Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (20 page)

The related complication is that timing within a club’s development is a huge factor. There may be a free agent that you really like, but he doesn’t fit with your other key pieces. It’s not a rotisserie or daily fantasy team where you simply have to fit pieces in within a salary structure. You have a partially completed puzzle, and you’re constantly evaluating what pieces you need and what are available along with what the cost considerations may be. In the end, analytics may suggest a piece isn’t exactly perfect, but if a player comes available
at the right time, and you can afford him, you may need to pull the trigger anyway.

“You can have all this theoretical analysis—we did this, we analyzed the last ten or twenty [teams], for the last ten years of finalists—and we looked at the way they were built with their cap structure,” Penn said. “Was it two great players? Was it three great players? Where did they invest in what positions? And what that ended up outputting was a really interesting study for a sports management class, but it’s completely impractical because you never really get a blank slate, and you never really get the opportunity to go out and build like that. You sort of, by circumstance, bump into or arrive at whatever talent you got, and then you have to build around whoever that is. ‘Best player available’ is a phrase used a lot.”

Of course, the players are the main actors that make your analytics decisions look good or bad. And while there are a good number of players in today’s NBA that take analytics output seriously, there’s still probably no better overall case than Shane Battier.

Battier, who retired after the 2013–14 season after a thirteen-year career, became the player face of the analytics movement after a lengthy Michael Lewis
New York Times
feature in 2009 unveiled a lot of the information that showed Battier to be a really valuable piece of winning teams even though his personal statistics
were never particularly impressive.

“I was fortunate enough to play in an era that the analytics were able to explain and give . . . more validation than if I had played ten years earlier,” Battier said. “From college ball all the way to the analytics movement, I was always described as a glue guy. And the hustle guy—a guy who played hard. It’s a nice way of saying he’s an unathletic guy who helps the success of the team. Basically a proxy for ‘glue guy.’

“And, really, with the Michael Lewis article that came out about me, it was the first time that someone could explain—and Lewis did an amazing job—to explain what I did and why I was an effective basketball player, even though even most basketball pundits couldn’t put a finger on exactly what I did to positively impact the game. I was always part of winning teams and championship-winning teams, but my numbers were never overly sexy, my skill set obviously was not overly sexy, but I was always on the floor when it mattered, and more often than not, my teams won.”

As widely reported in recent years by the sports media, the Houston Rockets are involved early in a lot of the deeper analytical thinking in the sport. And in Battier’s case, Morey and the Rockets smelled out his hidden value before anyone else. In a 2007
Houston Press
column on Morey’s methods, Jason Friedman wrote that when the Rockets’ brass were conducting a self-analysis prior to the 2006 draft and seeing who they could acquire to fix some of the issues, Battier “stood out like a Mensa
member at a Paris Hilton party.”

The Rockets went on to trade the No. 8 overall pick (and forward Stromile Swift) to the Memphis Grizzlies in exchange for Battier, which drew predictable howls, especially since UConn’s Rudy Gay had dropped in the draft and was available at that spot. It’s probable that even Battier didn’t understand why the Rockets had given up that kind of asset to acquire him, but that soon changed. So did the ways in which Battier understood the game, and how he could best deploy his own abilities to further his team’s chances of winning.

“I didn’t even know what the analytics really, really meant. It wasn’t until I got to Houston that I had it sort of explained what my value was to the Rockets’ organization, and it gave me a perspective on my career,” Battier said. “And even when I was playing before the Rockets in Memphis, I did things that I was taught to do—just be a good teammate, move the ball, block out, make the opponent take a tough shot, run back on defense—all the things that translate into modern-day analytics as the price of winning.”

“It really was an amazing experience to play for [Daryl] Morey and Sam Hinkie, who sort of explained their worldview of basketball, and I’ve always been super-analytic and always tried to look at a situation as it is versus what it’s supposed to be or getting caught up in the hyperbole. And the way they drew me into their analytic world—and I don’t know who the player was, it might’ve been Kobe, but they said, ‘Hey, do you know who Kobe Bryant is at his core?’

“And they showed me this scouting report on Kobe that he was a dominant right-handed player that finishes and gets fouled and shoots a free throw rate at a legendary level, and they had all the numbers and stats to back that up. And [they] really deconstructed one of the greatest players of all time, instead of traditional scouting reports that say Kobe’s got a really good right hand, he’s got a pretty good step-back jumper, he’s good in the post, all very general basketball terms, but nothing that could really give you an edge as a defender.

“I knew exactly how much better Kobe was going with his right hand versus his left hand, and I knew exactly how much better he was if I kept him—how much chance I had to survive if I kept him—out of the paint versus allowing him to get a paint touch with the basketball. And, basically, a legend [was] deconstructed, and you see what he is. He’s still obviously a legend, but you see there are warts and there are flaws and there are strengths that if you could navigate, it gave you a much better chance to dissect a player coming from a defensive perspective.

“And after I saw that, I said, ‘Wow, I’m sold. What else you got?’ And it really was an education of the analytic way of thinking about basketball, sort of the academic approach, if you will, to basketball in the new millennia.”

While Battier’s reputation was principally built around his defensive ability and selflessness—Lewis’s feature detailed a situation where the Rockets were readying to play the San Antonio Spurs, and Battier suggested to the coaching staff that he come off the bench that
game so he could better match the minutes Spurs sixth-man Manu Ginobili, his primary cover, would play—the Rockets also molded Battier into a lethal “3-and-D” wing. Battier shot a searing 42.1 percent from the 3-point line in his first season in Houston, and in his four seasons with the Rockets, he took at least four 3-pointers a game in each of them, and never shot under 36 percent.

Battier came to crave the kind of information the Rockets (and, for his final three seasons, the Miami Heat) could provide, but he was a bit of a rarity then. Even now, the NBA is full of guys who have no interest in seeing their own stats or shot charts, let alone those of players they will be defending. These players have gotten to the league and landed eight-figure contracts doing things their own way, and it will take some time for a larger subset of the players to buy in.

“It’s still in its infant stages, to be honest with you. At this point, it’s still a fairly academic movement,” Battier said about the analytics surge. “It’s still a movement that is rooted in the office of the GMs and the personnel directors. Now you have coaches who are trying to implement the data, and are walking along the company line of the analytics-based general managers, but there’s still a ways to go before the effect is complete and it reaches the most important people in the equation: the players. There’s still a deep rift between the belief in, I guess, what we would say [is] traditional basketball and what that means and what the data suggests as good or bad basketball.

“And the divide is pretty stark even with coaches, especially those of the old guard. Obviously not new, younger coaches who have been exposed to analytics, but the last frontier is players,” he said. “As a player, you’re taught basketball is almost a primal exercise. It’s mano a mano, the strong will survive, and you have to do what you need to do to survive because there’s always someone knocking, clipping at your heels, trying to take your job, trying to take your contract, trying to take your roster spot, trying to take your money, and trying to take your life.

“And so when you try to explain analytics and data to a player, they think, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, basketball is not about numbers, basketball is about being primal, it’s about emotion, it’s about mental toughness,’ and most players don’t think there’s any link to the data. In actuality, all analytics are are a way to explain all those things: heart, determination, and toughness. And you just have to look at it in a different way.”

At the 2015 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, Battier relayed an interesting story about how in one of his seasons with the Heat, he only took one jump shot that was inside the 3-point arc. He said his consumption of data, understanding what efficient shots were, and what his specific role was on those teams actually hindered him as an offensive player. He would find himself thinking on the court about whether something was a bad shot rather than playing naturally and taking what was available.

That said, knowledge for a player of Battier’s skill set can be really valuable, and it’s doubly so when the team’s coach buys in and is delivering the message. Battier said that a large part of his success in Houston was in the way then-coach Jeff Van Gundy (Stan’s brother) would internalize data and then impart that philosophy to his players.

“Jeff is one of the smartest coaches I’ve ever played for, and he understood the value of a lot of the data, and he would just tell us, ‘Look, 2-point dribble jump shots don’t [beat] us,’ Battier said. ‘And he would beat that mantra into our heads: 2-point dribble jump shots don’t [beat] us. And if you know the data behind that, you know that that’s the lowest-percentage shot in basketball . . . [a] non-paint two, off the bounce. In an elite level, shooters like, you know, Steph Curry is like 46–47 percent. The rest of humanity is a [sub-40 percent] dribble jump shooter. And as a defender, that was my shot to make people take. But when you put it like that, and you create a mantra, and Jeff would say, ‘Look, if someone makes a 2-point dribble jump shot
on you, it’s on me as a coach, I’m never going to yell at you, you’re not going to get crushed, it’s on me.’

“And that gives you an amazing confidence as a defender knowing that, look, I get it, from an academic standpoint, an intellectual standpoint, and I know I’m not going to get punished for it, yeah, OK, yeah, no problem with a long, off the dribble, 2-point jump shot. It’s going to take that sort of simplification from a coach, and that’s what makes coaches great coaches. The ability to reach each member of their team. If you start spouting stats like, ‘Look, if you got a 3-pointer on the angle at the break of the arc, don’t take it, if you can get a [closer] 3-pointer because the percentage is 10 percent better,’ all of a sudden, you are being confusing. Say, ‘Hey, I will never yell at you if you take a corner 3-pointer,’ people get that. And you don’t necessarily have to explain why. Sort of like Van Gundy did.”

As data-friendly as Battier was (and still is), there’s one area where he’s still a bit reticent of recent developments: the growing push for biometric data on players. Battier understands from a player’s standpoint how potentially harmful this could be. For every instance where a player can stave off injury or find out some predisposition to a potentially lethal condition like Marfan syndrome, there are situations where data could be used against a player, and many don’t want all of that personal information in the hands of their employers. There are issues of data security, and the NBPA will have to wrestle with a process that likely will benefit its membership overall but could have some individual cases of collateral damage should info leak.

“I was interested in my own performance,” Battier said. “I took very good care of my body for thirteen years in the NBA. I probably drank too much red wine, didn’t sleep as much [as I should have], but I was always interested in trying to see how I could find an edge with rest, or recovery, and that is all very applicable and poignant. But I think we are entering a very dangerous time. If you’re a player, [it would be] the invasion of privacy. Because when you own
information, you can [distort] that information to your own purposes. So that’s the danger of where this is all headed.

“I think it’s inevitable that teams will be able to collect information via blood, urine, stool, what have you. It can be used for good, but it can also be used for destructive purposes and when—it’s sort of the whole big brother question and that allegory that comes into play. How much do people really need to know? And the body fluids and lifestyle choices . . . I’m glad I’m getting out of the game at the right time.”

CHAPTER 7

How the NBA’s Best Teams Were Built

            
We’ll look for patterns, we’ll look for weak spots, and then we’ll determine how valuable those are to us because . . . there’s no way you’re going to construct a perfect team [that’s] perfect in every position. The only way to do that is if there are like five twenty-eight-year-old LeBrons available, and you can’t afford to pay all of them, right?

—Kirk Lacob, assistant general manager, Golden State Warriors

T
he 2015 conference finals ended up pairing the top two teams in each conference, which perhaps not coincidentally included four of the more analytically inclined teams in the league. While the Houston Rockets are always discussed at the industry’s forefront, both the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks have built their own strong internal number cultures (helped by key hires with San Antonio Spurs roots), and the Cleveland Cavaliers have gotten more coordinated in this area over the last few years after having previously invested in it with less eventual benefit.

Obviously, you don’t need a team of data analysts to tell you that you want LeBron James on your team, but more work is required to sniff out the ceiling of a James Harden, or to build a contender
around cores of Al Horford/Paul Millsap or Steph Curry/Klay Thompson. All of those players are now various levels of NBA star, but none came with a pedigree anywhere close to James’s when initial big-money decisions were made to build around their skills and complementary natures.

Each of the conference finalists has its own interesting and unique story about how it got there, and the details stretch back well before the 2014–15 season. In many cases, crucial decisions made a number of years ago ended up hitting, and two teams—Houston and Cleveland—also made deft, in-season changes of direction that were crucial to their successes. Here is how each of the title contenders were built, and how analytics helped underscore their team-building plans.

The Golden State Warriors and Chasing Greatness

Golden State Warriors first-year head coach Steve Kerr looked a bit bemused as he casually strode along the midcourt line of the Philips Arena court, making his way toward the media gathered along the sideline. Kerr, a former member of the media himself in between his time as general manager of the Phoenix Suns and his current role with the Warriors, quickly was surrounded by a horde of reporters and TV crews. Everyone was there to capture his thoughts after his team’s shootaround ahead of this February 2015 battle of surprise conference leaders between the Warriors and the homestanding Atlanta Hawks.

Normally, media at shootarounds are limited to a small handful of local media members and bloggers who cover the teams playing that night. On this particular Friday morning in Atlanta, though, there were dozens of media members in attendance, running the gamut from local to national entities, with both ESPN and
Bleacher Report
having multiple reporters on the scene.

Warriors–Hawks was a matchup that at the beginning of the 2014–15 season looked as innocuous as many of the 1,229 others on the NBA’s master schedule, but it had become a national media event as the two teams, unexpectedly, were well in front in their respective conferences. This meeting was the first of two scheduled meetings between two teams, and, according to Elias Sports Bureau, the first matchup of teams with fewer than ten losses this late in a season since the Cleveland Cavaliers and Los Angeles Lakers faced off on February 8, 2009.

Once Kerr stopped and literally was surrounded by the mass of folks carrying cameras, digital recorders, and notepads, he looked around, and with a chuckle, said “Welcome to the Finals!”

While the hype over a regular-season matchup was a little overdone—even with the Hawks winning a 124–116 thriller that evening—both teams definitely deserved the attention. Atlanta, which had been a thirty-eight-win 8-seed in the East in 2013–14, in part because star center Al Horford was lost to a season-ending injury, had just seen a nineteen-game winning streak end earlier that week at New Orleans. They entered this game having won thirty-four of their last thirty-seven contests, and were firmly in charge in the race to the 1-seed and homecourt advantage in the Eastern Conference playoffs.

As good as Atlanta had been, though (and the Hawks will be discussed in greater detail in a few pages), Golden State was the best team in the NBA all season. The Warriors entered this showdown at 39–8 in the tougher Western Conference, on their way to a final mark of 67–15. They featured the backcourt of soon-to-be league MVP Curry and Thompson, who recently had dropped an NBA-record thirty-seven points on the Sacramento Kings in one quarter without missing a shot.

The Warriors were flexing their muscle well beyond their win–loss record, too. Entering this Hawks game, they had an average margin of victory of over eleven points a game. They finished the
season at plus-10.1, the eighth-best mark in NBA history, according to a search of
Basketball-Reference.com
, which put them in NBA royalty. Every team on that “Plus-10 list” won the NBA championship except the 1971–72 Milwaukee Bucks, who lost in the Western Conference Finals to the Lakers, whose plus-12.3 is the best single-season mark ever.

More impressive was the way the Warriors achieved that success. Golden State was the first team in NBA history to lead the league in both defensive efficiency and pace of play (98.3 possessions a game), and they were only marginally passed late in the season by the Los Angeles Clippers on the offensive efficiency list to keep them from an unbelievable statistical trifecta. When you factor in how many fourth-quarter minutes the Warriors’ starters sat out because the team had a huge lead (Golden State’s fourth-quarter scoring margin actually was negative for the season), they likely had the league’s most potent offense, as well.

Even threatening to lead the league in all of those categories was so rare and imposing that, when asked on Twitter during the season about the name of the award for a team that accomplished it, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey replied, “The Larry O’Brien Award,” referencing both the trophy given to the NBA champion each season, and the
Warriors’ chances of claiming it.

This all helps explain the massive challenge of facing this particular team. Golden State crafted an enormous spread advantage between their offense and their opponent’s offense on a per-possession basis, and applied it relentlessly over a huge number of possessions in a game. They could break a team’s will both with quick scoring barrages and throttling defensive stretches. As such, it was nearly impossible for inferior teams to stay with the Warriors; either the opponent’s offense or defense (or both) would eventually break down under the pressure. Golden State capped off its dominance by being one of the most effective transition teams in the league, both in terms of how often they ran (north of 18 percent of possessions) and in how
they scored in transition (around 1.2 points per possession). Easy layups and open transition threes for everyone!

All of this was happening with a first-year coach in Kerr, who had replaced Mark Jackson, who was let go after winning fifty-one games the season before. The club also had managed a summer’s worth of speculation about whether to give up Thompson in a deal with Minnesota that would net them standout power forward Kevin Love. Ultimately, Golden State refused to part with Thompson, who management believed was a great complement to the more diminutive Curry, and also to some of the Warriors’ other wings. Love eventually was dealt to Cleveland to pair with LeBron James, and Golden State quickly signed Thompson to an extension of four years and $70 million. Now, here they were, the toast of the NBA, with a freewheeling, audience-pleasing style that was bulldozing the rest of the league on a near nightly basis.

“It’s been a great transition, obviously made easy by the fact that we have great players who are extremely easy to coach,” Kerr said prior to the game. “[We have] high character people, a lot of wonderful people in the organization, so it’s been very smooth.

“I knew we’d have a good team because they were already good. They won fifty-one last year and whatever it was the year before, two years in the playoffs in a row. My goal was just really to keep the continuity and continue the growth and improvement. I wouldn’t have guessed we’d have this record.”

Jackson definitely helped change the Warriors’ culture for the positive, but he had, despite semi-regular Curry explosions, made them into a team that was far better on defense than offense. In 2013–14, Golden State finished third in the league in defensive efficiency while ending up just a modest eleventh on the offensive end of the court.

Jackson’s inability to unlock the team’s offense was one of the major on-court frustrations of his tenure and why it felt like Golden State had hit a ceiling under his command, but it was an unraveling of his relationships within the Warriors that eventually was his
undoing. Whether he was in the wrong or not, Jackson had public blowups with two assistant coaches, with Brian Scalabrine being demoted to the Warriors’ D-League team in Santa Cruz, and then Darren Erman being fired for secretly audio-recording staff meetings. It wasn’t just his immediate staff that had trouble coexisting with him, though. Team owner Joe Lacob, who still maintains that Jackson was the right hire at the time and was what the Warriors needed then, told the audience at a Silicon Valley venture capital luncheon in December 2014 that Jackson’s firing was, in part, because “he couldn’t get along with
anybody else in the organization.”

In came Kerr and a philosophy cribbed from the San Antonio Spurs, where Kerr had played for three seasons and won a championship under Gregg Popovich, along with assistant coaches in Alvin Gentry and Ron Adams, who were regarded as among the NBA’s best strategists. Suddenly, the Warriors had a whole refreshing new way of thinking, especially at the offensive end.

“Coach Kerr knows that system and [he’s] taken a lot of advice from Popovich and coaches on that staff,” Curry said, “so you go with what you know to be successful.”

While offense is what gets the highlights, though, Kerr insists that his team spends the majority of its time working on defense, and it’s on that end of the floor where the Warriors really separated themselves thanks to their personnel. Specifically, as suggested in a January 2015 column by Alex Torres at
Warriors World,
Golden State has used both the draft and the free-agent market to nab a series of athletic perimeter players who
all have enormous wingspans. Golden State landed Thompson at pick No. 11 in 2011, got both Harrison Barnes (No. 7 overall) and emerging star Draymond Green (No. 35 overall; a second-round selection) in 2012, added known defensive stopper Andre Iguodala as a free agent in 2013, and brought on guards Shaun Livingston and Justin Holiday in 2014 to round out the group.

The end result is the Warriors have up to half a dozen players with wingspans of nearly seven feet to rotate among the shooting guard, small forward, and power forward positions (or even point guard when Curry’s on the bench). This personnel flexibility shows up in the halfcourt, where the Warriors can switch any ball screen and still have a defender capable of moving his feet well enough to defend the handler, and they also are difficult to post up against at any position. The length also really helps in transition defense, as the Warriors don’t necessarily have to find a specific cover in the open floor; with multiple guys capable of guarding multiple positions, they just find the guy closest to them as the opponent is pushing up the court.

“Small guys have somewhat taken over the NBA to an extent,” Kerr said. “That’s where Draymond and Andre and Harrison and Klay have come into effect for us. When we’re trying to chase all these quick point guards of pick and rolls, you have to have that athleticism and length and versatility, and I think that’s a big part of the way the NBA’s played today.

“We’re a quick team,” Kerr added. “We have a lot of interchangeable parts. We switch quite a bit. We have a lot of rangy, long-limbed athletes. Rebounding can be an issue when we play small, but we have to be on edge and active. When we are, we get to the ball quickly.”

Green became the principal catalyst of this group, blending an elite mix of rim protection, post defense, perimeter defense, and wing scoring into a player who quickly agreed to a new five-year, $85 million contract with the team after the 2014–15 season. He’s representative of the type of more positionless player that’s now thriving in the NBA, and his impact on the Warriors was pronounced.

Per
NBA.com’s
statistics database, the Warriors had a plus-16.5 rating (the net of the team’s offensive and defensive points per one hundred possessions) in the 2,490 minutes Green was on the floor, and only a plus-2.5 rating in his 1,456 minutes off the court. On the Warriors, only Curry had a larger spread between his “on” and “off”
ratings. Golden State also allowed 102.4 points per one hundred possessions without Green on the floor, which was the worst mark on the team by almost two points per one hundred.

“Draymond just has a knack for being in the right place at the right time, whether it’s getting a key rebound or covering guards on the pick and roll, penetration,” Kerr said. “He’s quick, he’s strong, he’s really, really intelligent. He just understands angles and schemes. He’s really kind of the key to our defense. We have a lot of excellent defenders. I mean, Andre is one of the best in the league and was All-League last season. [Andrew] Bogut’s our rim protector. Steph and Klay are excellent, too, but Draymond really ties it all together.”

Another significant change under Kerr was the increased appreciation of the physical, rim-protecting Bogut, a seven-footer who missed the Warriors’ tough seven-game playoff series loss to the Los Angeles Clippers in 2014. Bogut’s presence in the lane in the 50 percent of each game he typically played allowed the Warriors’ wing players to more aggressively push up on their men, knowing that if they got beat, at least they could steer the ballhandler into Bogut’s path. During the regular season, the Warriors were five points per one hundred possessions better defensively with Bogut on the floor, and his 95.2 points per one hundred possessions “on court” defensive rating was the best on the team.