Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (3 page)

So-called advanced basketball statistics, in the way that we currently understand and continue to evolve them, date back at least as far as 1959, when then-North Carolina head coach Frank McGuire authored a book called
Defensive Basketball.
In it was a section written by then-assistant coach Dean Smith (who would go on to his own Hall of Fame career as the Tar Heels’ head coach) that discussed how to evaluate the effectiveness of a team’s offense and defense not by its raw totals of points scored or allowed, but by how many it tallied or
conceded “per possession.”

North Carolina set offensive and defensive scoring targets in that era on a per-possession basis, with Smith writing in the book that the Tar Heels wanted to keep teams below 0.63 points per possession while scoring more than that figure. Their methodology at the time considered an offensive rebound to create a new possession, and the book emphasized that defensive rebounding was crucial so the Tar Heels would end up with more possessions—read: more chances to score—than the opponent. Those “extra” possessions on both ends lowered the points-per-possession target below modern averages, as any possession that ended with an offensive rebound would be included as worth zero points. Today, in order to keep the number of
possessions as equal as possible for both teams, offensive rebounds are considered part of the same offensive possession.

However North Carolina was defining possessions, Smith is widely cited as the first person to understand that the pace of a game had a significant role in determining just how good or bad a team was on either end of the floor, because composite statistics and averages don’t take into account how many opportunities a team had during the course of a game. If two different teams each average eighty points a game, but one plays at a pace of seventy possessions per game and the other plays at ninety possessions per game, the team with the slower tempo has a much more effective offense (rounded to 1.13 points per possession) than the faster team (0.89 points per possession). The most lethal offensive teams (like the 2014–15 Golden State Warriors) play at high-possession tempos while registering great points-per-possession numbers, but most teams have a tradeoff on tempo versus efficiency once they speed up to a certain level.

The modern origins of basketball analysis, though, stem from baseball—more specifically from the work and impact of Bill James, widely considered to be the Godfather of advanced sports statistical analysis. Shortly after graduating from the University of Kansas in the early 1970s, James began positing about baseball in new and unusual ways. After finding resistance from traditional media outlets who didn’t really understand or appreciate his work, James started self-publishing his now-famous annual
Baseball Abstract
in 1977 (and continued doing so until 1988). From there, James went on to publish a sizable number of additional books, and was hired by the Boston Red Sox as a consultant in late 2002. As of August 2015, he was still with the club in an advisory role.

James is responsible for a huge number of statistics that either have maintained their relevance or served as a launching point for additional study, and in the process, his baseball work spurred others to try to mimic significant parts of it for basketball. Among James’s
most famous concepts were runs created, which attempted to identify a specific player’s responsibility for his team’s run-scoring; Pythagorean winning percentage, which used run differential to establish what a team’s record “should be” versus what it actually was; and win shares, which was a catch-all statistic designed to gauge a player’s contribution to his team’s success, allowing for cross-position and cross-era comparisons of players.

Right as James was coming to his decision to cease publication of his annual abstracts, a handful of basketball-related analysts started working on what became dubbed as APBRmetrics—honoring the Association for Professional Basketball Research—with many of the earliest practitioners working on offshoots of James’s seminal stats that could apply to basketball. Here are some of the biggest names in the early advancement of basketball analytics, in approximate order of their time of prime impact:

       
•
   
Dave Heeren
is considered one of the forefathers of the basketball analytics movement. He created and further adapted TENDEX, which is credited with being the first linear-weight basketball metric. A linear-weight metric assigns positive values for good events and subtracts value for negative events to come up with a relative figure for player performance. It is fairly easy to calculate and understand even if it is not as nuanced or complete as a nonlinear calculation like wins over replacement value. Heeren once worked as a statistician for the New York Knicks but is better known for his annual basketball books called
Basketball Abstract
that were popular in the early 1990s
.

       
•
   
Martin Manley
became prominent in the same time period that Heeren did, and published his own annual books called
Basketball Heaven.
The output of his player evaluation formula, which was nearly identical to Heeren’s but also included the
impact of turnovers committed by a player, was dubbed “Manley Credits,” and became the basis for the NBA’s own efficiency rating. Sadly, Manley, who also wrote for the
Kansas City Star,
may be most well known for how he died, committing a meticulously planned suicide outside an Overland Park, Kansas, police station on his sixtieth birthday in 2013, and leaving behind a detailed website that explained why he took his own life.

       
•
   
Bob Bellotti
was the inventor of the points-created metric, an offshoot of James’s runs-created formulation for baseball, which attempted to define a player’s contributions in a single calculation. He also wrote a series of books starting in the late 1980s, with a 1988 publication called
Basketball’s Hidden Game
earning him initial entrance into the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks. He consulted for Milwaukee for nineteen years before switching to the Washington Wizards when Bucks general manager Ernie Grunfeld moved to that franchise.

       
•
   
Bob Chaikin
created a computer analysis/simulation program called B-Ball, which used statistics to try to suss out player impact and successful lineup combinations. Beginning in 1992, Chaikin has worked as a statistical consultant, analyst, and/or scout at various times for the (then) New Jersey Nets, Miami Heat, and Portland Trail Blazers. Since 2008, he’s been back with the Heat, where he also does college and NBA Development League statistical evaluations.

       
•
   
Jeff Sagarin
and
Wayne Winston
are former MIT undergraduate classmates who worked together to create WINVAL, which is credited as the first attempt at an adjusted plus-minus metric for players. Sagarin is best known for his college football (and other) rankings systems that get prominent play at
USA
Today.
Winston is a statistics professor at Indiana University who once taught Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in college. The Mavericks adopted the WINVAL metric shortly after Cuban bought the team in 2000, and Cuban credits the system for part of the Mavericks’ subsequent
success in that era.

       
•
   
Dean Oliver
is considered basketball’s best proxy for Bill James. The Caltech-trained statistician was one of the forefathers of the APBR movement, first breaking new ground in his writing at his own site, the Journal of Basketball Studies, in the mid-1990s, and later as the author of the seminal basketball analytics book,
Basketball on Paper,
which he published in 2003. The book brought significant attention to what Oliver called the four factors of basketball success: effective field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding percentage, and free throw rate, as well as adjusting player and team analyses for possession-based game tempo, and assigning varying fractional credit for team wins and losses to individual players.

                
Oliver also was a pioneer in bringing basketball analysis to the digital world, first as a leader on the Usenet group rec.sport.basketball in the text-heavy Internet era of the mid-1990s, and then on the APBR analysis group on Yahoo! groups in the early 2000s. Oliver posted the initial message in that forum, which saw a total of twenty-seven posts that February, and the first question he talked about exploring was whether “Hack-a-Shaq,” the strategy to intentionally foul poor free throw
shooters, actually worked. (Fourteen years later, this discussion became a frenzy during the Western Conference semifinal series between the Los Angeles Clippers and Houston Rockets, with both teams using the strategy so much that a rule change was discussed, but not enacted, in the summer of 2015.)

                
Oliver subsequently served front-office roles with the Seattle SuperSonics (where he was the first full-time NBA analytics hire), the Denver Nuggets and, after a stint as director of production analytics at ESPN, the Sacramento Kings.

       
•
   
John Hollinger
is another of the APBRmetricians who moved on to high-profile roles. After first founding a basketball writing site called
AlleyOop.com
in 1996, Hollinger spent three years working at
The Oregonian
newspaper in Portland, Oregon. In 2002, he was hired by
SI.com
and also started publishing
Pro Basketball Prospectus,
which later changed its name to
Pro Basketball Forecast.
In the mid-2000s, Hollinger started writing for
ESPN.com
, eventually moving all of his annual print publication work to ESPN’s Insider premium online product.

                
He is the creator of the player efficiency rating (PER) statistical metric that attempts to quantify everything a basketball player does in one composite number, and calibrates it against the rest of the league every season. It’s considered to include an incomplete valuation of a player’s defensive contributions, but remains one of the most widely known tools, thanks to Hollinger’s writing platforms and subsequent success. In late 2012, Hollinger was hired by the Memphis Grizzlies to be their vice president of basketball operations.

       
•
   
Roland Beech
launched the impactful website
82Games.com
during the 2002–03 NBA season, making advanced NBA stats easily available and consumable for the public. In 2009, Beech was hired by the Dallas Mavericks as their director of basketball analytics, with a pioneering role as part of the team’s coaching staff, not the front office. Beech traveled with the team on the road, sat behind the bench during games, and liaised with cerebral and stats-friendly head coach Rick
Carlisle. Beech played a crucial role in the 2011 NBA Finals, where his lineup analysis allowed Carlisle and his staff to make crucial adjustments against the Miami Heat that helped the Mavericks win the title. In August 2015, Beech moved to the Sacramento Kings to lead their analytics department, replacing Oliver, who was pushed out in the aftermath of a team management shakeup.

As renowned as they were (and some still are), these men were not the only ones playing around with advanced basketball statistics in the early 2000s. Another prominent member of the APBR community during that formative era was Kevin Pelton, who as of August 2015 was an NBA writer for ESPN Insider. He also was the lead writer on
ESPN.com
’s February 2015 ranking of all thirty NBA teams in terms of their analytics commitment and implementation.

Pelton traces his own statistical leanings back to his childhood reading of
Rick Barry’s Pro Basketball Bible,
and has spent much of his writing career trying to make advanced statistics more accessible to mainstream readership. At one point he was a moderator of the APBR forum, he wrote for
82Games.com
, and he worked as a consultant for the Indiana Pacers. He also created the WARP (wins above replacement player) quantitative model.

Before all of that, though, he was just trying to find some people like him who wanted to talk about basketball in new, mathematical ways.

“I went looking [around] and found Dean’s stuff on the Internet—obviously, far and away the most advanced and most prominent work at that point—and then I think sometime around 2001, [I] stumbled into the APBR analysis discussion group,” Pelton said of his initiation into the world of advanced basketball thinking. “At that point, [that] is where Dean was posting. Hollinger, I think, showed up at some point that year, in 2001–02, because that’s when he started
back writing about the NBA after he was at
The Oregonian.
Roland Beech was in the next couple of years, Justin Kubatko (founder of
Basketball-Reference.com
), people like that. That’s sort of when the stuff started to take its modern shape around that point.

“That was the only place where you could have these kinds of discussions, with people who were on the same page, that had the same level of interest. Now that’s pretty easy on Twitter to find that kind of community because there’s enough people, but back then, it really was a small group. A lot of it was kinda trying to figure stuff out as you went. Around that time is when you had the first version of adjusted plus-minus from Wayne Winston and Jeff Sagarin. And what does this mean? Does this actually tell us something useful? There was no data or background at that point. We just had to use our intuition and discuss it amongst several of us and figure it out as we went.”

Digging through the old posts on the Yahoo! ABPR group, it’s striking how many concepts being discussed back in 2001 are topics that are still being explored today. Just in Oliver’s posts alone, he broaches the concepts of individual player defensive value, defense effects on shooting percentages, why the Charlotte Hornets tended to play better without star forward Derrick Coleman, how to translate college statistics to the pros, and whether teams can actually win championships based on specific personnel strategies—in this case, a “twin towers”
approach with two centers.