Archive for the 'Layups' Category

Now, this is the kind of post I like to see... Basketball Geek's Ryan Parker (whose blog has quickly filled the "brilliant research" void left when Eli Witus shut down CountTheBasket to go to the NBA) took player on- and off-court shot location data and ran an adjusted +/- style regression to determine each player's individual impact on where his team's shots are coming from. It's especially useful because you can take the results and estimate what the offensive and defensive shot distribution of any theoretical 5-man lineup would be. For instance:

"Lets imagine a world in which the [07-08] Rockets loaned the [07-08] Celtics Yao Ming in exchange for some time with Kendrick Perkins. What sort of shot distribution would this lineup of Rajon Rondo, Ray Allen, Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Yao Ming have?"

Very cool, right? And definitely one of the more inventive ways I've seen of applying the on-/off-court regression methodology.

With a little assist from our own Playoff Probability Report, Harlan Schreiber of HoopsAnalyst compares the distribution of team wins this season to that of past years. The result? This year's preponderance of legitimately great teams (Cleveland, Boston, L.A. Lakers) is something of an historical outlier.

Ed. note: Continuing our all Pelton, all the time theme this week...

When Basketball Prospectus' Kevin Pelton picked against the Spurs before the season, it looked like a safe bet -- I mean, lots of indicators (cough*team age*cough) predicted a decline, especially with Manu Ginobili out for the early stages of the year. So, in the face of all this, how have they kept up their winning ways?

That is, according to Houston GM Daryl Morey. But Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus is here to tell you that, love it or hate it, basketball's box score is here to stay. Why? Because it can still give you insights about a player's game -- even those pesky "No-Stats All-Stars" like Shane Battier.

We asked this same question about 2 months ago, but Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus took a fresh look last week at what Steph could possibly give the champs, using his patented similarity-score projection system, SCHOENE. And he reached the same conclusion we did: he's not the same Starbury we knew and loved (well, knew) back in the day. Caveat emptor, Mr. Ainge.

In honor of the fact that we've been "assisting" (a.k.a. "linking to") them so much lately, here's another great Sporcle quiz for you guys: Can you name the 25 leading assist men in NBA history?

Ken Pomeroy of kenpom.com added an incredibly cool new feature to his team pages this past week -- he calls it "defensive fingerprint", and it's an attempt to identify the primary defensive style (man-to-man or zone) of a team simply by looking at the team's tempo-free stat tendencies. It's in the early stages of development and it's nowhere near perfect, but it's another very interesting attempt to combine traditional scouting information with statistical data.

Carl Bialik of The Wall Street Journal has a nice follow-up to the Shane Battier article by Michael Lewis that appeared in The New York Times Magazine last weekend.

In today's New York Times Magazine, here's an article by "Moneyball" author Michael Lewis highlighting not only the surprising importance of Shane Battier (a guy who "can’t dribble, [is] slow and hasn’t got much body control") to the Rockets, but also the APBRmetrics movement as a whole.

In honor of All-Star Weekend, Sporcle has a quiz that's right up our alley here at BBR: Can you name every NBA Slam Dunk Contest winner? And for extra credit, try taking the quiz with your eyes closed...