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[NBA.com] StatsCube: New Era of Statistical Analysis

Discussion in 'NBA Dish' started by durvasa, Oct 23, 2009.

  1. durvasa

    durvasa Contributing Member

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    Fun read for me.

    http://www.nba.com/2009/news/features/john_schuhmann/10/23/stats.analysis/index.html#

    With more access to this data, it looks like the Rockets are going to have to be more inventive with how they analyze it to stay ahead of the curve.

    [rquoter]
    ...

    Instantaneous Analysis

    The latest development in basketball analytics was among the many topics that were discussed at this week's Board of Governors meetings in Manhattan. The league's owners watched a presentation of a new data warehouse tool called StatsCube, which the NBA has been developing over the last few years and which is now available to every team.

    StatsCube has in it every point, rebound, assist, steal, block, turnover, missed shot, foul and substitution since the 1996-97 season, when play-by-play data first started being tracked courtside. The point in the game when each occurred, and what players were on the floor at the time, is recorded. Best of all, StatsCube can slice and dice the data so teams can analyze it instantaneously.

    "It's an environment for instantaneous reporting, navigation and analysis of every play-by-play event that has happened in the NBA since 1996," says Catanella. "That's a lot of data."

    Say a team's power forward grabs only X rebounds per minute. Is the team better when he's on the floor? What players shoot the best in the last three minutes of a close game? Does a center block as many shots after he's picked up his fourth foul as he does when he has fewer than four?

    With a little bit of training, StatsCube can answer all of those questions within seconds. The data always has been available to teams, but they've never before been able to access it so quickly and easily.

    "It's a great cost-saver for teams," says Catanella, "because they don't have to try and build a system like this on their own, and they can spend their time doing the analysis that can be so valuable, as opposed to spending 90 percent of their time trying to put that iteration together, if they're even able to do it. A lot of teams aren't even capable."

    Of course, having access to the tool is just the first step.

    "It's an enabler," Catanella says, "but we're not going to tell them what numbers to look at when evaluating players."

    The Future

    Of course, there's still a limited amount of information available through play-by-play data. We know that Ray Allen made an 18-foot jumper and that Rajon Rondo passed him the ball, but we don't know if Allen was wide open or closely guarded. Did Vince Carter get caught up in a Kendrick Perkins screen, or was he helping out on a Kevin Garnett roll to the basket? And was Jameer Nelson putting enough pressure on Rondo up top?

    The next (and perhaps final) step is coming soon. During Game 4 of the Finals last June, the NBA did a demo of a system in development that tracks player and ball movement through the use of six HD cameras placed around the arena.

    "You have the precise location of every one on the floor, you have the play that is run, you have the ball touches and you have the positioning for the rebound," says Steve Hellmuth, NBA Entertainment's executive vice president of operations and technology. "And you can collect all of that information. You can even have the trajectory of the ball as it went to the basket."

    Collecting such an enormous amount of detailed data, ingesting it, sorting it and eventually bringing it to the surface is a challenge, but Hellmuth believes the system is no more than a few years away.

    "We're going to test some more this year," he says. "And if our tests go extraordinarily well, we might deploy next year. It will probably be a deployment over the next couple of years. But player tracking is definitely in our future."

    ...
    [/rquoter]
     
  2. Pest_Ctrl

    Pest_Ctrl Member

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    I don't think it would be too much of a threat to Morey and his crew now that the other GMs have access to these data. The things that are important are not the data themselves, but how to interpret the data, how to translate the data into something that truly matters. With this much amount of data available, there would be numerous ways to go through the data and get some sort of conclusions, and most of them would be irrelevant. If every team hire some statisticians and develop their own algorithms for talent evaluation, they would probably all be very different, and probably a lot of them would not work as they are supposed to. For example the Mavs algorithm that put Kidd at No. 2 last season, seriously?

    Morey and crew have proven in the past few years that they know how to interpret the data, so I think this would only be a plus to them, now that they have more data to go through and analyze and test hypothesis. Anyway, if we fans can have access to this, it would be such a great tool for our average fans who don't have 100 employees working for us to generate the data. I do hope that they would make this public.
     
  3. Easy

    Easy Boban Only Fan
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    I am certain that Morey's system is 10 times more sophisticated than this one. Like the article says, the stats are not new. Only the way it can be accessed is new. Morey and his staff track a lot more things than the NBA stats do.
     

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