Archive for the 'Statgeekery' Category

Last Friday, I posted about teams that formed as potent a slashing combo as the new LeBron James-Dwyane Wade duo in Miami, and found that in an incredibly small sample of similar cases (3, to be exact), at least one -- if not both -- of the players had to change their playing style to accommodate their new circumstance. A lot of people asked about the general effect of the new team member on the offense, though, so today I wanted to quickly follow up and look at whether the driving tendency of the added player correlated to the amount of offensive improvement the team saw.

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When I posted last month about the all-time players who played for the best offensive and defensive teams in NBA history, there was a common theme among a number of the names at the top of each list: namely, they all played for a certain coach, or under a certain scheme. It only makes sense, then, to do the same study for coaches, and determine the guys who have called the shots for the top offenses and defenses of all time (or at least, since 1951).

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One common observation about the new-look Miami Heat goes something like this:

• Dwyane Wade is a great perimeter player who makes his living attacking the basket. He's unstoppable when he drives into the lane, but not as good when you force him to shoot a jump shot.
• LeBron James is also a great perimeter player who makes his living attacking the basket. He, too, is unstoppable when he drives into the lane, but not as good when you force him to shoot a jump shot.
• Won't this redundancy in skills make the Heat easier to defend?

If only we could quantify this dilemma, find similar situations in the past where two hard-driving teammates joined forces, and see if their offenses were as potent as expected...

Oh, wait, we can.

Enter good old Free Throw Rate (FTA/FGA). Because the majority of fouls are assessed on interior shooting attempts and/or aggressive offensive plays, FTR is actually a pretty good indicator of where a player likes to operate from on offense. Players like Glen Rice and Dennis Scott were known for their low FTRs because they took a ton of perimeter jumpers, shots on which a foul would land you in the serious doghouse. And at the other end of the spectrum there's Reggie Evans, whose legendary FTRs tell the story of a player who rarely attempts a shot outside of point-blank range. Obviously there are some players who are exceptions to this rule, but the majority of players' inside-outside tendencies can be described simply by looking at FTA/FGA.

So that should be the starting point in examining the issue of hard-driving teammates. The next step is to compare everyone's FTR to some universal standard, and to do that I borrowed this method from PFR's Doug Drinen. I don't want to bore you with the details, but it basically compares everyone to the league average; 100 is average, numbers greater than 100 mean the player attacks the rim more than the average player, and numbers under 100 mean the player is less aggressive than the average player. The theory is that if we just look at these "FTR Index" numbers for perimeter players (PG, SG, SF), we can find players who drove to the basket the most, which best describes LeBron and D-Wade's playing style.

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Team USA capped off a strong tournament yesterday by defeating host nation Turkey 81-64 in the championship game of the 2010 FIBA Worlds, and I'm going to cap off our coverage with the final U.S. advanced stats from the tourney:
Basic Stats

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2010 FIBA World Championship Semifinals
USA vs. Lithuania
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Istanbul, Turkey

United States of America

Record: 7-0
Coach: Mike Krzyzewski
Offensive Rating: 126.1
Defensive Rating: 90.2

Basic Stats

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Several times in the past, I've looked at what I called "Team Continuity" -- that is, the amount of minutes/possessions/etc. that a team gave to players who had been on their roster the year before. Today, I want to extend the concept to the NBA as a whole and examine league continuity, specifically the 5-year periods since the merger in which the league had the biggest influx of new talent.

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Here's an update to the Team USA stats I posted on Tuesday, which includes yesterday's game (in addition to the entire group stage of the FIBA World Championships so far, and the USA's international tour leading up to the World Championships):

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In case you've been as interested as I have in the international basketball action over the past few weeks, I thought I'd post some advanced stats for Team USA (including exhibitions + group games so far). Also, my apologies to our non-American readers for this all-Red-White-and-Blue edition; I would include other teams, but I can't find a statsheet-style printout of their data online, particularly for the pre-tournament warmup games. Perhaps the USA Basketball site will eventually post every team's numbers, though, like they did for the Olympics.

At any rate, here are the results & numbers for the team so far (feel free to compare to the Redeem Team's stats):

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Here are some quick logistic regressions I ran between offensive/defensive efficiency (as measured by my 1951-2010 estimation equation) and whether or not a team won a championship...

The first regression is between regular-season offensive/defensive rating (relative to the league average) and championships won since 1951, the first year for which I can estimate possessions. The logistic equation to predict championship probability from RS efficiencies was:

p(C) ~ 1 / (1 + EXP(4.7267572 - (0.3988116 * Offense) + (0.612137 * Defense)))

From this equation, we would expect an average team during the Regular Season (0.0 on offense & defense) to have a 0.9% chance of winning an NBA title. If you increase offense to the following levels while keeping defense average, you see this pattern:

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By popular demand, here's a sequel to the post I wrote on Friday, which focused on the NBA players who played for the best offenses over the course of their careers. This time I'll be looking at the players who were a part of the best defenses in their careers, but the methodology remains the same:

1. Estimate defensive efficiency (points allowed per 100 possessions) for every team since 1951 in the regular-season and playoffs.
2. Adjust playoff defensive ratings up/down based on regular-season offensive strength of postseason foes.
3. Compare defensive efficiencies to the league average (to account for the fact that the avg. was, for instance, 85 pts/100 poss in 1951 and 108 in 2010)
4. Find career averages (weighted by MP with each team) for every player since the NBA started tracking minutes in 1952.

Make sense? Good. Here are the all-time players who had a presence on the best defensive teams (minimum 15,000 career MP):

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