Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion (9 page)

There has been significant discussion as to whether the Rockets, despite shot distribution that is more points-efficient than any other team in the league, have taken things too far. If so many of your shots are coming from two very specific areas on the court—at the rim and behind the arc—it might make you
too
predictable, which makes the job of the defense that much easier. The overall Moreyball philosophy, though, isn’t validated or negated by what the team he runs is doing. Personnel (and health) makes a large difference in the execution of a plan, even if the plan is strategically sound, and this general approach to offensive basketball, mathematically, is sound.

Dr. Stephen Shea, a mathematician and the coauthor of
Basketball Analytics: Objective and Efficient Strategies for Understanding How Teams Win,
has noted that every team in the NBA would improve its effective field goal percentage if it adjusted its shot distribution
closer to the Rockets’ strategy. He also posted a blog entry in February 2015 that showed the distribution of all NBA teams over the past three seasons by what he terms their “Moreyball Efficiency”—a function of a team’s percentages made and allowed in the restricted area and on 3-pointers—and suggested a very strong correlation between high positive figures and championship contention.

In that entry, he noted that the last two NBA champions—the 2014 San Antonio Spurs and the 2013 Miami Heat—led the league in those seasons in Moreyball Efficiency, which makes sense since they also led the paradigm shift toward the present “spacing and shooting” era. They also met each other in the Finals both seasons, so the runners-up each year
also ranked very highly.

As the chart from that entry below shows, there was reason at the All-Star break to believe in teams like the Golden State Warriors, Atlanta Hawks, Portland Trail Blazers (who scored high in this metric despite having LaMarcus Aldridge, one of the world’s best midrange jump shooters) and, somewhat surprisingly, the Washington Wizards, who at midseason had the lowest “offensive Moreyball” percentage in the league, per the analytics blog
Nylon Calculus.
The Wizards were well known as a team that openly shunned threes, but they made a very high percentage of the ones they attempted, and they also had the frontcourt to make and prevent some easy twos, which helped them in this ratio calculation.

There is a pretty strong data fit in this model, with the data suggesting that as you approach and then move beyond a 1:1 ratio on offense and defense, your winning percentage will see a significant boost. Below that Moreyball Efficiency of 1, most of the teams sit below the trend curve, or underachieve their projected win rate. At and above that point, that changes, and there are a good number more teams above the trend line that are overachieving.

At the extreme positive end lie both recent world champs, the losing team in each of those finals, and the aforementioned candidates from 2014–15 that looked like legitimate title contenders. (The data also re-emphasizes the disappointment that Russell Westbrook’s injury in the 2013 playoffs was for Oklahoma City, when the Thunder very well could have ended up in the Finals and with a rematch against the Heat.) The blog entry concluded, presciently, by stating that the Warriors looked to be very significant favorites to win it all.

Still, Morey’s concepts find themselves with a number of detractors, for varying reasons. Part of it is that Houston hadn’t had much playoff success under Morey before the Rockets’ run to the 2015 Western Conference Finals that included a stunning comeback from down three games to one against the Los Angeles Clippers. That was even though Morey had done a very commendable job refashioning the roster from the Tracy McGrady/Yao Ming days without having a significant drop-off in the standings.

Part is that the Rockets can be frustratingly dull to watch at times, with most variety drained out of their offensive attack in favor of a three-prong attack made up of an incredible number of threes, James Harden drives that end in fouls, and mostly inelegant Dwight Howard post ups.
Grantland
’s Jason Concepcion wrote well about this aspect in November 2014, likening the Rockets to some of the historically more successful practitioners of
catenaccio,
the infuriatingly boring and—in the hands of the right team—incredibly successful
Italian defensive soccer strategy. There were similar comparisons to the left wing lock era New Jersey Devils of the NHL, when they were winning Stanley
Cups while playing a style that ultimately forced the league to enact rule changes to defuse it. The Rockets, despite Harden’s individual brilliance, come off as boring and soulless in their approach, and grading out as an average offense increases this particular category of ire.

And part of it is, frankly, a number of people around the league dislike Morey, including some who are paid significant amounts of money to talk about basketball on TV. While the battle between “those who played” and “those who calculate” has raged on for years—with little in the way of viable conclusion, since the smartest analysts in the game look at advanced numbers and also watch copious amounts of games and film—the debate, as such, is rehashed every now and again, and flames are fanned with the vitriol. Accordingly, TNT’s Charles Barkley made national headlines just before the All-Star break with a diatribe against Morey and the Rockets on the network’s iconic
Inside the NBA
studio show that included Barkley claiming that recent NBA champions had won titles because they had great players, not because of advanced statistics.

Barkley’s on-camera personality mix of former star player and honest everyman is designed to entertain more than inform, but even by those modest standards, his riff was woefully short on truth. There is ample documentation on how the Miami Heat used analytics to try to figure out how best to deploy LeBron James, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh, specifically in relation to Bosh’s usage, where he became a crucial pick-and-roll and perimeter-defending presence when the Heat reached their pinnacle. Likewise, the San Antonio Spurs are among the smartest teams in the league in every facet, and use heavy doses of analytics to their continuing advantage. The Rockets were also able to sniff out Harden’s star potential through his performance levels as a sixth man with the Thunder. Barkley’s riff also ignores that Synergy’s Garrick Barr is a former NBA assistant coach, and other third-party analytics providers also have numerous former basketball players on their staffs.

Anyway, a funny thing happened to the Lakers on the way to being a leaguewide joke for their horrible shot selection: while they ended up taking the most mid-range 2-point attempts in the league while finishing a ghastly twenty-eighth in success rate from that range, they actually ended up right on the league’s 3-point trend line. The Lakers took a below-average but not irregular number of threes for the season and made a below-average but normal rate of them (and then, somewhat surprisingly, moved advance scout Clay Moser into a liaison role to try to better connect the team’s analytics efforts with the coaching staff that doesn’t seem to care for them).

The outliers in terms of the number of 3-point attempts per game versus the percentage made were the aforementioned 76ers, who took a lot of threes and didn’t make many; the Warriors, who led the league at 39.8 percent and attempted 2,217 of them (fourth-most in the league) and . . . the Rockets, who shattered league 3-point records while shooting a mediocre-enough percentage to suggest that maybe they should dial things back just a touch:

The only two good teams that were near the bottom of the league were the Grizzlies, who put a scare in the Warriors in the second round of the playoffs before getting figured out, and those curious Wizards, who actually went to a heavy dose of small ball once they got into the playoffs, shot a lot more threes, and had a good chance to make the Eastern Conference Finals had injuries not hindered them against the Atlanta Hawks. One other notable team in that grouping was the long, young, and interesting Milwaukee Bucks, who also have built a roster around disruption rather than marksmanship, but it’s a bit too early to say that’s their distinct style.

As January 2015 was the NBA’s first month ever with more 3-point attempts than free throw attempts, this trend—and this debate on how many is enough—will continue to roll on. The league will never completely conform to one style, nor should it, but it’s worth noting that the seven teams with the highest percentage of 3-point attempts at season’s end all finished in the top nine in offensive efficiency, and the last five teams alive in the 2015 playoffs were the five most frequent 3-point shooting teams. In today’s NBA, the 3-point shot, ever increasingly, is king, and if you don’t shoot enough of them, you’re going to need to do a heck of a lot of other things well in order to compete for the championship.

CHAPTER 4

The Hunt for Future Perfected Players

            
There was only one thing I was trying to do—put numbers in front of our team to get them to understand that what we were doing is in their best interests, and that their efficiency numbers would be off the charts if they did this right . . . And that no one would be hurt by less minutes; you would be more efficient.

—John Calipari, head coach, University of Kentucky

W
hen the University of Kentucky’s men’s basketball team is expected to be good, there’s no bigger story in college basketball, and entering the 2014–15 season, the Wildcats were expected to be very, very good. Fueled by a superb freshman class led by multiskilled forward Karl-Anthony Towns, and a number of returnees from the season before, the biggest challenge for head coach John Calipari wasn’t anyone on the team’s schedule. It was that he had too much talent and depth on his roster, and needed to figure out a way to manage it all successfully. With as many as ten players who conceivably could start, and numerous prospects that looked like potential NBA lottery selections, he and his staff needed to get creative.

Calipari has been a master recruiter and self-promoter since his days at the University of Massachusetts a
couple of decades ago. There, he built a national power around the skills of forwards Lou Roe and then Marcus Camby, whose shotblocking and athleticism in a 6-foot-11 frame ultimately made him the No. 2 overall pick in the 1996 NBA Draft. Calipari had a similar ramp-up at the University of Memphis in the middle of last decade, ultimately elevating that program back into national title contention when he had point guard Derrick Rose, who became the No. 1 overall pick in the 2008 NBA Draft and would win the league’s MVP award three seasons later. The potent mixture of Kentucky basketball’s platform and Calipari, though, lifted everything to another level.

Despite the school’s basketball pedigree, the Wildcats program wasn’t ready-made for Calipari when he arrived in the summer of 2009. Things had stagnated under former coach Tubby Smith, who had won a national title in 1998, his first season at the school, and then never got back to the Final Four. Kentucky then took a significant jolt from two tepid seasons under Billy Gillispie, who had led Texas A&M to unexpected heights but was overmatched in Lexington and also struggled with alcohol issues as the Wildcats sagged into national also-ran status.

The Wildcats weren’t winning nearly enough, they weren’t recruiting nearly well enough, and they didn’t matter nearly as much as other elite programs like Kansas, which won the national title in 2008 (over Calipari’s Memphis Tigers, in overtime in the final) and North Carolina, which rolled to the crown in 2009 behind four NBA lottery selections in that year’s draft. But Kentucky was still
Kentucky,
the bluest of college bluebloods. It needed a coach—a CEO/evangelist, really—worthy of its grandeur, and no one was a better fit for that program at that moment than Calipari. It was the job, and the pulpit, he had been waiting for his whole career. Kentucky basketball is akin to religion in the Commonwealth, and Calipari can sell hoops faith like none other.

In his first season in Lexington, Calipari immediately made the Wildcats into one of the best teams in the nation behind the talents of John Wall (who would then be the NBA’s No. 1 overall pick), DeMarcus “Boogie” Cousins (who went No. 5 overall in that same draft) and Eric Bledsoe (No. 18 overall). The following year, a less-talented version of the Wildcats unexpectedly clawed its way to the Final Four. The season after that, powered by the uber-talented frontcourt pair of Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, the Wildcats finished 38–2 and won the school’s eighth national championship. Those two freshmen then went Nos. 1 and 2 overall in the 2012 NBA Draft. Two seasons later, in 2014, Kentucky was back in the national title game again after negotiating some in-season struggles.

Then, the unexpected happened. Kentucky, which under Calipari had been a program heavily fueled by “one-and-done” players who excelled as freshmen and then immediately jumped to the NBA, had a sizable number of players decide to return for the 2014–15 campaign. With yet another loaded class set to arrive, Calipari needed to find a way to manage everyone’s minutes, win games on the floor, and set up as many players as possible for maximum NBA interest.

So, he hired a director of analytics to help him
manage the whole process.

When the announcement of Joel Justus’s hire was made, along with the subsequent proclamation that Kentucky would utilize a platoon system in which two distinct groups of five would come on and off the court together and effectively split up the two hundred total game minutes available, the reaction was that this was more of Calipari’s marketing gimmicks. It wasn’t a totally unfair assumption. There certainly was a sexy, promotional component to the role, which fit into the super-aggressive way Calipari has billed his program, which has generated five Elite Eight appearances, four Final Fours, a national title, and thirteen NBA lottery picks in his six seasons in charge. But Calipari insisted there was significant substance
behind this particular sell, that platooning and having a dedicated analytics director was the best way to win now
and
get as many of his talented players to the NBA. In doing so, Kentucky became one of the more ambitious teams at the college level in trying to make targeted use of analytics to help its players and its performance.

“Well, the idea wasn’t a marketing [one]. There was only one thing I was trying to do—put numbers in front of our team to get them to understand that what we were doing is in their best interests, and that their efficiency numbers would be off the charts if they did this right,” Calipari said, as the experiment continued to unfold around him. “And that no one would be hurt by less minutes; you would be more efficient. And so that’s why we did it.

“The numbers that Joel can come up with are better, just logical things that no one on the staff would just say. Every kind of rotation, every kind of combination, we keep score. So as much as we think this combination or that combination is doing well, you look and you say, ‘Damn.’ They look like they’re doing better than they are. You know what I’m saying? They move the ball better, they space better, yeah. But the numbers don’t foretell that—the other team may not look as good, but the spread is way bigger when they’re in. So those are the kind of things that we’re able to see and monitor and also let them know, to keep them [informed].”

Calipari’s hard sell to his players was that NBA personnel care about percentages and rates more than gross numbers, and his players would have a huge opportunity to post impressive stat rates because they would only be playing for four- to five-minute spurts in a game, and not playing more than maybe twenty-three or twenty-four minutes most nights. He also relentlessly harped on his players’ on-court effort as a key factor in their draft status.

“I told some of these guys, if you score twenty a game, but if you have no motor, you’re done,” Calipari said. “If you scored ten a game, but your motor’s off the charts, you’re going to be a top-ten pick. But, let me say this. [Having] the motor is way harder than scoring.
It’s hard. And they break down. ‘Can’t I just shoot it more?’ ‘No, I’m sorry. Sorry, it doesn’t work that way.’ It’s amazing. And when I stop them all the time at practice, and say [to an assistant], ‘Now, why would he do it this way instead of the way we’re talking?’ ‘Because it’s easier.’ ‘No kidding.’ Just whatever’s the easiest route. But there is no easy route. It’s not easy. The numbers show the hard workers, the aggressive, attacking players, are the guys they want, and those numbers show in all these stats. But the only way you get those stats is you just play harder.”

The platoon system worked decently for a chunk of the nonconference schedule, but things changed a bit once forward Alex Poythress injured his knee and was lost for the season. There also was the dilemma in the backcourt, where often the shooting provided by Tyler Ulis and Devin Booker was more effective than what twins Andrew and Aaron Harrison were providing. Things eventually got blurrier as the season continued, certain games got tougher, and Kentucky kept winning (the Wildcats reeled off thirty-eight wins in a row before losing to Wisconsin in the national semifinals). Calipari pared his rotation a bit and went more often with eight players, with a more established hierarchy that blended his players from the two earlier fivesomes more often.

Still, the experiment was interesting and, in a way, Calipari had a unique opportunity because his team was so deep and so talented; the Wildcats ended up having six players selected in the 2015 NBA Draft. So, while Calipari had to win games, he and his staff also kept in constant contact with NBA personnel about what pro teams want to see from his players, and tried to put his players in the best position to compile the most impressive rates in categories that define them in the eyes of scouts. Calipari and his staff would distribute stat sheets after games, normalizing his players’ rates projected over thirty-four minutes—a heavy starting player’s load at the college level—but he wanted them to continue to focus particularly on the stats that helped them the most.

“Rebounding percentages. Like, in other words, there’s ten or twelve rebounds, how many of them did you get? That percentage is huge for them. So we’re able to monitor that,” Calipari said. “The other thing that’s huge for [scouts] is defensive playmaking. Defensive playmaking being your steals and blocks divided by your fouls. And all of sudden, you’re like ‘These numbers matter. We’ve got to put you in the position to be more of a defensive playmaker, be able to steal more balls, be able to . . . ,’ you know, those kind of things.”

Calipari seemed pleased enough with Justus’s work that, after the season, he elevated him to the position of special assistant to the head coach. Justus will continue to provide analytics insights to Calipari and his staff, but also will be involved in opponent scouting and other special projects. As for the platoon system? That looks to be a one-off invention, in part because it took a crazy confluence of events to necessitate it, and also because competing schools started using the system against Kentucky in recruiting. The Wildcats missed out on several high-profile targets for the 2015–16 season, and Calipari was pretty clear in a blog entry on his personal website
CoachCal.com
that the days of the “white” and “blue” teams in
Lexington were over.

“If you ask me if I’m ever going to platoon again, my answer is NO,” Calipari wrote in May 2015. “Last season was an absolute outlier. It’s just not the way I like to coach. I would rather play seven or eight guys because I believe that gives us the best chance to win. I think we wrote the book on platooning this year, but I hope we stick it on the shelf and never have to use it again.”

Kentucky may be the pinnacle of college basketball talent procurement and draft placement, but future NBA players don’t just appear ready-made at the college level. It takes years of cultivation and competition at the high school level to whittle down thousands of potential Division I players to the choice few that will be good enough to play for the college game’s best programs.

And while, thanks to shoe-company money that fuels an ever-burgeoning grassroots basketball scene that allows the nation’s best players to play with and against each other more often in a travel team setting, there’s no real or consistent way for analytics as we strictly define them at the levels beyond that to have a huge impact on the development of elite high school prospects.

Box scores haven’t been consistently available across the spectrum of different prep competitions, let alone there being the accuracy and the staff availability/competence to process anything more than the simplest of statistics. A company called Krossover is trying to bridge that gap, using Synergy-style human loggers to provide indexed video breakdowns and analysis services for modest (by college and pro standard) fees, but coaches still need to be sophisticated enough to use the output, and they have to have the budget to pay for it. And while top high schoolers may try to pattern their games to be more like top NBA players they admire—which in itself is an indirect form of analytics, since they’re molding themselves into modern pros—according to
Scout.com
director of recruiting Evan Daniels, there really isn’t that much chatter about advanced stats among the nation’s elite teenagers.

“I’m not sure that they do. I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t heard many kids bring up analytics, if any,” Daniels said. “I think once they get to college, they’re more in tune with it, and it’s hard to at the high-school level because up until this year—I guess Nike EYBL has done stats for a couple years—but not all the shoe-company events have done stats, so it’s hard to get reliable stats for the kids, for the games. Now, this year, we can kind of look at more advanced stats than we have been able to in the past, so it’s kind of a new thing, but to be honest with you, I haven’t really heard any of them bring it up. And part of it is they aren’t educated on that type of stuff. I think once they get to college, they open up to it a little more.”