NBA dives headlong into new era of statistical analysis

The life of an NBA coach is a never-ending series of questions.

Which of my point guards makes my small forward a better shooter? Should I force LeBron baseline or middle when he faces up on the left wing? Do I get the same production out of my sixth man after he's played 30 minutes as I did when he first checked in?

Not long ago, a coach and his staff would have to sit in front of a TV or a computer for hours to figure out all the answers. Now, those answers are right at their fingertips.

Basketball analytics has come a long way in the last few years. The last time the Lakers were looking to defend their title, only a handful of stat-heads were in NBA front offices and fans didn't have much exposure to numbers that went beyond the boxscore.

These days, several web sites and countless blogs are dedicated to statistical analysis, with sites like 82games.com and basketball-reference.com becoming popular resources for fans looking to dig deeper into how effective players and groups of players are, and why teams win or lose games.

Those in and around the league are starting to realize that how good a team is offensively or defensively can't be determined solely by looking at points per game and field-goal percentage. We now have the knowledge and resources to incorporate a team's pace of play into evaluations. We realize that the Denver Nuggets were a very good defensive team last year even though they allowed more than 100 points per contest. We know that the Milwaukee Bucks were better defensively than their opponents' shooting percentage might show because they were the best in the league at forcing turnovers and were better than average when it comes to defensive rebounding.

For teams, there are several uses for such statistical analysis: Scouting for the Draft, evaluating potential trade or free-agent acquisitions and preparing for your next opponent. Not to mention evaluating your own team's strengths and weaknesses.

"That's the most important piece, because you want to know your team better than anybody," says Ken Catanella, who worked for the Sixers and Nets and now works directly with the NBA on basketball analytics. "Some teams know other teams as well as the other teams know their own players, if not better.

"They're all trying to buy low, sell high and put together a mix that produces the best returns, meaning wins and championships."

A safe estimate is that about half the teams in the league now have someone capable of doing analytics. Who's doing what around the NBA is mostly kept a secret, but the Houston Rockets, led by general manager Daryl Morey and vice president of basketball operations Sam Hinkie, have become the poster franchise for statistical analysis. The Nuggets' Dean Oliver and the Boston Celtics' Mike Zarren are also familiar names to well-read hoops fans. Recently, numbers guy Wayne Winston, who was employed by the Dallas Mavericks, made a name for himself by declaring that he wouldn't want Oklahoma City's budding superstar, Kevin Durant, on his team for free.

That evaluation is clear evidence that basketball statistical analysis still has a long way to go in many people's eyes. But advancements are being made every year. And while many teams are developing their own systems and methods, they're also getting a boost from the league office.

The latest development in basketball analytics was among the many topics that were discussed at this week's Board of Governors meetings in Manhattan. The league's owners watched a presentation of a new data warehouse tool called StatsCube, which the NBA has been developing over the last few years and which is now available to every team.

StatsCube has in it every point, rebound, assist, steal, block, turnover, missed shot, foul and substitution since the 1996-97 season, when play-by-play data first started being tracked courtside. The point in the game when each occurred, and what players were on the floor at the time, is recorded. Best of all, StatsCube can slice and dice the data so teams can analyze it instantaneously.

"It's an environment for instantaneous reporting, navigation and analysis of every play-by-play event that has happened in the NBA since 1996," says Catanella. "That's a lot of data."

Say a team's power forward grabs only X rebounds per minute. Is the team better when he's on the floor? What players shoot the best in the last three minutes of a close game? Does a center block as many shots after he's picked up his fourth foul as he does when he has fewer than four?

With a little bit of training, StatsCube can answer all of those questions within seconds. The data always has been available to teams, but they've never before been able to access it so quickly and easily.

"It's a great cost-saver for teams," says Catanella, "because they don't have to try and build a system like this on their own, and they can spend their time doing the analysis that can be so valuable, as opposed to spending 90 percent of their time trying to put that iteration together, if they're even able to do it. A lot of teams aren't even capable."

Of course, having access to the tool is just the first step.

"It's an enabler," Catanella says, "but we're not going to tell them what numbers to look at when evaluating players."

Of course, there's still a limited amount of information available through play-by-play data. We know that Ray Allen made an 18-foot jumper and that Rajon Rondo passed him the ball, but we don't know if Allen was wide open or closely guarded. Did Vince Carter get caught up in a Kendrick Perkins screen, or was he helping out on a Kevin Garnett roll to the basket? And was Jameer Nelson putting enough pressure on Rondo up top?

The next (and perhaps final) step is coming soon. During Game 4 of the Finals last June, the NBA did a demo of a system in development that tracks player and ball movement through the use of six HD cameras placed around the arena.

"You have the precise location of every one on the floor, you have the play that is run, you have the ball touches and you have the positioning for the rebound," says Steve Hellmuth, NBA Entertainment's executive vice president of operations and technology. "And you can collect all of that information. You can even have the trajectory of the ball as it went to the basket."

Collecting such an enormous amount of detailed data, ingesting it, sorting it and eventually bringing it to the surface is a challenge, but Hellmuth believes the system is no more than a few years away.

"We're going to test some more this year," he says. "And if our tests go extraordinarily well, we might deploy next year. It will probably be a deployment over the next couple of years. But player tracking is definitely in our future."

Until then, Synergy Sports is the best tool for teams to get a better idea of how and why certain plays and players are effective. The online service is run by Garrick Barr, who worked for the Phoenix Suns for 11 years and logs every possession of every game, going beyond the boxscore to tell you what kind of action produced the play's result.

Was it a fast break, a pick-and-roll, a post-up or a spot-up? From what area of the floor did the action start? And did the player drive left, drive right or pull up for a jumper?

If a team has a game with the Cavs coming up, coaches might want to know if LeBron James is more likely to drive baseline or drive middle if he's isolated on the left side of the floor. They might want to know how effective teams are when they run a pick-and-roll with Shaquille O'Neal guarding the big man. Synergy has the answers.

"I've worked with a lot of great coaches," Barr says, "but there's just no way for them to understand the effectiveness-rating for all of these situations. It's way too granular for anybody to track."

The best thing about Synergy is that, as you sort through the players and break down various offensive and defensive situations, video of every possession that applies is just a click away. It's great to know that James drives baseline 37 percent of the time he's isolated on the left side and shoots 54 percent when he does, but it's better to watch it. How did his defender guard him when he missed a shot or turned the ball over?

"Data is great," said Barr. "It's very powerful and the value that teams get out of it is growing, but at the end of the day, professional coaches, scouts and GMs want to see the video to verify that what the stats seem to be telling them is really telling them.

"You want to do that final verification to make sure that your conclusions are valid."

Combining the data with the video, Synergy is a coach's dream, helping prepare for his next opponent with just a few clicks of the mouse.

"I use it virtually every single day," said Nets coach Lawrence Frank. "It's like having a video coordinator for every single game.

"I might watch a team and see all of their offensive possessions or all of their defensive possessions or all of their pick-and-roll possessions. What are they running after timeouts or what are they doing late in the game on side-outs? How is an individual getting his shots? It varies."

This season, Synergy, which employs more than 100 loggers, will have every regular season game completely broken down within 30 minutes of the final buzzer. So, after a coach is done talking to his team and addressing the media, he'll be able to sit down at the computer with his assistants and figure out what went right or wrong that night. He can download the video and still beat his players to the team bus.

Synergy also is developing tools that will closely resemble the opponent scouting reports that teams provide to their players. And by the time the playoffs roll around, teams will have a tool that allows them to quickly create player-edits, videos of each individual opponent that players can watch on their computer. Such a task normally takes several days of non-stop work on the part of a team's video coordinator.

Interestingly, while Synergy seems tailor-made for a coach, its biggest benefit until recently was helping teams prepare for the Draft. That's because it has countless college and international games logged as well. As teams put together their Draft board and debate the value of specific prospects, they can call up video of a player to help them make their decisions. And because each play is logged, there's no searching through hours of tape to find the right play.

In the end, the best way to gain knowledge about players and teams is to combine every tool available. Coaches -- or fans -- might start at basketball-reference.com to determine if a team is strong or weak on either side of the ball. They can then go to 82games.com to quickly see if they're better or worse with a particular player on the floor. Teams can run a query through StatsCube. And then they can check out the video on Synergy Sports.

Of course, even if all that is done, success is far from guaranteed. Those in the business -- and fans -- have to know what to do with all the data.

"It's all up to how they apply the information," Hellmuth says. "Information doesn't win any ball games."

John Schuhmann is a staff writer for NBA.com. You can e-mail him here.

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