In a seminal article written in The New York Times, Michael Lewis talked about the importance of the then National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets (and later championship winner with the Miami Heat) player, Shane Battier, terming him the “No Stats, All Star”. Battier, a ‘small forward’, did not do enough to show up much on the game “box scores” — the equivalent of a cricket scorecard — which tracks minutes played, points scored, assists generated, rebounds, steals and blocks collected and fouls committed. But he did much more on the court that was not tracked on the box scores — scoring from the most efficient distances (the corner three) or spreading the floor to allow spacing on offense or generally playing robust perimeter defence against the opposing team’s best shooting guard or scorer (by methods such as keeping a hand over the opposing shooter’s eye while taking a shot).
Six years after the article’s publishing, nearly everything that Battier did on the court is now measurable and can be translated into useful stats by most NBA teams.
Players like Battier — whose worth was noticeable only by fellow players or advanced scouts or the well discerning coaches — are now understood to be useful and supported to the hilt even by the ordinary fans who watch the game. Take the instance of recent NBA championship winner Draymond Green, who doesn’t score too much or rebound much and is undersized for his position (power forward) but adds tremendous value as a screen setting, passing forward on offense and a brilliant defender with a strong base offering solid post defence and the ability to switch onto the perimeter. Green recently won a maximum contract to continue playing for the 2015 NBA champion, the Golden State Warriors, and he would not have been given this huge sum of money ($85 million for five years) if what he did was not measurable these days.
A new statistic — the Real Plus Minus, a modified version of Jeremias Engelmann’s Regularised Adjusted Plus Minus — is prominently displayed on ESPN’s NBA page. The mechanics of this statistic, which looks into how much a player contributes to the team score on the court as opposed to when he is off the court, are intricate. The statistic relies upon a ridge regression analysis that measures a player’s impact as part of a line-up as opposed to the average contribution of any player in any line-up. Normally, such a statistic would have been a connoisseur’s or backroom manager’s secret sauce, but today, it is a widely used statistic that is available even to the fan base. This is just one illustration of how far the advanced statistics revolution has gone in the NBA today.
Many NBA teams rely upon even more sophisticated data, some of which are not available to the public (at least for free). Teams have installed SportVU cameras that track everything that a player does. These include the number of miles run by a player on court, the number of screens set by the said player, areas frequented by a particular player to shoot from, and so on. With these deep, analytical statistics available to the coach’s backroom staff at their fingertips, the planning for games is sophisticated and the importance of coaching cannot be stated enough. Basketball today, as it is played in the US (European basketball in any case was equally cerebral but less athletic), is almost a game of chess with grandmaster coaches and players. It is no coincidence that the most successful teams in the NBA today have a strong statistics dependent core in their management. Examples such as the Houston Rockets (whose general manager, Daryl Morey, is a MIT MBA graduate with a computer science/ statistics degree) and the San Antonio Spurs come to mind immediately.
The statistical revolution in the NBA — while at an advanced stage and possibly at the highest level in the three major leagues in the United States — followed rather than led the move towards advanced use of statistics, a credit that must go to Major League Baseball. A visit to any baseball statistics-based website, such as Fangraphs, will be an introduction to an alphabet soup of statistical information.
The pioneer in baseball advanced statistics was an obscure writer named Bill James who later on was the lynchpin for sabremetrics (baseball statistics). Bill James’ scientific and simplified approach to baseball statistics was later emulated by general managers such as Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics to construct an efficient squad despite thin resources as opposed to richer opponents. Lewis’ book Moneyball, based on Beane, explaining the success of sabremetrics was made famous by the eponymous film starring Brad Pitt recently. That being said, the advent of ABPRmetrics (the basketball version of sabremetrics) has added a decisive edge to the way basketball is played, coached, and even followed in the United States. A generally well-administered sport has been given yet another fillip by the statistics revolution.
