Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (11 page)

“I think we’re now just seeing the results of it, but I think the impact it could have on us is post-[2016],” Ford said. “A lot of the players that will be on the ’16 [team] will still be the guys that were kind of raised through USA Basketball with Coach K, if you will. And then post-’16 and we head into the next [cycle], you’re going to see players that first started to play for USA Basketball in our 16- and 17-and-under teams. That’s where you’ll see the Jabari Parkers, the Jahlil Okafors, even Marcus Smart, those types of guys.”

Compared to high school, analytics are much more widely available and used at the college level. While longtime
Sports Illustrated
college basketball writer Luke Winn estimates that maybe a quarter of Division I programs have a staffer who is largely competent in advanced statistics and analysis, basically every program competing at that level has access to some type of analytics.

For starters, a subscription to Ken Pomeroy’s
KenPom.com
site costs $19.99 a year and provides a wealth of information, starting with a team’s four factors rankings and moving into more esoteric statistics like a team’s relative height and contributions from its bench. Other web-based services like Basketball State provide even more granular stats and years of historic information, for a similar price point. Both of those service providers also have more expensive products tailored for college coaches to help them analyze their own team and to scout others. There are also independent consultants who work for individual programs, and basically every Division I program subscribes to Synergy, as well.

If you have extra cash and the ability to hire staff to process all of the data, though, SportVU is becoming a differentiator at the NCAA level, too. And whenever the system actually becomes more mainstream at that level, a few individual schools will already be well ahead of the curve.

During the 2014–15 season, there were four men’s college basketball programs that used SportVU. Powerhouses Louisville and Duke—which had the highest and third-highest basketball budgets in the country in 2013–14, per data provided to the US Department of Education’s Office of Postsecondary Education—were each on their second season with the system, as was Marquette, a perennial NCAA tournament team under former head coach Buzz Williams that now was under the command of former Duke point guard and assistant coach Steve Wojciechowski.

The fourth program, though, was a fairly unexpected one, coming not from the remaining pool of college bluebloods or even one of the nation’s big-money conferences. It was from within the less-fancied Mountain West Conference, and even within that league, it wasn’t nouveau power San Diego State or typical league heavyweight New Mexico or even glitzy University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The program that installed SportVU in its arena was Colorado State, located an hour north of Denver in bucolic Fort Collins, with a bigger basketball budget than either the Lobos or Rebels per that Department of Education data. The Rams elected to spend a modest chunk of it to gain an advantage.

Cutting-edge technology seems a funny fit for an old-school tactician like Colorado State head coach Larry Eustachy, who has won over five hundred games in his career despite coaching mostly at a series of out-of-the-way-and-spotlight locales. But the seeds for the idea were planted by the team’s video coordinator, Willie Glover, who had worked with Eustachy both as a student assistant and assistant coach at Southern Mississippi and had connected with Brian Kopp at the 2014 NBA Summer League. Glover figured the spend would benefit the Rams as a recruiting tool, and also would enable the program to maximize the skills of the players they were able to bring in, as the Rams were much more likely to nab a one-year transfer than a one-and-done blue-chipper.

Glover got Eustachy to buy in, and he spent the 2014–15 season handling the interpretation and the reporting of the SportVU data for the coaching staff. Glover openly admitted that the first season was a work in progress, both in terms of the actual reports (which were delivered via e-mail, and after every four games to try to smooth out stats variance a bit) and in how messages were received and deliberated by the coaching staff. While a lot of what Glover sent along was fairly rudimentary, there were sometimes pieces of information that he flagged that would allow the team to more closely consider how it was deploying some of its personnel.

“If we want to look at assists, we can track Daniel [Bejarano] for example, and see on average . . . at home he touches it about eighty-four times a night,” Glover said, showing off the SportVU product on his laptop as he sat in Eustachy’s office. “As you can see, that’s about roughly twenty times more than the next person, so what is he doing with those touches? His assist percentage is quite low considering the number of touches that he has. As compared to a JJ Avila, who touches the ball roughly twenty times less, but has a 3 percent higher assist percentage.”

Of course, it’s difficult to compare a guard (Bejarano) who is forced to be a primary ballhandler because of injuries and roster construction with a big man (Avila) who gets the ball in more favorable scoring positions (and also was a good passer from the post and off the bounce), and that is the kind of conversation Glover wanted to promote with his data e-mails to Eustachy and his assistants without making things too confrontational or complicated.

“That would be a good argument or discussion to have in the coaches meeting,” Glover said about the Bejarano/Avila comparison. “Hey, how can we get the ball into JJ’s hands more so we can be a more efficient offense. Daniel, for example, he has the ball in his hands a lot, but the percentages are not adding up for the touches he had. [Backup point guard] John Gillon, he was up there with JJ;
typically, when they have the ball, good things happen for our team compared to other guys, and that’s something that I may put in a report because, again, I don’t want to overwhelm him.”

The 2014–15 Rams were an interesting test case for the introduction of SportVU because in certain ways, the way they played stepped well outside of Eustachy’s long-established coaching footprint. Pomeroy’s data goes back to the 2001–02 season and, prior to last season, a Eustachy team in his database had never taken more than 30 percent of its field goal attempts from behind the arc nor finished higher than 234th in the country in terms of the percentage of field goal attempts that were 3-pointers. That changed with the roster in question, as Colorado State took 36.6 percent of its shots from 3-point range and connected on a reasonable 34.8 percent of them. Four of their five primary 3-point shooters made at least 36 percent of their attempts, so the higher rate of shots from that distance, on the surface, made sense.

Things got more complicated for Eustachy because of what happened at the point guard position. Grambling University transfer Antwan Scott was presumed to be the starter at that position heading into the season, but he suffered an early foot injury, was never healthy, and ultimately played in just four games before missing the rest of the year. As noted earlier, sliding Bejarano over to the point had its limitations because he was not a great passer and also, relatively speaking, was a volume shooter who didn’t shoot very well from inside the arc or get to the free throw line to bolster his decent 3-point marksmanship.

That left Eustachy with the option of Gillon, a transfer from the University of Arkansas-Little Rock. Gillon had a solid assist-to-turnover ratio, may have been the league’s most effective penetrator off the dribble, shot 39 percent from the arc, and got to the free throw line a ton for a guy who only played around twenty minutes a game. Despite Gillon’s seemingly solid offensive contributions, Eustachy—whose reputation centers around rugged defense and rebounding—had a
hard time trusting the diminutive Gillon (who was six inches shorter than Bejarano, who was an excellent rebounder for a guard) on the defensive end of the floor. This was a great situation into which to introduce some of the SportVU data and create a discussion.

“As coaches, you tend to get things in your brain and you tend to see things, you see almost what your brain is telling you to see,” said assistant coach Ross Hodge. “Like, John Gillon for example. We always had it in our head that he was a poor defender, he’s a bad defender, but then you get into some of the SportVU stuff and some of the Synergy stuff, it’s like ‘He’s grading out pretty well.’ He may not be in a stance, jumping to the ball, closing out like crazy, but his man don’t score. Or he gets over the ball screen. It may not be what you want, or how you want it [but it works].”

That said, the Rams’ staff also had to figure out how and when was the best time to send information to Eustachy for his consideration.

“Coach is a timing guy, like most head coaches. Will will hit him with the stats. That’s the best way to do it, we feel like, because usually it will give him a chance to be at home,” Hodge added. “He can look at them, digest them a little bit, not feeling like it’s an argument. Not coming in, feeling like ‘I don’t give a [expletive] what you all say, John Gillon can’t guard.’ And then you’ll be like ‘Well, coach . . . ’ It just gives him some time to digest it. Sometimes, he’ll come in and won’t bring it up at all. Sometimes, we’ll be in there watching film as a staff, and twenty minutes later, out of nowhere, he’ll be like ‘Yeah, I saw that on Will’s stats.’”

Hodge said the new data they had at their disposal also helped the assistant coaches make a case to Eustachy for a different way to defend ball screens last season. Instead of having the handler’s defender jam up and then go under the screen, or have the screener’s defender hedge the screen to try to slow down the dribbler, they went to more of a soft drop from the screener’s defender so they didn’t end up allowing as much penetration and an easy kick for an open three.

They also were able to provide more context to some of Eustachy’s preferred rebounding stats and tactics by showing that certain players were actually going hard for rebounds despite less-than-impressive rebounding numbers. They were collecting a high percentage of their realistic opportunities and/or the Rams were getting the rebound a large portion of the times a player was within a few feet of the rebound.

This is still a work in progress in Fort Collins, especially since Colorado State doesn’t pay for SportVU use for practices, so the data set is limited to the Rams’ home games, many of which come in non-conference play and can be somewhat lopsided affairs. But the Rams are bullish on what they were able to accomplish in their first year using the SportVU system; they say it has added just a little more clarity and insight to their staff discussions.

“If you didn’t have the data, and it’s just arguing what your account of events is, that’s when it can get difficult,” Hodge said. “When any person sees it one way, and you see it another way, basically you’re just arguing what you both see, and you could both be seeing it right. And [SportVU clarifies] a little bit of the ‘maybe this is happening. Or maybe this
isn’t
happening. Maybe we’re seeing it wrong.’”

Duke operates at a different level than Colorado State. The Blue Devils have the highest-paid college coach in the country in Mike Krzyzewski, one of the largest overall budgets in the country, and one of the most national presences of any college program in America. So when Duke was one of three schools to first dive in to SportVU in 2013, the Blue Devils also made sure it was installed in their practice facility. Through the end of the 2014–15 college season, they were the only team in the country with that privilege.

As noted in the Colorado State section above, sample size is one of the principal issues in effectiveness of data mining and analysis at the collegiate level. Even if you have the system, it’s almost certain at this stage that your opponents will not, so teams that use SportVU
for games are only able to collect data from their sixteen or seventeen home games a season. Since maybe half of those are against non-league competition, with a good percentage of those games being “guarantee games” against overmatched opponents grateful to receive a high five-figures check for playing, there is a lot of noise in the data provided, if you even have the proper staffing to analyze it.