Stats prove reliable for teams in need of answers
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- This was an excellent weekend to come to Boston, for a lot more reasons than you might think.
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| What can stats do? How about provide evidence if someone says Ron Artest is a 'locker room cancer.' (Getty Images) |
At the TD Banknorth Garden, you could enjoy the actual experience of sports -- the drama, the athleticism, the noise (and there's plenty of that these days) and the beer (only if you're not working). At the third annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, you could experience sports from the perspective of a growing and increasingly necessary subculture.
Stat geeks.
We watch sports and form opinions and debate who should be MVP. We bring our passion to the games in ways that we rarely allow into other arenas of our lives. It's a release. It has a tempo -- a beginning, a middle, and an end, a circadian rhythm that keeps us coming back.
The people I hung out with for a few hours on Saturday understand why we watch and what we are watching. They quantify the unquantifiable. Whereas we think we know why LeBron James missed 10 of his 15 shots against the Celtics Friday night, they have found ways to understand exactly why.
Or at least they're working on it.
It's not a perfect science, but quantitative analysis has become a focal point of the NBA business in a way that statistics have long been synonymous with baseball. The majority of NBA teams are heavily invested in using data analysis to help them make decisions -- on players, coaches, trades, schemes, and the salary cap. The unofficial leader of what we'll call the basketball geek revolution is Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who got his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-chairs the conference. As ESPN.com stat guru John Hollinger joked during the panel discussion on basketball analytics, "Fortunately for Daryl, there's no luxury tax on analysts."
What did we learn from this conference, dubbed "Dork-a-Palooza" by Mavericks owner Mark Cuban? Generally, we learned that as basketball fans, you will be hearing and reading a lot more about statistics you've never heard of before. As the kind of work that Morey does with the Rockets becomes more prevalent, NBA teams will become better at making informed decisions about which players to trade, which ones to draft, which ones to put on the floor together, and when.
As a result, the interpretation and analysis of basketball will become a lot more intelligent. Presumably, you will want to know why these decisions are being made. You'll want to delve beyond the trite notions that Paul Pierce and Kobe Bryant are "great in the clutch" and the Celtics play "sound team defense." You'll demand evidence when somebody proclaims Ron Artest to be a "locker room cancer." You'll want to know why Shane Battier is worth every penny of his $6.4 million salary, but why Antawn Jamison -- who averages three times as many points per game and twice as many rebounds -- is overpaid at $9.9 million.
When lazy people tell you that a certain player does things that "don't show up in the box score," you will want proof. There are dozens of people working for and with NBA teams who have the answers, most of which, in fact, do not show up in the box score, which Dean Oliver of the Denver Nuggets referred to as providing "the least valuable data in this business."
Is your team doing this? You better hope so. "The teams at the top of the standings do it," Oliver said, "and the teams at the bottom of the standings don't." A good measure is the growth of teams subscribing to the ambitious data and video collection service provided by Synergy Sports Technology, which has risen from four to at least 20 in the past four seasons. At least half of the NBA's 30 teams use computer applications developed by Stratbridge Inc. so their data can tell a useful and timely story.
"Everybody's looking for the secret sauce," said Cuban, a proponent of making basketball decisions based on analytics.
