tickets, he scored the assistance of a pair of Microsoft programmers to build the actual program, Sonics Explorer, from a 70-page functional specification document he wrote. The process of building, testing and refining the software spanned the two summers Cho spent with the Sonics as an intern while in law school.

"The most important component, at least from my view," says Walker, "is that it does it (rates players) on a per-minute basis, so it enables us to track guys better or notice players - particularly Eastern Conference players that we don't see as often and ones that aren't playing a lot of minutes if they're really getting a lot done in lesser minutes and not getting much notice."

NBA statistical analyst John Hollinger wrote in this year's edition of his Pro Basketball Forecast series, "It's a pretty simple concept, but one that has largely escaped most NBA front offices: The idea that what a player does on a per-minute basis is far more important than his per-game stats."

Not so the Sonics front office, and if they didn't believe per-minute stats before, the immediate dividends paid them by Fortson - who had averaged just 11.2 minutes during his one season in Dallas - have provided proof as ample as Fortson's 265-pound frame.

Using per-minute stats is not of itself revolutionary - Sund used them in Detroit and Dallas, before he used a computer - but the key is the ease with which they or any other relevant data can be obtained thanks to Sonics Explorer.

"You've always had statistics of some form or another," says Sund. "Now we have them and we can put them into the computer and it prints them out per minute played, it prints them out per minute played, it prints them out on a per-36 minute basis [what Sund likes to use because starters typically play about 36 minutes], it prints them out in certain areas that we have developed here - taking point guards and analyzing the statistical attributes of a point guard that can be computerized into the Sonics Evaluation Number. That becomes useful, because you can look at them and say, 'These are the top players at their position because these are the elements of those positions that we think are important.'"

The Sonics Evaluation Number (SEN) Sund references is used by the front office to rank players by position (a process Sund also regularly has them and the coaching staff do on a subjective basis). The Sonics don't go down the list and sign the top player or use the SEN that literally, but do use it as a first cut to find players that might be undervalued by the market. For example, Walker recently began watching a somewhat obscure Eastern Conference rookie because he had rated so well in limited minutes.

What makes the SEN unique is that the weighting for various statistics depends on the position. When Sonics Explorer was first being built, the Sonics coaching staff and front-office personnel submitted their list of the most important statistical criteria for each position. A composite of these rankings was used to create a formula for each position. Notably, the Sonics place a heavy importance on assist-to-turnover ratios for point guards, and their ratings at the position reflect that.

As valuable as per-minute and individual statistics can be to rate individuals, their weakness often comes in describing how players fit together. Walker says that many of the mistakes the Sonics have made - including the contract they gave Booth - have come when they've been unable to strike a balance between a player's low productivity and how well he would fit the role envisioned for him.

WINVAL, a software program designed by Jeff Sagarin and Wayne Winston used by the Dallas Mavericks extensively and a handful of other teams, was one attempt to do this. WINVAL takes the concept of plus-minus - how much the Sonics or another team outscores or are outscored by their opponents with a given player on the court - to another level by adjusting for the quality of teammates and opponents. But the Sonics did not feel they were using WINVAL enough to justify its cost.

Sonics consultant Dean Oliver, featured in the last installment of this series, has proven more valuable to the front office in this role. Oliver's work focuses on evaluating players roles and how they fit together to form a team. Oliver and the rest of the front office have also made extensive use of the data, both plus-minus and otherwise, available at the Web site 82games.com over the last two years, adding to their analysis.

Of course, the Sonics front office does not rely solely on computers to scout players. While Cho and Walker have embraced the move towards statistics, Sund is more of an old-school talent evaluator who favors first-hand scouting and tape evaluation. Sund says that he's more interested in the big-picture conclusions than the numbers themselves.

"The math, for me, is very difficult to decipher," says Sund. "What I like with what Dean does for me is that he puts it in paragraph basketball form, and that's very understandable. It's understandable for the coaches, it's understandable for me. I think that's very useful."

The key, all involved are quick to point out, is establishing a balance between statistical analysis and first-hand scouting.

"As long as you keep (statistical analysis) in the right perspective as a valuable tool and not the absolute answer, I think it's important because it does help keep a discipline in your decision-making and eradicate some of the other emotional or subjective stuff that enters into it," says Walker. "You still need some of that; there's still an instinct in making those decisions. You combine it with the objective side, I think you've got a good framework for making decisions."

"You want to gather as much information as you possibly can to make decisions," says Sund. "I think that becomes important, so if you can get more computer data, because that's what it basically is, to help you in your decision-making, that's good."

"I think they go hand-in-hand and combining those two with a lot of videotape analysis will give you a good idea of how a player may be able to succeed," says Cho. "Seeing a player first-hand will often give you a better feel for his game as well as his physical attributes than watching him on tape. At the same time, players can be hot and cold on specific nights, so we like to supplement watching a player in person with both statistical analysis over the course of a season as well as extensive videotape analysis."

The Sonics had to rely entirely on traditional scouting as they decided to select Swift with the 12th pick of last June's Draft, and the work of European scout Lojze Milosavljevic and Director of Player Personnel Dave Pendergraft, as well as individual workouts, was key in the decision to take Vladimir Radmanovic nearly four years ago.

The Sonics fine track record with young players, including getting starters Rashard Lewis and Reggie Evans with a second-round pick and as an undrafted rookie free agent, respectively, is a testament not to their use of statistics but instead their scouting staff.

Both the statistical analysis and the Sonics traditional methods of scouting fit into a framework that is as much Moneyball as the use of statistics, viewing basketball decisions as business ones.

"At the end of the day, it's a classic business equation - it's a cost-benefit analysis," says Walker, who holds an MBA from Stanford. "You've got to look at what you're paying. Our system does do a bang-for-the-buck calculation. We have to be very efficienct, given our resources, because ultimately our goal is still the same as anyone else's - to win an NBA Championship."

It doesn't take complicated calculations to determine the Sonics have gotten plenty of bang from some of their moves. Fortson is the quintessential example, but fellow Sixth Man Award contender Antonio Daniels was signed away from Portland with little fanfare. In the press release announcing the move, Sund referred to Daniels' efficiency, and the Sonics were attracted by Daniels' ability to avoid turnovers. Lo and behold, he led the NBA in assist-to-turnover ratio last season and is first again this year.

A Daniels repeat would give the Sonics three straight league leaders in assist-to-turnover ratio, as guard Kevin Ollie, considered something of a throw-in in the trade that brought Ray Allen to Seattle from Milwaukee, led the league in 2002-03. Ollie was another player the Sonics had long coveted because of his error-free performance at the point.

Any list of the best trades in Sonics history has to include acquiring Brent Barry from Chicago in exchange for an aging Hersey Hawkins. Barry was another player the Sonics had liked based on his efficient shooting. Lo and behold, Barry would lead the NBA in true shooting percentage twice while with the Sonics and come to be regarded as one of the NBA's most underrated players.

The Sonics expect more of those success stories in the future, even as the rest of the NBA begins to embrace the Moneyball movement.

"I think with all the technology out there, it’s just going to get progressively more advanced," says Cho. "With the growing number of both high school and international players entering the league as well as the steady increase in salaries, I think it’s important to be on the leading edge."

"I'd like to believe we can maintain a competitive advantage," adds Walker.

 

The Sonics Play Moneyball: Part Four - The Coaching Staff

Kevin Pelton, SUPERSONICS.COM | Feb. 14, 2005
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In Seattle and around the NBA, statistics haven't made the same kind of impact on the sidelines as they have in front offices. That's to be expected. Coaching ultimately comes down to feel, and, unlike general managers, coaches need only evaluate players they watch on a daily basis, not hundreds throughout the NBA and countless more amateur prospects.

Still, there are two primary ways in which the Sonics use statistics: Evaluating their own players and lineup combinations with plus-minus statistics, and scouting upcoming opponents by looking at their statistics.

The concept of plus-minus is a long-standing one in hockey (to the point where the NHL's league leaderboard in the statistic is corporately sponsored), but its popularity in basketball is a more recent thing.

Until last season, coaches mainly obtained plus-minus data by tracking it themselves on a coach-by-coach basis. Following in the footsteps of his coach at North Carolina and mentor, Dean Smith, former Sonics Coach George Karl always tracked plus-minus data during his time in Seattle, receiving a report on how his players rated after each game.

"It's the No. 1 stat I believe in," Karl once told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Following the 1993-94 season, statistical guru Harvey Pollack, the Philadelphia 76ers director of statistical information, began tracking plus-minus in his annual Statistical Yearbook. The NBA's leader that first season? None other than Sonics Coach Nate McMillan (+616), then coming off the bench for the 63-19 Sonics. Without McMillan on the floor, the Sonics were just 129 points better than the opposition.

"I didn't get any bonuses for that," McMillan recalls now with a smile. He did get more respect from Karl, however, as the plus-minus data verified McMillan's importance to the team, something that couldn't always be demonstrated through the use of traditional statistics.

Pollack has annually published plus-minus data for every player for over a decade now, but that information doesn't really help coaches because Pollack can't tabulate it until the following December. Still, Pollack's was the only source available to fans - except when coaches, like Karl, made a point of mentioning plus-minuses in the media - until October 2003, when the Web site 82games.com made its debut.

For the last two seasons, 82games.com founder Roland Beech has tracked plus-minus for both individuals and lineups on a daily basis. While fans have enjoyed seeing the curtain pulled back on plus-minus data, NBA coaches have benefited as well, as teams throughout the league - including the Sonics - use 82games.com's data.

Beech has taken plus-minus data a step further by adjusting for team quality. While all the league leaders since McMillan have been perennial All-Stars (David Robinson in 1994-95; Michael Jordan in 1995-96 and 1996-97; Shaquille O'Neal in 1997-98, 1999-00 and 2001-02; Tim Duncan in 1998-99 and 2000-01 and Dirk Nowitzki in 2002-03 and 2003-04), the last-place finishers have included solid players like All-Stars Shareef Abdur-Rahim and Antawn Jamison. These players happened to play the most minutes on bad teams. Beech's "Roland Rating" compares how a team does with and without a player on the court, both on a per-48 minute basis. (Click here for the Sonics Roland Ratings this season.)

"It's not something that I substitute by, or use every day, as opposed to something nice to look at, to get a feel for a guy," says McMillan. "Sometimes there's some surprises there."
One surprise last season was swingman Richie Frahm. After making the Sonics during training camp, Frahm consistently rated as a positive presence for the team when he was in the lineup early in the season. His final Roland Rating of +10.0 was far and away the best on the Sonics.

"Last year, one guy that was always in the good plus-minus was Richie Frahm," says Associate Head Coach Dwane Casey. "Every time you looked up, golly, Richie Frahm, Richie Frahm. So he went and he had an immediate impact when he went into the game. That was always a different variable that you really didn't notice when he was going into the game."

At the same time, Frahm's limitation illustrates some of the weaknesses of plus-minus data. A significant part of Frahm's good rating owed to blowout games at New Jersey and Boston Frahm entered with the Sonics trailing big. They rallied in the fourth quarter, giving Frahm a combined +32 plus-minus in those two games.

"A funny thing can be, a guy might have a good plus-minus, but it might not be because of him," adds Sonics assistant Bob Weiss. "Like if you have a player who goes in, and let's say he starts the game and things start to go badly. The coach doesn't have much confidence in that player, so he pulls him. He may have only gotten a -6 while he was out there because you pull him right away. Whereas another player might be in there and things are going bad, you're in there for the whole slide, and you might get a -20. But, on the other hand, if that same basically non-productive player is in there and you're on a run, you'll stay with him, so all of a sudden he gets a +15 where he didn't really contribute to it.

"You have to look at statistics and then you have to use your common sense as well to see which are actually verifiable and which aren't."

Where plus-minus data might be more valuable is in evaluating lineup combinations to see how well they work on the court. One lineup the Sonics have been using more lately has paired Antonio Daniels and Ray Allen in the backcourt with a big frontcourt of Vladimir Radmanovic, Nick Collison and Danny Fortson. The numbers illustrate this lineup's effectiveness; it has outscored opponents by 59 points in just 119 minutes together.

No fancy statistics are necessary for much of the advance scouting of future opponents shared by Casey and Weiss. They're looking for key indicators of player skills and how those skills will affect the Sonics strategy.

"The biggest stat would probably be three-point shooting, outside shooting, where their points come from, how do they score?" says Weiss. "With each team it's going to be a little different, but three-point shooting is probably one of the predominant ones.

"You have to know who you can rotate off of and who you have to stay with."

Weiss has been known to enlist Sonics interns to conduct his own statistical studies. One of the most successful came during the 2002-03 season, when he discovered that the Philadelphia 76ers were 11-1 that season when Allen Iverson attempted at least 10 free throws, 1-4 when he failed to hit that mark.

"We used stats in that game to show that if we keep him off the free-throw line, make him shoot the three-point shot, (we would be successful)," said Weiss. "All of a sudden, you can turn those statistics into positives for yourself."

Free-throw percentages are another important marker, as they let coaches know which players should be fouled when they get a good look down low and which players they should look to foul when trailing down the stretch. Coaches also look at fouls and blocks on the defensive end of the court.

As they scout, the coaching staff can make use of advanced statistics provided by Sonics consultant Dean Oliver, featured in an earlier part of the series. Oliver sends the coaching staff advanced statistics about upcoming opponents and shot charts prepared with Beech's help that answer Weiss' questions about where opposing players are scoring from.

"I felt comfortable with his information and the way he brought it in," says Casey, referring to when Oliver first began communicating with the coaching staff during training camp. "His information just gives you a base. We're not making decisions based strictly on Dean's stuff. It's great stuff, but as a base to go by, not to make hard decisions on."

Another piece of proprietary information the Sonics use is what combinations opponents like to use. The coaching staff charts games just before they play an opponent to see the rotation pattern the opposing team is using.

"We don't do their plus-minus per se, but we keep a clock of the guys on the floor," says Casey. "We know who's in at the end of the first quarter, end of the second, end of the third and in crunch time at the end of the fourth."

 

I hear there's plenty of room in the Yao Makeover thread and in the Matt Maloney sighting thread for all of you reading-challenged posters.