Mapping the NBA

I like this report. Gives a good idea of trends in the NBA. To bad the trends are not distinct enough to show correlations (i.e. between three point shooting and fouls).

 

I like the efficiency against pace map. Suns and Mavs are the best at offensive efficiency. One is fast. One is slow. But notice, of the bad offensive teams, a large majority are slow. Theories?

 

I wonder if the guy who did this mapping exercise ever worked at BCG.

 

Teams who suck at offense tried to limit possessions to give themselves a chance to win?

 

Terrible human beings are some NBA player who willfully evaded half a million federal taxes and some disgraced NBA head coach who failed miserably and repeatedly in the playoffs in Houston.

Spanoulis, who boasts the highest overall per-minute efficiency in the playoffs among all Rockets, held his head high when he walked out of the contact on his own term.

 

I think in general, slower pace makes it harder to score on any given possession. Fast break and secondary breaks are certainly more higher percentage shots compared to a half-court set. Slow the pace down to half-court, and only some freakishly efficient team like the Mavs can score efficiently. Hell, even Memphis can be efficient on offense when they decide to run all the time. Of course, they do this at the cost of playing no defense at all. But you get the point.

 

thats what utah calls defense

 

I was wondering the exact same thing. heh.

 

Oooo... I like this kind of a analysis! Great thread! Five stars!

I feel like the additions of James, Francis, Scola, Brooks, and (most of all) Adelman just skyrocketed our offense past Dallas and just shy of Phoenix. Our defense will decrease only slightly as Adelman is not as defensive-minded as JVG and with the loss of Howard.


Not only has our offense increased in power, but the addition of a ton of guards, and Adelman's offensive style is gonna increase our pace a LOT!


Though Adelman does place importance on defense, I don't believe he does as much as JVG did. Because of this, and because we should expect fouls from our rookies (Scola and Brooks), I feel that our fouls will increase. But our pace will increase, too.


Wow! I can't imagine shooting more threes than we did last year! But we added Mike James, Steve Francis, and Aaron Brooks - all of whome are going to increase our threes! But I don't think we'll draw as many fouls this year because I believe the refs are gonna call games differently, Rox don't get respect, and flopping is being frowned upon more now than in the past.

 

...because I did and I used this type of visualization quite a bit...it's an easy to grasp way to get a message across.

 

becasue of Ginlobli and Parker penetration and team defense

 

Discipline. It is what makes them so damn good. They are probably the most efficient team in basketball.

 

i agree. although bcg seems to be pretty anal about only using the method for growth/share, i think it's much more flexible, as we see here.

it would be a cool project. i bet we could map individual players on these matrices too. i'm gonna mess with it and see what comes out of it. i can't post attachments so I guess the results are going to be secret.

 

you can take a screenshot of it and upload it to one of the file hosting services, then you can embed that picture here using the [ img ] ... [/ img ] tags

 

i wonder where the 95-96 Bulls would have placed on the map. they were number one in offense and renowned for their defense.

 

k here goes:

this is a map of the rockets team vs the nba average in generating points via FG vs via FT. I've included some other NBA players as reference.

 

crap. i guess CF doesn't autoresize. sorry guys.

so the above is my attempt at doing this mapping for individual players. I picked some stats i thought would be interesting, and since this is just a test i was curious about how players generate points.

so on the Y axis you have points a player generated via FT per minute played. on the X axis you have points a player generated via FG per minute played. The NBA average has the crosshairs through it, and the dotted line going through the middle is the equivalent of a "balanced" player according the the stats. you'll notice tracy is right on the dotted line, meaning he generates a balanced number of points via FT and via FG. the dotted line doesnt look like its balanced because the axes on the graph are funky to give the best view.

interesting notes from doing this: look how similar D-Wade and Yao are in terms of how they generate points. also, note that the only difference between Manu and AI is their FT points per minute. Lets you know that per minute played, Manu is just as productive as AI in putting the ball in the hoop, but doesnt get quite the FT points that AI does. also, it seems like both Carmelo Anthony and KB24 are the most productive per minute played. interesting, no?

 

LOL @ VSpan in the northwest quadrant, no wonder he feels lonely on Rockets team.

Good job HowsMyDriving for attempting a visual representation. It's interesting that Snyder ends up in the same spot as Novak on your chart, although these two played vastly different balls. Apparently the combination of 1) Snyder's poor FT%, 2) Novak's excellent FT%, and 3) small sample size contributed to this "misleading artifact."