34 games into the season, there is enough sample size to take a look how the team is performing up to date. Also with sportsVU data available, there are a lot of new ways to look at the team performance, thus it should be fun to do some digging in the numbers. So I pulled data mainly from NBA.com up to Jan 1st, 2014. Again, I tried to graph the data more visually, and sometimes do simple manipulation to look at the numbers in different angles. The main filter I used was with play time > 15 min/game, thus hopefully I captured most rotation players in the league, (I end up with 298 players, which is roughly 10/team, which sound right). I'm not trying to keep tract of rank numbers unless it is really significant, as that could change quickly, but I'm trying to graph in concepts of their ranking location within the league, so that we could have a better idea about our player's performance. As there are so many ways of looking into data, I'm not trying to cover every aspect here, and I will go with whatever I found interesting and worth notice, but bare with me if I miss anything. I will post slowly with pieces as they come along, I could not finish everything at once. It will depends on time I have.
Shooting% In these graphs, each dot represent a player in the league and they are sorted based on the FG%. Rocket players were highlighted and labeled with their name. Dotted horizontal line indicate the league average. So as a team shoot the most 3pts, half of our team are shooting at below league average 3FG%, which is pretty sad. Especially sad to see James Harden is under performing here, and Casspi and Garcia who are suppose to be our 3pt shooters. P.Beverley is not helping. With the hot start of Jeremy's 3 game, he is also declining here, but remain above league average. Happy to see Parsons start to pick up his 3pt shooting from his bad start of the season. Glad to see him actually shooting 3s instead of pump fake. TS% wise, Jeremy and James looks better, I think that is due to their better FT% and more of FT attempt. And look at eFG%, JH, PB, OC, AB are clustered in the mediocre range. I think the whole team need to improve their shooting. One thing I don't like is that, when you look at the scatter of 3FG% vs. 3FGA, JH as a second worst 3FG% taking a significant amount of 3pt shots. Pretty much he is the only one taking more than 5.5 3pt attempts per game that is shooting at below league average 3FG% here. James shoots much better last season, and I was surprised at his shot selection this year. Not sure whether his angle injury has anything to do with it, that limited him to shot 3s, but McHale really should rest him more to make him more effective.
Nice graphs. The 3FG% vs 3FGA -- I guess that's 3FGA per game? It might be more interesting if it is 3FGA per 36 minutes. Brooks shoots a good percentage and he shoots a lot of 3s. But he doesn't play many minutes, so it appears from your graph that he isn't shooting nearly enough.
Speed and Distance Speed and Distance: Statistics that measure the distance covered and the average speed of all movements (sprinting, jogging, standing, walking, backwards and forwards) by a player while on the court. I select the column of "average speed", as the distance traveled or distance traveled per game has a lot to do with playing time, and distance traveled per 48 min directly correlates to "average speed". As the name "speed" there, I do think this number do really indicate how fast a player run, as during a game, their speed varies a lot, from sprinting to walking up the court, and even standing. I found the "average speed" was actually just derived from distance traveled/play time and convert that to mile/hour numbers, thus I use this number as a indication as how mobile this player is on the court, as that is pretty much the distance traveled normalized by play time. We all know Parsons traveled the most in the league, but taking consider into his super high play time, he dose accumulate distance with more playing time. (Which is still tiring though.) However, if we look at the number normalized with playing time, we could see that P.Beverley is actually the most active player within Rockets. He is in the top 8% of the player in the league in terms of distance traveled while he is on the court. Which goes well with eye test, he is constantly moving around, dash in to grab an offensive board, then dash back for defense. Casspi and Parsons are all active cutters, moves a lot without ball, don't know what happend to Garcia, I thought he is the same type of player as Casspi, but he obviously is not as active as Casspi, maybe he is getting old, LOL. Centers usually don't travel too far from the rim, they cruise around the painted area, thus you would see most slow movers are centers, or bigs in the team, thus it is really odd to see James Harden fall in that range. He is actually bottom 3% in his mobility. Which also agree with eye test, he likes to stay at the top of the key, shortest travel distance from back end of the court, and he basically don't have much off ball movement. Rockets don't have plays require him to cut or curl, pass screens, etc. And I feel he normally is not involved in a play that he is do not have ball. As a team, the league most running team is PHI, with average of 4.2 mph of their rotation players, and the slowest team is NYK, with only 3.79 mph average for the whole team. Second most traveled team is SAS, Tony Parker would run the floor, through couple of screens even before he take the ball and start attacking. I don't see our guards do that kind of stuff. Oh, another slow team is of course NET.
Harden starts the play and ends the play most of the time. No travelled needed. Lin is active he always moves around at least a little but, but he could be moving more to try to get the ball (though Harden may not pass). Garcia I don't think is a cutting kind of player, I thikn he was signed to just shoot 3s, which was great last year. now he's just a bricklayer.
TOV Somebody suggested to looking at turnovers per 100 touch instead of traditional TOV rate, as TOV rate could be screwed with high volume shooters. Since the touches is tracted now with sportsVU data, it does make sense, as it has a indication about how much mistake you make with certain amount of ball handling, so it should be a better parameter to look for TOV. Here is the reference. http://www.hickory-high.com/?p=11173 No surprise, James Harden, D.Howard and Jeremy Lin are our leaders in TOV. Even Asik is playing less this year, he still contribute his fair share of TOV, and these four are above league average in turn overs. But they are not really leads there, I mean, Jeremy is a bit better than I thought. What really impress me is that Beverley is really low in turnover rate, I mean, as a guard, he is way below average of the whole league, he is the lowest in the team, and he is a guard, he is in the group who don't even handle the ball, how did he do that?
Percent of passes over touches SportsVU track how many touches each player had in a game as well as how many passes they do during the game, so I simply introduced a parameter of pass/touch%, which is a indication on what percentage of ball comes in when a player touch it, it end up as a pass to go out of the player's hand, and that indirectly indicates what percentage of ball end up in a player's hand, which end up as FGA, FTA or TO. I forgot to add the league average line here, which should be 0.71, or 71% of touches end up as a pass. James Harden pass out around 61% of his touches is the lowest in the team. And he also located at the low end in that category in the league. If you look at those who pass less, you end up with whole bunch of shooters, to name a few, Rudy Gay, Nick Young, Kevin Durant, Klay Thompson, Carmelo Anthony and then a whole bunch of centers like Brook Lopez, D. Cousins, A. Bynum etc. Those guys are suppose to take the ball and shoot or dunk, so they end up pass out lesser percentage of their touches. So look at this, my feeling is that though we are talking about James play making, acting like a PG etc, he is still playing more like a SG than a PG, as his mentality and way of playing game is more like a SG than a PG. On the other hand, P.Beverley is extremely willing to pass, rather than looking for his own shots. He does has reasonable FGA, but he don't turn the ball over, and he don't really looking to draw fouls, and looks like he is the most willing passer in the team, to the extend at Asik's level, which I'm not sure is good or bad. Then look at DH, I'm surprised that he is not in the level as Brook Lopez, Pekovic, Javale McGee's group, who basically get the ball, and dunk or look for their own. DH actually pass in a good percentage, which is nice in the term of inside out play, and I hope we could go that rout a bit more frequently, and DH obviously is capable of doing that.
