Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (12 page)

By having the system also available for their practices, the Blue Devils are vastly increasing the number of times it can be utilized within a season, even if the primary purpose of the analysis then becomes self-scouting from practice sessions rather than understanding what has worked better against opponents. As the competition in practice may often be better than what a blueblood program will often face in nonconference play, there’s additional merit to what’s being analyzed from practices.

Krzyzewski was reluctant to discuss exactly how Duke is using SportVU and how the system has aided the Blue Devils, but his former assistant Wojciechowski was willing to provide a bit of detail on how the Blue Devils had started to explore its uses.

“It’s one of those mechanisms that has tremendous potential to really take a look at the game from an analytical standpoint at the very highest level,” he said. “And I think the challenge for us at Duke, and for anybody who uses that, [was] how do you use that data to generate things that are useful on a day-to-day basis to impacting the team? And I think that’s the challenge of it. Again, it’s in the infant stages, especially at the college level, of using it and figuring out, ‘How do we take this slice of the pie, the analytics, and make it work for us in a positive and meaningful way?’”

Wojciechowski acknowledged that much of the value from the system came from breaking down the five-on-five sessions during practice, or self-scouting, since there are many more practices than games over the course of a season. The Blue Devils, per Wojciechowski, were able to use the SportVU data from practices for a variety of purposes.

“I think some of the things that you look for, or you want to kind of reinforce what your eyes see with data, are like rebound chances,” he said. “How many times does a guy have a chance to rebound the ball? And then how many times they go after it, how many times do they get it? I think that’s one thing. Shot selection. Where are guys actually an efficient and effective scorer and what type of shots do they produce and score them at a high percentage, and what type of shots do they shoot at a low percentage and what areas of the floor they are? Those I would say are two examples that we used [in 2013–14].”

A December 2014 column by Barry Jacobs in the
Charlotte Observer
noted that Duke was using SportVU data to break down the team’s in-game perimeter shot selection as the Blue Devils were learning to play with gifted freshman
low-post scorer Jahlil Okafor. Like many teams, Duke tries to limit the number of lower-success shots it takes, and having a post player as dominant as Okafor made that mandate even more important for the 2014-15 Blue Devils.

Per an
EdTech
article from March 2015, Duke ended up making 41 percent of 383 catch-and-shoot 3-point attempts during the 2014-15 regular season. Those shots generated 1.23 points per attempt, which was relatively close to the 1.33 points per attempt posted by Okafor (who made 279 of 420, or 66.4 percent, of his shots without attempting a 3-pointer). Add in the impact of floor spacing and optimizing Okafor’s scoring load, and those are good shots to be taking. Conversely, according to the
EdTech
column, Duke only made 33 percent of its threes
attempted off the dribble. That is not a good enough percentage to be taking those shots over giving Okafor low-post touches (or finding better catch-and-shoot looks), so those were shots Duke wanted to try to avoid as much as possible.

Per Wojciechowski (and numerous other college coaches), the ability not just to provide stats to the players, but to show specific breakdowns of where and how shots were coming from—paired with graphics or video to hammer home the point—is the best way to impact players.

“How you package the data, especially when you’re dealing with college-aged kids, is important,” he said. “For us [at Duke], it was more of a verbal [thing], talking about verbally what we saw, and then backing up with evidence of the data. Whether it’s a ‘You’re not going to the boards enough’ or ‘You’re taking low percentage shots,’ it just gives another layer of proof that what you’re saying is true and why you’re saying those things to them. And I think in today’s day and age with kids, it’s why are you saying that and having as many layers as possible to kind of prove a point and to teach them.”

Wojciechowski was more circumspect when asked about how he planned on using the Bradley Center access to enhance his Marquette program, but noted that because of last season’s roster turnover from the year before, it was almost like starting fresh with a new set of data since the stuff from the season before wouldn’t be particularly helpful. He also added that, as a newer coach taking over his first college program as a head coach, he would be more apt to revisit some of his decisions after being presented with the enhanced data SportVU can provide, in addition to using the output to back some of his predetermined thinking.

“In Coach [Krzyzewski]’s case, he’s done it for so long. His feel and his eye for the game, when you have a guy that’s at a master level of coaching, mostly it’s used for validation,” Wojciechowski said. “But mostly for younger coaches who are trying to establish a system and get know new personnel, I’ll use it both ways. Hopefully, I’m validating the decisions I’m making, but I think there will be times more so than with Coach where you’re taking a step back and asking yourself, ‘Is this the right thing?’”

When asked, though, whether he recalled a specific instance where SportVU had altered his thinking, Wojciechowski demurred.

“Off the top of my head, from my experience with it, no, not to this point,” he said with a laugh. “I assume that that day is coming.”

A program doesn’t even have to have SportVU, though, for it to have an analytics basis. And analytics don’t just have to be about on-court performance for them to be very effective.

Buzz Williams is one of the more unique characters in the college head-coaching ranks. Williams himself is extremely comfortable with statistics and analysis, but he’s also a master motivator and a voracious information hound. Williams is a huge fan of NFL coaches like Jon Gruden (who turned to a career as an analyst for ESPN’s
Monday Night Football
) and Gus Bradley, the head coach of the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars, for their creativity in thinking and motivating. Williams also says he has offered to pay reporters for their leftover interview notes from feature stories he finds interesting.

Williams, both at Marquette (where he did actually have a year of SportVU access through the Golden Eagles’ games at the home of the Milwaukee Bucks) and now at Virginia Tech, also tends to cull from a different pool of recruits than many other top-tier coaches. He often dips into the junior college ranks to grab one- or two-year contributors to fill holes in his roster, believing (a) that the growing number of transfers each season in college basketball makes building around freshmen a bit riskier, and (b) that he’s not going to get blue-chip recruits to come to Milwaukee or Blacksburg, Virginia, and needs to craft a team with a hard-nosed edge in order to compete, first in the old Big East and now the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Putting together rosters that way also shortens the time that Williams has to make things cohesive. He doesn’t have the luxury of leaning on full recruiting classes that stay together for four seasons and increasingly understand what he wants from his team. Not that every year is a reboot, but there’s a significant learning curve involved with playing for him, and Williams is aware that different handling is required of today’s college players. Mostly gone are the days of coach as autonomy figure, so Williams needs to work harder to get his messages to sink in, and he likes using data and descriptive/visual presentation to help make his points.

“I think that the world’s society, their attention span is much, much shorter than ever before,” he said. “So I think when you’re trying to teach, you have to do it with evidence. Because I think the way of how coaches from a generation above me once coached, I think that’s over in some regards. In that, ‘Well, the head coach said this, and that’s it.’ And everybody just takes it as if that’s the gospel. Not saying that’s completely gone—I think the position is still the position—but I think when you’re talking to your staff, I think when you’re talking to your team, there has to be some sort of evidence of why you’re saying what you’re saying.

“These kids can’t listen to a diatribe for twelve minutes of ‘Hey, this is how we do it.’ You gotta explain why,” he added. “And anything you can use from data—and I understand you can twist it and skew it however you want, but it’s the best, in my opinion—it’s one of the best ways to teach. Because it’s something that kids can understand. It’s something that you can hold them accountable to. And it’s also something that not only can you get it as it relates to a stat, but you can you use video to show it, you can use stats to show it.

“And so, I’m always looking for ways to take opinions out of things and say ‘These are facts. And from these facts, this is gonna determine how we should play, why we need to play this way, who we need to recruit, why we need to recruit them, etc., etc.’”

Williams loves to dive deep into advanced statistics, but understands that the meaning and usefulness of them can get lost in the message if it’s not delivered in an accessible way. “I think in order to magnify something, you gotta simplify it,” he said. And perhaps the most unique way that Williams shapes and simplifies his messages while building credibility with his players is through a weekly series of offseason chats he holds for his team. At Marquette, they were called Life Lessons. At Virginia Tech, they’re called Tech Talks. Williams focuses each talk on a specific topic, which run the gamut from life skills like personal finance and understanding health insurance, to the more academic, like how different people’s brains are wired differently.

One purpose of the talks is pretty straightforward. Williams wants to help his players understand each other better and also prepare them for life beyond the insular nature of college, whether they go on to professional basketball careers or out in the general workplace. The talks are also geared to have a significant side effect, though: Williams loads them with information and data, so when the players show they’re starting to understand the Tech Talk lessons and show increased eagerness as each week brings a new one, Williams knows they are more likely to buy in during the season when he uses analytics to make his points about how he wants the team to play.

“If I have taught them things that they want to know, that utilize numbers, then their trust in me is, ‘If coach is talking about numbers, [he] knows what he’s talking about . . . ,’” Williams said. “You know what I’m saying? So, it’s stuff that they need to learn, it’s stuff that’s healthy for their life, but it’s also stuff that I build equity in what I’m teaching them, because when I get to December, there’s never going to be, ‘Well, Buzz is writing all those numbers up there. He don’t know.’ Because they’re not going to view it like that.”

Williams is well known for his obsession with “paint touches,” or how often on offense his team can get the ball into the lane, or deny opponents those opportunities on the defensive end. He adjusts his philosophy on how best to get the ball there based on his personnel—his Elite Eight team at Marquette in 2012 was mostly undersized and more often got in the paint off the dribble than via the pass—but he harps on the overall concept so often that a Marquette basketball blog adopted
Paint Touches
as its name and Twitter handle while he was the coach there. Williams claims that field goal percentage is much higher on shots taken after the possession had a paint touch, even if the shot ultimately comes from outside the paint, than ones that don’t.

So, in order to get his team playing in the style he wants, Williams concocts a variety of what he calls “whiteboard stats,” because
he (and only he) writes everything he wants his team to understand data-wise on a gigantic whiteboard in the locker room. Some of them he refers to as SID stats, or the more basic box score and aggregation stuff that gets disseminated to the media and is available on team websites. Other stuff is more complex, but ultimately the message is presented in a discrete format that makes it easy to understand and maintain during games.

“In all of the numbers that I study and all of the stuff I get into, I don’t relate all of that to our team. I don’t [even] relate all of that to our staff. But I do try to find ways to simplify what I think is most important as it relates to that particular team, or that particular kid,” Williams said.

“I don’t explain to them, ‘You know when we do the shooting drills? Do you know how often somebody rebounds the ball, and then pitches it out to you to shoot it?” he added. “Like, they don’t get that that’s because the ball’s coming from in to out . . . All they get is, ‘Coach says our offense is red light, green light. The light is red until the ball touches the paint.’”

That’s not to say that the talk topics are randomly selected. If the conversation is about taxes and other income deductions, Williams will use the context of salaries earned and tie them into a professional basketball context. Do you have an agent? Do you have a rep who landed you an endorsement deal? What are the different state tax rates or tax rates for Americans playing overseas? That helps teach his players that the same starting point ends up at decidedly different end points given the different paths you can choose.