We feel statistics will increasingly play a role in the NBA; the problem currently is that the metrics are not sophisticated enough for any team to rely solely on statistics. Partially the dearth of data dating back to the beginning of the modern era impedes the effort to build sophisticated statistical models with, but of course this will of course be rectified going forward. However, anyone who thinks they can build, manage and coach a team using only statistics is insane. I don't even think this is a goal of any team - teams are just trying to be smarter about which players are really worth big bucks, and which players are only good for rotisserie leagues and the New York Knicks.
WSJ.com - The Story That Stats Don't Tell, by Russell Adams
Like several other teams in the National Basketball Association, the Boston Celtics have increasingly sought help from stats-obsessed number crunchers, who have transformed other pro sports. The hope: use statistics to make smarter decisions about which players to sign and how to use them.It didn't do much for the Celtics this year. The team, with 32 wins and 46 losses going into Friday's game, will be sitting at home when the playoffs start next week.
Heading into the postseason, the stats push in basketball is a long way from being a secret weapon for success. Some of the league's biggest stats mavens are shooting airballs. Aside from the Celtics, the Seattle SuperSonics and the Orlando Magic have also become more reliant on number crunching -- and both have had subpar seasons.
Inspired by the success of stat heads in baseball and football, more basketball teams have been rushing to hire some of their own. In the most recent example, the Houston Rockets this month brought on a 32-year-old with an MBA from MIT, Daryl Morey, to be their assistant general manager, the highest position yet given to a someone with a pure stats background.
The Dallas Mavericks, owned by Internet entrepreneur and billionaire Mark Cuban, hired a company called 82games.com to help them push the envelope on data mining. The company has recently started looking at more obscure measurements, such as the ease of the shot that an assist leads to. An assist that results in a layup is considered of higher value than a pass that leads to an outside jump shot.
Some of the teams that rely on statisticians to make personnel decisions have done well this year, including the Mavericks, San Antonio Spurs and Phoenix Suns. And, to be sure, basketball teams don't rely on statisticians nearly as heavily as baseball teams do.
But there is a rising feeling in the NBA -- even among teams using number crunchers -- that they have to be used selectively in basketball. “I don't think there's very many of us who really feel like we have all the answers,” says Dan Rosenbaum, an assistant economics professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro hired as a stats consultant by an Eastern Conference team he declines to name.One big problem is that the data guys haven't yet found their breakthough statistic... Some tout a player's “plus-minus rating” (how many more or fewer points than the opponent a team scores when that player is in the game), while others are big believers in Player Efficiency Rating, which measures a player's per-minute productivity using both positive contributions (like assists) and negative ones (like missed shots).
Unlike their counterparts in baseball, stat heads in basketball don't have decades of data telling them every move a player made. It's only now that people in basketball are starting to keep records on things like how often in a game a defensive player deflects a pass.
Another problem is that the stats guys in basketball don't always have the ear of the coaches. Also, basketball, far more than baseball, is a team game, making it harder to isolate individual contributions to overall success. For their part, the Celtics have drafted three high-school players since 2003, and stats at that level are essentially useless, says the team's general manager, Chris Wallace.
All of this sheds new light on a fundamental debate in the sports world: whether raw numbers and statistics are a more effective tool than the observations of seasoned coaches and scouts for mapping out game strategy. The balance has been shifting in the past decade in favor of the numbers guys. The NBA's experience provides those on the other side of the debate with some counter evidence.
The Phoenix Suns have clinched first place in their division, but they are an enigma to statisticians. Players such as Boris Diaw, Raja Bell and Tim Thomas have been crucial to the team's success -- and yet statistically, there was little in their performance last year to suggest they were capable of playing big roles either as individuals or as teammates.
The Golden State Warriors also have defied the stats wizards. Players like Baron Davis, Jason Richardson and Troy Murphy have wracked up impressive offensive numbers -- the sorts of performances that should have led to far more than the 31 wins the team had netted going into Friday's game.
For several years, stat heads mostly inhabited the fringes of NBA front offices. That began to change when the Sonics in 2004 hired a former environmental engineer named Dean Oliver to be a full-time statistical consultant. The Sonics went on to win their division that year after missing the playoffs the season before, and several former bench-warmers had break-out seasons. A similar turnaround took place last year in Boston, where Mr. Morey worked before getting hired by the Rockets.
Sonics CEO Wally Walker, who hired Mr. Oliver, says the team's fortunes this year show that statistics are hardly a panacea. “Our chemistry isn't nearly as good this year as it was last year,” he says. “It's hard to hang a number on that.”
In other words, no magic bullet yet, but many are optimistic.
update 4/18/06
a little essay about the subject
Tags: Basketball, /NBA, /statistics
