Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (6 page)

“Our focus was the technology side, but early on I knew we had to build out the rest of the analytics off the back of it. It wasn’t just going to be, ‘OK, here’s a bunch of X, Y coordinates, and I’m just going to dump it on your desk, and [say] ‘go nuts . . .’ [although] that’s all [then Houston Rockets vice president] Sam Hinkie wanted . . . and teams like the Mavericks didn’t want me to work with anyone else.

“I remember clearly having a conversation with Mark Cuban, and he said, ‘Well, I don’t want you to get too many more teams.’ And I said, ‘Well, if it’s OK with you, I’m going to try and get them all.’ For them, they were, ‘Wow, we don’t want it to grow too big,’ but to me, the advantage is never going to be an access to the data. It should be in what you do with it.”

Kopp said that a lot of those early moments for SportVU were spent defining the basics of what was actually available from the data and what kinds of reports they could generate. Kopp believes that the creation of this more manageable information, combined with STATS
management not supporting the development of more sophisticated data services off of its own data, is what led to the formation of companies like Second Spectrum and today’s whole industry of third-party data solution providers. Instead of expanding STATS’ own business, Kopp had to actively seek out external partners in order to get STATS’ data, in manageable formats, into the hands of potential customers.

“To be very blunt with you . . . it’s part of the reason I’m not at STATS [anymore]. They didn’t support it from the beginning, so I had to go partner with other people,” Kopp said. “They didn’t allow me to build out my own Second Spectrum for a while, so I had to partner with people like that to broaden the aperture and exposure of the data. So I had to work with Kirk Goldsberry (a Harvard lecturer who also contributed to ESPN’s
Grantland
) to give him data and get it out there and have it exposed to people.

“Ideally, you do that all in-house, you keep it all yourself. But I also knew that anybody who wanted to have access to this data would have to work through us. So, in a weird way, Second Spectrum, we gave them free data, they decide to—I like those guys, they’re really smart, [but] I really don’t like how they built their business, personally. Because they took data that I gave them for free, and they decided to run a business and I said, ‘OK, we can work out some [deal] to get access to it,’ and they decided, ‘No, we don’t need you anymore.’

“Certainly, it could’ve been handled in different ways, both by STATS and by some of those potential partners,” Kopp added. “I could have kept it hidden in a vacuum, and people at Second Spectrum would argue, ‘Well, you wouldn’t have gotten certain clients without exposure to our data,’ and I’m like, ‘Nah, I’m pretty sure we would’ve gotten them anyway.’”

(Asked to respond to this, Second Spectrum’s Maheswaran declined comment.)

Early in the SportVU buildout, Kopp tried to sell the product directly to the NBA, but the league wasn’t interested at that point in
widespread implementation. Instead, Kopp built an individual team client base from the couple of early adopters into fifteen of the league’s thirty teams. At that point, the NBA decided to license the product at the league level, putting cameras in all twenty-nine NBA arenas (the Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers share Staples Center) and distributing the data to all of its franchises. The league, per an article by David Aldridge on
NBA.com
, actually started testing SportVU
during the 2009 NBA Finals. In that series, the league used the technology to slow-motion check a crucial goaltending call, and it turned out that the referees had gotten the call correct. That sparked the realization at the league level of how powerful the technology could be.

The NBA’s decision to install the cameras in every arena has pushed the league headfirst into the Big Data era, and much like it has with Synergy’s products, the NBA has now incorporated a ton of Sport-VU’s data into
NBA.com
, so fans (and media) can access it. The data portion of the league’s website is remarkably robust, with users able to check traditional statistics as well as a litany of advanced analytics options, plus huge video libraries, dynamic player-tracking graphics, and much more. While what’s accessible on
NBA.com
is just a fraction of the output generated, there really isn’t very much even the hardest of hard core fans are missing if they know how to navigate the site and the myriad SAP-powered search options for each category.

Want to know the Bulls’ best and worst player combinations? How about which two Cavaliers paired the best with LeBron? You can find how the Grizzlies did when Marc Gasol was on and off the court. You can slice up Steph Curry’s 3-point shooting by court area. You can learn that Kobe Bryant shot just 32.9 percent on jump shots in 2014–15, and that DeAndre Jordan led the league in defensive rebound conversion rate. You can literally spend hours at a time combing through the various categories. The league also has a writer, John
Schuhmann, specifically dedicated to crafting analytics-based stories for the site, to add even more refinement.

Video availability is the gem of the revamped
NBA.com
site, though, especially with the disappearance of Synergy’s independent, public-facing
product called MySynergySports. (In August 2015, Barr hinted that it may return in a different form down the road.) Now, on
NBA.com
, with the help of Synergy, you can pull up all sorts of clips to complement the stats you’re examining. For example, if you want to view, in sequence, all 202 baskets Curry made from five feet or closer to the rim in the 2014–15 season, you just need to click on the video option link for that particular stat, and they’re cued up for you. Overall, the site is an incredible trove of numerical and visual information that brings users as deep as they want to go into the sport, and this reflects the pro-technology reign of newish league commissioner Adam Silver.

So, if fans now have this kind of access, just imagine what NBA teams
actually
have, and the many different ways they are using it in order to create and sustain competitive advantages.

CHAPTER 3

Analytics Believers and Doubters

            
Teams are trending towards taking less mid-range shots, and that appears to be a sound strategy. So, these teams’ efficiency attacking the rim and knocking down perimeter shots should be a good indicator of the teams’ success (at least on offense). If restricted area and 3-point shots are the most efficient looks on offense, and teams are trending towards taking more of these shots, then a team’s ability to defend these areas must also increase in importance.

—Dr. Stephen Shea, mathematician and coauthor of
Basketball Analytics: Objective and Efficient Strategies for Understanding How Teams Win

W
ith every NBA team having equal access to the raw SportVU data and subscribing to some level of Synergy’s service as well, it appears that Catapult’s Brian Kopp was right: teams derive their advantages from what they can find in the data and how creatively they can implement ideas on and off the court. How they’re doing it, though, varies very widely from team to team, and a lot depends on the amount of money invested and proprietary work being done at the franchise.

In Kevin Pelton’s February 2015 NBA analytics rankings, he labeled twelve of the league’s thirty teams as being either “believers”
or “all-in” on analytics (which foots fairly closely to what research for this
book determined independently). The four teams described as “all-in” were the Philadelphia 76ers, Houston Rockets, San Antonio Spurs, and Dallas Mavericks, all of whom also made the overall top ten in ESPN’s 122-team combined ranking of NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL teams. Those four NBA teams also double as perhaps the league’s most secretive.

The difficulty in establishing long-term strategic advantages, though, stems from the simple fact that, eventually, you have to show people what you’re doing (except in the areas of player health and wellness, which is why according to a growing number of NBA personnel, developments in that area ultimately will dwarf the current evolution of on-court strategy). Whether it’s in player acquisition, draft philosophy, or on-court strategy, there’s going to be a video and paper trail that everyone else in the league can dissect, and they can eventually figure out some part of your plan.

That ability to dissect applies to writers, as well, so below are breakdowns of some unique ways in which three of those four all-in teams are thinking differently about conventional NBA strategies.

The Spurs and (the One-Season Fall of) Strategic Roster Management

The cramped interview area tucked just outside the visitor’s locker room at Denver’s Pepsi Center felt like the perfect setting for legendarily gruff San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich to discuss his team’s highly compressed early-season schedule. It was mid-December, just six weeks into the 2014–15 season, but Popovich and the Spurs—who for years had been well ahead of the rest of the NBA in terms of managing their roster to endure the strains of an eighty-two-game regular season while still winning enough to position themselves for postseason success—seemed
to be meeting their match in terms of balancing performance and player workloads.

The Spurs entered this particular tilt with the homestanding Nuggets with a perfectly reasonable record of 16–7, which projected to around fifty-seven wins, which was a typically normal Spurs haul in the Popovich era. Popovich’s concern, though, was that the schedule, along with a spate of injuries, was already taxing his team—especially his aging core of Tim Duncan, Manu Ginobili, and Tony Parker—to a degree that was much worse than in previous seasons. November already had seen the Spurs play eleven games over an eighteen-day stretch, and this meeting with the Nuggets was in the midst of an absolutely punishing December run that, if you included a game on November 30 at Boston, featured nineteen games in thirty-two days, including seven sets of back-to-back contests. To make matters worse, none of those back-to-backs even featured two consecutive home games.

“The whole month is just ridiculous. We just have to deal with it,” Popovich said, plainly.

While coaches often can trend toward both hyperbole and recency effect, there was ample reason to believe Popovich when he said that December was the worst schedule month he had ever seen in his two decades with the franchise. In addition to the sheer number of games, the travel, and the quick turnarounds, a rash of injuries had left him much shorter on personnel than the ordinarily deep Spurs liked to find themselves. Parker, the starting point guard, was struggling with a hamstring problem that had cost him some games, and he wouldn’t play on this night. His primary backup, Patty Mills, still hadn’t at this point returned from summer rotator cuff surgery, so the point guard role was nominally in the hands of the inexperienced Cory Joseph, with some help from Ginobili and other perimeter players.

The Spurs also had seen small forward Kawhi Leonard suffer a hand injury that cost him two games ahead of this particular contest
(in which he played), and then soon after saw him miss fifteen more. San Antonio also had been without center Tiago Splitter for all but ten minutes of the season prior to his return on December 8, and on this night, he still hadn’t completely been integrated back into the rotation as he got his fitness levels back to normal playing standard.

All of this meant Duncan, in particular, was finding himself playing more minutes than usual. Entering this particular game, Duncan had played at least thirty-six minutes in four of his last five appearances after not even averaging thirty minutes a game during the 2013–14 season. Two nights before, Duncan played a then season-high forty minutes against the Los Angeles Lakers; later in the week, he would play forty-eight and forty-three minutes, respectively, in triple-overtime losses to Memphis and Portland. Popovich ultimately found a way to rest Duncan for four separate games in December, but the thirty-eight-year-old still played in fourteen contests and averaged 34.5 minutes a game for the month. It was hardly ideal.

“It’s a little tougher on us this year, you know?” Popovich said, expounding on the impact of the schedule and the personnel issues. “Patty Mills is such a big part of what we do, coming off the bench if Tony didn’t play, because he scores. And Tiago’s just coming back into the feel of the game. He hadn’t played in, well, I don’t know how long now. So we’re doing OK. We’re much better off with Tiago and Patty Mills [though] if we sit people.”

Sitting players in strategic fashion has been a major part of how Popovich has extended the contention window for this Spurs team as its core ages. The team even made some light of the strategy late in the 2011–12 season, which was a compressed sixty-six-game schedule after extended negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement cost the league part of the campaign. Box scores list the reason players who didn’t enter a game received a “DNP” (did not play) in that particular contest, and against the 76ers on March 25, 2012, the Spurs listed Duncan’s reason for his
DNP as “old.”

Some in the league office didn’t find these types of roster manipulations funny, and the issue came to a head early in the following season, when the Spurs elected to send Duncan, Parker, Ginobili, and swingman Danny Green home before the end of a six-game road trip, having them miss the Spurs’ lone game in Miami that season. It didn’t help the Spurs’ cause that the game was a national TV broadcast, and no league wants to irk its big-money broadcast partners. After playing shorthanded and losing a tough game to LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and the Heat, the Spurs were fined $250,000 by then-commissioner David Stern for violating league rules by resting players in a manner that was “contrary to the
best interests of the NBA.”

In a statement released by the league, Stern explained that “the result here is dictated by the totality of the facts in this case. The Spurs decided to make four of their top players unavailable for an early-season game that was the team’s only regular-season visit to Miami. The team also did this without informing the Heat, the media, or the league office in a timely way. Under these circumstances, I have concluded that the Spurs did a disservice to the league and our fans.”

Interestingly, it was James himself who triggered an initial discussion of the rights of a team to strategically rest its players when Cleveland sat him for four straight games late in the 2009–10 season to help him recover ahead of what was expected to be a lengthy playoff run. At a subsequent owners’ meeting in New York, Stern discussed the issue with his constituents and noted that there was “no conclusion reached, other than a number of teams thought it should be at the sole discretion of the team, the coach, the general manager, and I think it’s fair to say I agree with that, unless that discretion is abused.”

Since the Miami incident, the Spurs and Popovich have become more prudent in the way they strategically utilize their roster, but they continue to do so, and with good reason. At a base level, Popovich, general manager RC Buford, and their lieutenants do a
masterful job of identifying players that will fit into the Spurs’ culture and basketball systems, and then Popovich is able to achieve the equally difficult task of maintaining their readiness throughout the season. That successful nexus is how the Spurs annually seem to have quality depth options at bargain prices. The Spurs typically still play well when they’re shorthanded, and research into the strategy—and the whole structure of the Spurs’ roster—illuminates just how they manage to pull that off.

In a November 2014 column at
The Cauldron,
Ian Levy looked at the way the Spurs handled their minutes during the 2013–14 season (one in which the Spurs ended up winning the NBA title after no one on the roster averaged more than thirty minutes a game during the regular season), and noted that, while the top four players on the Spurs played fewer minutes on average than their counterparts on other NBA teams, the rest of the roster (players five through twelve) played
more minutes than average. Levy detailed this in the graphic shown below:

This in itself isn’t a surprise for a team that has older stars, quality depth that allows them to go deeper into their bench, and finds itself in a fair number of blowout wins, which means they can pull their best players earlier in the contest. What was much more compelling, though, was that the Spurs were getting
significantly
more impact from their deeper rotation players than the average NBA team. Levy charted a stat called “box plus-minus” (which measures a player’s approximate impact when he’s on the floor), against the players’ total minutes distributions, and painted a really interesting picture:

Levy’s second chart shows that the Spurs basically got the same composite level of production from their top three players as other NBA teams do. San Antonio’s top minutes guy (Duncan) was better overall than the NBA average while the second- and third-most heavy minutes guys (surprisingly, shooting guard Marco Belinelli and point guard Tony Parker) were slightly worse.

Look at the rest of that chart, though. Where the NBA at large sees a continued drop-off in on-court impact, with no average player from number four in minutes through the end of the bench even
having a positive box plus-minus rating,
every single Spur
from four through twelve was positive, and the players in positions four through nine were
highly
positive contributors.

The initial jump in the Spurs’ curve comes from the number two through five players being very close in minutes, along with Kawhi Leonard’s (number five in overall minutes) emergence as a bona fide star. The curve beyond that, though, tracks on a path similar to the NBA average, just three to four net points above the trend for every spot. The result, according to Levy, is that “spreading minutes more evenly is not the sacrifice for the Spurs that it is for most other teams in the league. In fact, if you use the ratings of each Spurs player from last season, but redistribute their minutes so as to match the league average pattern, their projected net rating changes a whopping . . . 0.1 points per one hundred possessions. That difference is small enough that it wouldn’t even affect San Antonio’s win projection across the entire season. Their sacrifice really isn’t a sacrifice at all.”