Marc is on vacation this week. He has given the keys to his column to Kevin Draper, our sports business reporter. Get this newsletter in your inbox each week by clicking here.
Ben Alamar went to the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament, like many N.B.A. front office executives, in the middle of April seven years ago. Most of the college seniors playing at the event would go on to careers overseas or in the development league. Few would be drafted, and even fewer would make the N.B.A.
Alamar, the head of analytics for the Thunder at the time, was looking for a diamond in the rough, a player equipped to help him mine. He spent a few minutes with each prospect, asking them questions to see if they had an “elite basketball brain.”
He showed each prospect game film, frozen at key moments, and asked them to quickly tell him what would happen next. As the player rises for the shot, will it go in? As a fast break develops, which player will finish it? As the ball hits the rim, which player will gather the rebound?
He measured the prospects against a control group of the Thunder coaching staff and front office. As it turns out, even the seasoned basketball minds don’t fare particularly well.
“Elite coaches are thinking and doing things from a different perspective from elite players,” Alamar said. “Elite players know what is going to happen, and coaches are doing something else. The coach doesn’t have to know in a split second what is going to happen.”
When someone asks you or me whether a shot will go in, we begin processing information: Where is the defense? Is the player shooting off the dribble or from a pass? Is his or her body square to the hoop? Are their arms or legs askew?
We can then predict whether it will go in. Elite players, however, do not need to do this.
“When the elite basketball brains answer the question, they are processing that information in a reflex area of their brain,” Alamar said. “This is thinking fast. They are just reacting.”
The One Who Made It: Kent Bazemore
Alamar tested all the players at Portsmouth, and only one scored better than the baseline: Kent Bazemore, from Old Dominion University. Bazemore is one of the few players who attended Portsmouth and is still in the N.B.A., and he’s earned the most money by far.
Well aware of what makes something statistically significant, Alamar is quick to add caveats. Plenty of players with elite basketball brains don’t make the N.B.A., and plenty without one do. Bazemore is quite athletic, and he surely worked hard.
“That is purely anecdotal,” he said. “That is not proof of concept, but it does say, ‘Maybe there is something here?’ ”
Alas, the Thunder did not draft Bazemore. Nobody did. He signed with the Warriors as an undrafted free agent before blossoming as a starter with the Hawks. He’s now on the Blazers.
Alamar would have liked to conduct similar research with brain scans, but that is too time consuming and costly. He believes that not only can elite basketball intelligence be measured, it can also be taught.
The easy gains from using analytics in the N.B.A. have already been won. Each team now has an analytics staff, and coaching staffs are infused with analytics-speak. Everyone knows even bad 3-pointers are still more efficient than most twos. Everyone knows points scored isn’t a particularly useful metric without considering pace. Everyone knows that rest — excuse me, “load management” — is critical.
Developing basketball intelligence is an area that Alamar, who now does business analytics for StubHub, believes is untapped. Another is putting quantitative analysts on coaching staffs.
Strength in Numbers
Roland Beech was the first. Hired by the Dallas Mavericks in 2005 as an analytics consultant, by 2011 he was a Mavericks assistant coach. Beech is credited with persuading Mavericks Coach Rick Carlisle to start J.J. Barea in the 2011 N.B.A. finals. The change helped Dallas defeat the favored Heat.
But very few teams have followed suit, and analytics is a tool mostly used by front offices. Bucking the trend are the Wizards, who hired Dean Oliver as an assistant coach this season. Oliver wrote the bible of basketball analytics, “Basketball on Paper,” and has served in three front offices.
The biggest change in moving to the bench, Oliver said, is trading in the long-term view for the short-term. “When you are on it, on that bench, in practice every day, you are doing everything you can to make everybody better for the next game,” he said.
Without John Wall, the franchise star who will be out most of the season with an Achilles’ tendon injury, the Wizards are a pedestrian 5-9 through their first 14 games. But entering Tuesday night’s games, they had the second-best offense in the league, even though they don’t shoot many 3-pointers or get to the foul line often. So why is their offense so good? This isn’t a question Oliver spends much time trying to answer.
“We are still trying to figure out how we can make it better, and that’s on both sides of the ball,” he said, adding: “That is my daily focus. If you were asking me on the management side, I would probably have more explanation for what is going right and what is going wrong.”
Earlier in his career with the Nuggets, Oliver worked with George Karl. Karl developed innovative offenses without using the language of analytics, and has won the sixth-most games in N.B.A. history. With the added knowledge that comes from now being a coach, Oliver said he likely gave Karl information that was too obvious.
“I think some of the things I did early on were perhaps assuming he didn’t understand the numbers as much, but he understood the game without the numbers,” said Oliver.
The Next Wave
Has Oliver’s unique skill set heralded any breakthroughs for the Wizards? “Not that I would talk about,” he responded matter-of-factly.
The man whose book made an enormous contribution to a widespread understanding of basketball analytics is now a company man. All new research is proprietary.
Before the Wizards approached him, Oliver said, he was working on a sequel to “Basketball on Paper.” He was hesitant to say what would have been in the book, but he sketched a broad outline.
Part of it would have focused on how to measure things some people believe are unmeasurable. “From defense to emotion, the impact of emotions and motivation, there are ways to measure these things,” he said.
Another part would have explained how to make use of the reams of data teams now have. “The player tracking data gives us so much, but what framework do we put it into,” he asked. “When ‘Basketball on Paper’ was written there was no player tracking. What do we make of all this stuff?”
Oliver said he had a publisher lined up, and he’ll get to the book. But first he has some business to take care of.
“I want to win a championship, and then maybe I’ll finish that book,” he said.
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Corner Three
Kevin Draper has volunteered to answer your questions this week, including some sent to Marc recently. Email your questions for Marc to answer next week to marcstein-newsletter@nytimes.com. (Please include your first and last name, as well as the city you’re writing in from, and make sure “Corner Three” is in the subject line.)
Q: Why are ratings are down? Is the answer really a later start, fewer games? Isn’t that counterintuitive? — Robert Chen (Taipei, Taiwan)
Draper: Unless you are in the advertising or television business, don’t bother paying attention to ratings. It isn’t worth your time, and they don’t measure what you think they measure.
Most fans think ratings measure whether their favorite player/team/sport is popular, or whether said sport is growing. In reality, they very narrowly measure how many people were watching a thing at a given time. Ratings barely affect the N.B.A.’s finances in the short-to-medium term — they have a television deal signed for the next five seasons — and a sport’s economic health doesn’t affect you. If the N.B.A. is watched more or watched less, you can still go to games and you can still watch games on television or streaming.
Q: Is this the fastest a team has gone from world-destroying superteam to hot garbage that I think children should shield their eyes from? — Sean (New Jersey)
Draper: The Warriors are on pace for 14 wins, and assuming the injuries have to heal up at some point and Steph Curry returns this season, it feels like they will be a 20-25-win team. Even if they don’t quite get there, however, they won’t quite be as hot of a mess as the 1998-99 Chicago Bulls.
That team, off three straight N.B.A. titles, went just 13-37 in a lockout-shortened season. The Bulls lost Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman and Steve Kerr, as well as their head coach, Phil Jackson. The next two seasons were worse, as they won just 17 and then 15 games in full 82-game seasons.
I know this reads like a rationalization, but things aren’t bleak for the Warriors. The Warriors aren’t bad because they lost all their best players — besides that Kevin Durant guy — but because their best players are mostly injured. But next season they will have a (presumably) healthy top-five player, two top-20 players and a top-50 player, as well as a very high lottery pick and a couple of role players who will emerge from this season’s trial by fire.
That’s not a superteam, but it’s a compete-for-a-title team, and that’s pretty good!
Q: What are the specific skills you see Andre Iguodala bringing to a contender; which contenders need him the most; and which contenders can afford to give Memphis what they want, for him?
I keep thinking a guy like Iguodala might really help a team like Houston, or Milwaukee, or the Lakers. — Richard Jones (Truckee, Calif.)
Draper: Draymond Green once told the Warriors’ front office to draft a specific type of player. “There are 82-game players, then there are 16-game players,” he said. Since about 2015, Andre Iguodala has been a 16-game player. Does he have a full season left in the tank? Undoubtedly no. Does he have a full postseason left in the tank? Undoubtedly yes, and that’s all that matters.
While Iguodala isn’t quite as bad on offense as commonly perceived — he typically shoots the 3 well in the playoffs, and he is an above-average dribbler and passer — his real value comes on defense, where he can guard every position besides center. He would seemingly fit best in the West, where there is a plethora of wing-type players — LeBron James, Paul George, Kawhi Leonard, James Harden, Luka Doncic — who will need guarding.
Iguodala would fit well on any playoff team. But he makes $17 million and the Grizzlies don’t seem inclined to buy him out, so some team will have to trade Memphis back that amount of salary, and likely a first-round draft pick.
The Mavericks have the pieces, but are they in win-now mode? The Clippers could trade Mo Harkless and some filler, but they barely have any draft picks left to trade after sending most of them to the Thunder for George. Maybe Bam Adebayo’s emergence in Miami has made either Kelly Olynyk or Meyers Leonard redundant, but the Heat also have few draft picks.
A buyout situation is easy; Iguodala signs with whoever he wants, probably the Lakers or Clippers. A trade is much harder.
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Source: Basketball - nytimes.com
