Here is an interesting article from Wall Street Journal Online. Unfortunately, I can't provide a link since it's a subscription based newspaper. If it needs to be locked due to no link, then please lock it up ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Pro Basketball The NBA Tries to Make Teamwork a Science Coaches are crunching numbers and consulting computers to find winning lineups By RUSSELL ADAMS Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL November 5, 2005; Page P6 Players in the National Basketball Association will find a new category in their report cards this fall: "Plays well with others." In a league long dominated by high-flying superstars, more teams are focusing this season on teamwork -- and turning to surprisingly scientific methods to measure it. New technology makes it easier to track the performance of every combination of five players that steps on the court, in a long list of game situations, from out-of-bounds plays to pick-and-rolls to zone defenses. As different player mixes yield different results, teams are beginning to quantify the elusive concept known as chemistry. Say, for example, that after a coach inserts two particular players into a game, the opposing team has trouble scoring. Getting ready for the next opponent, the coach might flip open his laptop, punch a few keys, and see how his team did defensively in other games when the same two players were on the court together. He's able to do this because teams are increasingly turning to software that dissects plays, follows every pass and shot and tracks each player's part in every possession. For basketball, it's something of a catch-up game. While combining video and statistical analysis has long been used to gain an edge in baseball and football, it's a fairly new phenomenon on the hardwood court. NBA teams have been slower to adopt that approach to dissecting games because it requires someone actually record every possession of every game, including which players were on the court. Los Angeles Clippers coach Mike Dunleavy says that when he took the job in 2003, the team's entire video-scouting system consisted of two VCRs. Now, the NBA is realizing how well the approach can actually work. Software developed by XOS Technologies helps a coach see things like how the team fared in quarters when certain players were on the court together. He could run any number of different scenarios: To determine whether one player helped his fellow defenders more than another, he could isolate moments in games when the two played separately but with the same four teammates. "Coaching went from being very subjective to an exact science of what guys do," says Mr. Dunleavy. Of course, the raw material for this kind of study has been around for some time. The NBA started keeping such records in 1996, and over the years more teams have been developing or purchasing software programs to help them extract patterns from the data. But now the data are more widely available thanks to independent Web sites like 82games.com and academics who record them for teams or for publication. Fans were the first to catch on to 82games, but the site's founder, Roland Beech, says more NBA teams are coming to him now with questions about his data. In addition, all but two NBA teams now use XOS's system that packages statistics and video for instant evaluation of what is working and what isn't. And XOS is testing a wireless system that allows NBA coaches to show plays on a laptop during timeouts. Over the course of an NBA season, the average team uses about 500 different five-man lineups, according to statistician Wayne Winston. The new push toward more number-crunching analysis could have profound implications for how games are played. "The ability to do that with numbers is huge," says Dean Oliver, a statistical consultant for the Seattle Supersonics. "The NBA and a lot of sports have always been about who are the best players. But basketball is such an intricate game it really is about how you fit them all together." Though fans have grown used to Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant or Tracy McGrady pouring in basket after basket while his pals mostly stand around and watch, there is growing evidence that savvier teamwork can take a team all the way to the top. Last year's finalists, the Detroit Pistons and San Antonio Spurs, played a team-oriented game, with only one player between them averaging more than 20 points a game last season. And don't think the rest of the NBA hasn't noticed the success that comes from the team approach. Indeed, as coaches track every dribble of every game, they're discovering some surprising things about their own rosters. Among the revelations: Eddie Griffin gave the Minnesota Timberwolves a 10-point boost when he came off the bench to join superstar Kevin Garnett on the court last year, according to 82games.com. And the Houston Rockets' most effective pairing in net points (see chart nearby) was all-star Tracy McGrady and journeyman Jon Barry, who together made Houston 13 points better than opponents. Of course, the idea that a good player isn't the same thing as a good teammate is probably as old as the NBA itself. And duos that just seem to click on the court aren't a new phenomenon; you might remember some fellows named Stockton and Malone or Cousy and Russell. But technology is taking the guesswork out of finding player combinations that work -- or don't. Shot-location data, for example, have often confirmed teams' hunches that pairing guys who like to shoot from the same part of the court can inhibit both players' scoring. And teams that have bad chemistry often see it blow up in their faces. Exhibit A: The 2003-04 Los Angeles Lakers, who added future Hall of Famers Gary Payton and Karl Malone to an already stacked roster -- and got worse. That team was hurt by injuries and the distraction of Mr. Bryant's legal troubles, but Mr. Payton's inability to accept a reduced role and play a team game was widely seen as a big part of the team's ultimate undoing. The Miami Heat took a major roll of the dice when it this off-season jettisoned Eddie Jones and Damon Jones, perhaps the two best teammates stars Shaquille O'Neal and Dwayne Wade could ask for, and replaced them with two highly skilled players -- Mr. Payton and Antoine Walker -- who have had trouble fitting in on equally talented teams. The Heat didn't return phone calls seeking comment. Science suggests the pairing of dominant scorers like the Philadelphia 76ers' Allen Iverson and Chris Webber is likely to run into problems. Statisticians Jeff Sagarin and Mr. Winston created a calculator that rates the performance of the many different lineups each team uses during a season and found that one of the lineups the 76ers used most after Mr. Webber was acquired last year was more than 21 points per game worse than an average NBA lineup against similar competition. [The NBA's Dynamic Duos] - source: 82games.com These teammates significantly boosted their team's fortunes when they were together on the court last season. Net points per 48 minutes is a measure of how many more points than their opponents the team scored per game while using that pairing Top 10 player pairs in net points per 48 minutes, 2004-05 Manu Ginobili / Tim Duncan (Spurs): +18.7 Mike James / Toni Kukoc (Bucks): +14.3 Steve Nash / Shawn Marion (Phoenix): +14.1 Othella Harrington / Tyson Chandler (Bulls): +14.0 Jon Barry / Tracy McGrady (Rockets): +13.2 Jason Terry / Dirk Nowitzki (Mavericks): +12.1 Baron Davis / Mike Dunleavy (Warriors): +12.0 Jason Hart / Matt Carroll (Bobcats): +11.2 Eddie Jones / Shaq O'Neal (Heat): +10.6 Eddie Griffin / Kevin Garnett (Timberwolves): +10.1 Chucky Atkins / Brian Cook (Lakers): +10.1
That's very interesting. I wonder if Barry is in good enough shape to start at shooting guard and log much bigger minutes. I certainly don't think any of us fans would be opposed to it, but then again, he sure is fantastic in his role off the bench. Sometimes if it ain't broke you don't fix it.
The idea of trying to quantify a player's effects on the team's level of performance is certainly very interesting. However, the goal of accurate quantification is much more complex than the system that they seem to be using. Confounding factors abound regarding the attribution of cause and effect. For one, a major weakness of their method is that they use points scored by the entire team as measurement for the contribution of only 2 out of the 5 players. There are many other factors that can contribute to a team scoring more points than the opponent when these 2 players are on the floor, the most obvious of which are the contributions of the other 3 players. In fact, they're ignoring who the other 3 players are completely. For example, you can take the analysis to 3 player combos and may find, for example, that the combo of Barry/TMac/Deke achieves a +20, the combo of Barry/TMac/Yao a +5, and the combo of Barry/TMac/Howard a -15. In this case, Deke may have been part of the cause leading to the effects attributed solely to the Barry/TMac combo. Ultimately, every combo from 1 player up to 5 players will need to be analyzed and weighted by playing time together. Standard errors also need to be calculated to reflect degrees of certainty (or lack thereof due to small sample size). I believe that some of these higher point combos may have had large error bars due to small sample size of playing time together with some of the bench players. This project will be complicated, but achievable using today's powerful computers. In short, this article raises an interesting way to look at a player's contribution to team performance, but their method of measuring this can be pursued in a more sophisticated way for a better reflection of reality.
Mike James / Toni Kukoc (Bucks): +14.3 had that stat been at the beginning of the article I could have stopped reading
who knew that mike james and toni kukoc were leathal together? maybe we should have tried to get kukoc last year and run a lineup of: james, barry, tmac, kukoc that's a championship lineup right there! it doesn't even matter who plays the 5.
