Thursday, February 19, 2015

Data dump:Isolation is a meritocracy, miscellaneous is something you should avoid

Hi everybody,

this is mostly a data dump after I looked at the new nba.com Synergy Sports data (next stop tracking data!). Feel free to use the plots.
For players I always show those that have enough attempts

One personal note: The Synergy data can be easily wrongly interpreted. For example, a cut is mostly not a play itself. If you look at the players that attempt a lot of cuts, you find mainly center that most probably are beneficiaries from other stuff that is going on (cue to Blake Griffin throwing a lob to DeAndre Jordan).
Even though cuts have a high value for Points per possession, cutting all the time is not the solution. (This is a very personal note, as my last rec league team had a disastrous knack of cutting into whatever real playtype was going on at that moment...)

Cheers,
Hannes