For all you NBA-Geeks, Nerds, Dorks and other derogatory terms for people with high IQs and low sexual experiences (WoW and Second Life doesn’t count!), I present to you a great round up of articles from MIT’s SSAC.
When you guys are done with this, can you please help me with my astrophysics homework?
The New York Times’ Joshua Brustein looked at the upcoming M.I.T Sloan Sports Conference coming later this week, and highlighted some of the NBA papers attendees will hear about.
- Effort and Concentration looked at how players respond to different pressures. They looked at free throw percentages at home and on the road and when during the game those percentages increase, decrease or stay the same. Other analytics, like offensive rebounding, were also tracked on a home/away basis over the course of a game. The bottom graph shows how home teams tend to grab more offensive rebounds, which is considered a more “effort” oriented skill rather than a “concentration” skill, like free throws.
- N.B.A. Chemistry evaluates how player’s will interact with one another on the same team together. This is the paper that’s the most dubious, in my highly subjective and not at all empirical mind. How mean, how can you factor in all the various components involved in the chemistry between two athletes at the professional level?
- Experience and Winning in the National Basketball Association tracked how chemistry improves with more time together (this should excite ‘Wolves fans during the Rubio/Love era). They plotted various lineups over time, and determined whether more veteran teams that had been playing together for a longer period of time did better in the playoffs. A possible outlier on this one is the 07-08 Celtics that assembled the original Big Three, and went on to win a title over the Lakers.
- Big 2’s and Big 3’s placed players into 14 different “clusters” like “limited, role-playing centers” (think, Bill Wennington for those old Bulls teams, or Tiago Splitter for the current San Antonio line-up) or “wing 3-point shooters” and determined which teams had which players on them. The teams where the best players fell into the same clusters, tended to do poorly compared to a more even-handed rotation with players from all different clusters.
Perhaps the most interesting part was at the end of the article.
The research calculated that good chemistry can be responsible for up to six wins over the course of a regular season.
It also looked at some of the major player moves in the last several seasons, finding, for instance, that both the Denver Nuggets and the Knicks improved with their trade centered on Carmelo Anthony. But Denver benefited more.
As for LeBron James’s Decision, Shen said that Miami was one of the worst teams James could have picked in terms of chemistry. The Cleveland Cavaliers presented James with the best synergies, but that was largely because he made his teammates better, rather than the other way around. Also, according to their model, Dwyane Wade is not a good fit with James because their main skills, offensive scoring and ball handling, are wasted in combination with one another.
But Shen acknowledged that mathematical formulas do not always have the answers.
“If you’re LeBron James, synergies aren’t the only things you consider,” he said.
And that is why NBA observers should only place so much on the sabermetrics and quantitative data associated with the NBA. In the end, any team can beat any other team on any given night. There’s no replacing instinct and whatever God or fate has in store for a team or player. As Emerson wrote: “Or say, the foresight that awaits / Is the same Genius that creates.”
[New York Times; M.I.T. Sloan Sports Conference; Photo: GQ]
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