Which brings us back to that lingering question from Oliver’s first post on the Yahoo Message board: How to measure defense? Traditional measures-like blocks, steals, and rebounds-fail to account for the full context of each play, but SportVU can provide a more complete picture. “It’s just an incredible amount of information, regardless of whether it’s about NBA or anything else … There’s very few people who have ever seen any data like this.” “We look at that data and we say this isn’t just good data, this is the best space-time data,” Goldsberry says. students in a semester-long project to break some of it down. He’s working with another Harvard professor, statistician Luke Bornn, and four Harvard and MIT Ph.D. Kirk Goldsberry, a visiting scholar at the Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis who also uses spatial mapping to analyze the NBA for Grantland and on his blog, Court Vision, is one of the few civilians who’s been granted access to any of the SportVU data. The result is one of the largest and richest data sets not just in sports, but in the world. STATS charges teams from $75,000 to $100,000 per season for SportVU, and the program has grown in that time from four initial teams to now half the league. This is the system’s third year in the NBA since being recalibrated for basketball.
STATS acquired SportVU in 2008 from an Israeli company that had originally designed it for soccer. “You have 1 million data records per game.” For each second of game play, the SportVU cameras capture the location on the court of the ball and each player 25 times, according to Brian Kopp, a VP at STATS. They record everything: How far and how fast a player runs during the game, how many dribbles he takes when he has the ball, where he shoots from, the arc of his shot, whom he’s passing to, whom he’s not passing to, the spots where he get his rebounds, the spots where others get his rebounds. They’re provided by STATS, the global information behemoth, as part of its SportVU program, and they currently hang in the rafters belonging to 15 different NBA franchises, six per arena. Where is that raw data coming from? Cameras that weigh about a pound and can fit in the palm of your hand.
Oliver believes that technology is providing the raw data to solve it, but all those NBA stat gurus working in isolation against each other aren’t close to cracking the code. Oliver, now back out of the league and working for ESPN, says that he’s particularly frustrated by the lack of headway that’s been made on one of the first problems he posed on the Yahoo message board: What new metrics could be created to quantify individual defensive performance? The last decade has seen tremendous progress in understanding the offensive side of the floor, but defense-where players must constantly rotate and cover for each other-presents a much knottier problem. When asked how many analysts he employs, Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, the first stats acolyte to be hired to run a franchise, replies, “It’s not something we talk about.”
Desperate for any competitive advantage, NBA teams guard their data-and whatever conclusions they draw from it-with about the same paranoia as a government official sitting on bomb codes. “You often just don’t have a ton of feedback on how you’re doing, especially if you’re one person on a team by yourself,” he says. Most analytics departments are small, which makes it hard to tell when your research is headed down the wrong path, says Aaron Barzilai, a former MIT player who started the site BasketballValue before joining the Philadelphia 76ers in November as their Director of Basketball Analytics. “What additional statistics could be taken to improve individual defensive evaluation?”ĭean Oliver estimates that between 22 and 24 NBA teams currently employ some form of analytics, with about one-half that number seriously incorporating their findings into the team’s approach to the game. “Does Hack-a-Shaq work?” “Why has Charlotte had such a good record without Derrick Coleman in the lineup and a mediocre one with him in?” Others were more theoretical. “To start off the group, I think that it is most appropriate to identify some of the outstanding questions in basketball,” he wrote. named Dean Oliver laid out an ambitious agenda of 12 issues. 10, 2001 at 10:32 p.m., a former Cal Tech hoopster turned statistics Ph.D.
#JASON SCHWARTZ ESPN PROFESSIONAL#
Just over a decade ago, several of the most prominent among them first gathered in a much humbler spot: a Yahoo Groups message board called “ APBR Analysis,” for the Association of Professional Basketball Researchers. This weekend, many of the NBA’s sharpest minds will gather at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, an increasingly splashy affair held each year by MIT, and now sponsored by ESPN.
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