Some Thoughts on NBA End of Game Situations
Posted on October 30, 2021
| 4 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
3 things I think teams get wrong Before anyone yells at me that there are teams that do get these things right and there are rare situations where these might be the right things to do, let me just say that I know that and I’m just speaking in general terms.
Not being aggressive enough seeking out 3s instead of 2s when down late. I have written about this before here.
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The Myth of the Lost Art of the Mid-Range
Posted on January 4, 2021
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
“The analytics say that’s a bad shot” is a phrase you will often hear during NBA broadcasts when a guy like Kevin Durant or Chris Paul pulls up from mid-range, often accompanied by a lament that analytics have resulted in the “death of the mid-range” or the “lost art of the mid-range” (Side note: analytics don’t say anything, people do, and often when that phrase is said by TV analysts it is often not something people who actually do basketball analytics would agree with).
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Fred VanVleet's Weakness
Posted on December 26, 2020
| 5 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
If you have watched a lot of Raptors games over the past few seasons it can be a struggle watching them try to score in the half court. One of the reasons for that is they lack a guy who can generate good shots for himself. In particular, this is an area in which Fred VanVleet really struggles. I decided to take a dive into the public tracking stats to see how much he struggles and how he compares to other players.
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Leverage Stats on pbpstats.com
Posted on December 22, 2020
| 6 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
TLDR: Leverage stats on pbpstats.com group stats based on how each much possession impacts win probability.
Typically when looking at clutch stats in NBA analysis we just do filters based on score margin and time remaining. There is a sizeable difference in win probability between being down 5 with 4 minutes left and down 1 with 4 minutes left. Your percentage chance of winning a game when down 5 with 45 seconds left are in the single digits so lumping this possession with a possession in a tie game with 45 seconds left doesn’t make much sense to me.
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Some Quick Thoughts On Final Shots in Tie Games in the NBA
Posted on September 16, 2020
| 5 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
There have been multiple games recently in which a team could hold the ball for the final shot in a tie game. Both the Celtics in game 1 against Miami and the Raptors in game 6 against Boston shot a pull-up 3 in these spots. These were heavily criticized by lots of people. I think that criticism comes from a place of not understanding the reality of both how hard it is to score in these spots and what the proper strategy should be in these spots.
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Pesticides, Developing Resistance and the NBA
Posted on September 14, 2020
| 4 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
I recently finished reading Merchants of Doubt and one of the chapters focused on the attacks on Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring, which warned of the dangers of pesticides such as DDT back in 1962. The attacks claim that her role in the ban of DDT prevented malaria control which could have saved millions of lives. This claim is not warranted, in part, because at the time DDT was banned it was already becoming less effective at killing mosquitoes because they developed a resistance to DDT.
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Using Tracking Shot Filter Data To Measure Shot Difficulty and Shot Making
Posted on August 31, 2020
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
The tracking shot data on NBA Stats allows us to get shooting data based on closest defender distance, shot clock range, touch time and number of dribbles. Using this data we can get a rough measure of shot making by comparing how they shoot compared to the league average for each tracking shot filter bucket. An example of a filter bucket would be: closest defender 4-6 feet, shot clock 15-7, touch time < 2 seconds, 0 dribbles, 3pt FGA.
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NBA Tracking Shot Stat Video Examples
Posted on May 16, 2020
| 1 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
The stats for the tracking data on stats.nba.com
allow for filtering by period. This means that when a player makes or misses a single 2 or 3-pointer in a quarter we can get figure out how that shot was classified by the tracking filters. Here are some examples of shots for each closest defender distance filter.
3s:
Wide Open:
Open:
Tight:
Very Tight:
At Rim:
Wide Open:
Open:
Tight:
Very Tight:
Some Quick Math on The Quick 2 aka The Slower Loss
Posted on November 23, 2019
| 4 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
End game spots in basketball are my favourite strategic spots to think about. One thing I think many people get wrong is going for a quick 2 when down by 3 points at the end of game (I’m looking at you announcers who love to say “you don’t need a 3”). I figured I would run through some quick math based on actual results of ~20 years of NBA games to show that teams should be more aggressive going for 3 in these spots.
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NBA Matchup Plots
Posted on October 26, 2019
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
There are now matchup boxscores on stats.nba.com. It can be a little hard to get a lot out of reading the data table as shown on the site. I saw a tweet from Seth Partnow with some charts showing the data in an easy to interpret fashion and decided to write some quick and dirty python code to generate the same charts. The example below is the Toronto Raptors defensive matchups in their season opener against New Orleans.
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Why Corner Threes Will Still be Valuable if the NBA Widens the Court
Posted on September 20, 2019
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
A common suggestion to reduce the value of the three pointer is to widen the court and make the three point line the same distance all around the court. The thinking is that corner threes are more valuable because they are taken from nearly two feet closer to the net so if we make the three point line the same distance all around the court that will eliminate the discrepancy between the value of corner threes and above the break threes.
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My Favourite Features on pbpstats.com
Posted on June 29, 2019
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
I didn’t really have a plan when I started building pbpstats.com other than to make it easier to find stats that either weren’t available anywhere or weren’t easy to find on other sites. The site has been up for almost two years and here are the features I am most proud of.
Wowy Combinations [On/Off –» Wowy Combinations]. I think this is the only place where you can get net ratings for all on/off permutations for a group of players.
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Basketball Stats I Wish People Would Stop Using
Posted on May 2, 2019
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
These are a few of the frustrations I have with commonly used stats during TV broadcasts of NBA games.
Field goal percentage. Some shots count for two points, others count for three points, so why are we counting them together? If someone has a 45% FG% is that good or bad? If they shoot only threes, it’s very good. If they shoot only twos, it’s not. This is why effective field goal percentage was created.
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Separating First and Second Chance Scoring in the NBA
Posted on September 20, 2018
| 5 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
With the decline of offensive rebounding in recent years we can assume this means second chance scoring is declining as well. Since offensive efficiency is on the rise, this means that efficiency excluding second chance points must be increasing to an even larger degree. I decided to split up second chance points from other points to look at trends in recent years. For lack of a better term I have called these first chance points, where first chance points and second chance points sum up to total points.
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Play-by-Play Based Shot Quality Model
Posted on September 3, 2018
| 11 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Not all shots are equal. While you get 2 points for both a breakaway dunk and a tightly guarded, off-balance 20 foot jumper, the dunk is the more valuable shot because it is going to be made nearly every time. Multiple people have created shot quality models to estimate the probability a shot is made based on various factors. You can read about some of them here and here . The better public models all used the no longer public SportVU shot logs.
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The Impact Your Offense Has On Your Defense
Posted on May 5, 2018
| 2 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
Basketball is a free flowing game of alternating possessions. As a result, how your offensive possession ends impacts the results on the ensuing defensive possession. If you score, your opponent has to take the ball out of bounds and inbound it, which gives you extra time to get back on defense. That extra time to get back on defense helps your defense compared to if you missed a shot and the other team got the rebound.
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NBA Efficiency by Rebounder Position
Posted on May 1, 2018
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
I recently shared my possession data and wrote a brief post on how to use it to dig deeper into pace. Today I’m going to do some exploratory analysis on that data to breakdown the efficiency on possessions following a missed field goal based on the position of the rebounder. Intuition would suggest that when a primary ball handler gets a defensive rebound it should create more fast break opportunities and lead to a more efficient offense.
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Digging Deeper Into Pace in the NBA
Posted on April 18, 2018
| 4 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
In NBA stats pace is the number of possessions a team gets per 48 minutes. It is used as a measure of how fast a team plays. While it is generally a good measure, it is flawed in a few ways. The first reason is that it doesn’t separate offensive pace and defensive pace. When pace is brought up, often people are talking about the pace of a team’s offense. A team that plays fast on offense and forces their opponents to play slow on defense may not have a fast pace by the traditional definition.
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NBA Possession Data
Posted on April 17, 2018
| 3 minutes
| Darryl Blackport
I have decided to share my possession details dataset for the 2017-18 regular season. This data is the starting point for all stats on PBPStats.com . I have parsed out possession details from play by play data to create detailed stats for each possession. I spent dozens of hours putting this together and I think there is a lot that can be done with this data. By making it public I’m hoping people will do some stuff with it that I would have never thought of doing.
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