There is a fantastic, must read post over TrueHoop by Henry Abbott, timed to coincide with the start of the SLOAN Conference — THE sports statistics conference — going on at MIT in Boston this weekend.
Abbott’s point is a good one: It’s one thing for a front office to have a bunch of advanced statistics in hand and use them in player and lineup evaluation, it’s another all together to explain those numbers to players. Or even some coaches. The new breed of coaches embraces these stats — Dallas last year used numbers extensively to see which five-man units worked best, Miami’s Erik Spoelstra is a numbers guy — but how do you get the lessons learned in those stats to the players?
Abbott has an idea:Video. Game footage.
In other words, don’t tell me Kobe Bryant takes a lot of insanely difficult shots in crunch time, show me those fallaway leaners against the triple team….
Whatever your point is -- that this player should play shooting guard, that that one is worth a ten-day contract because of his D-League rebound rate -- stop saying it in nerd-speak charts and tables. Get ye to Synergy and show them all that stuff on game tape.
Use the stats and the spreadsheets more than ever, but behind-the-scenes, like plumbing -- not as the final element in the presentation.
Synergy is a reference to Mysynergysports.com, a site that (for a fee) lets you look at video of games broken down by play and situation. I’m a big user, a lot of bloggers and writers are. If you want to see how LeBron James does in transition, you can call up the video of all his transition shot attempts almost instantly (he’s really good at it, by the way). Or you can see what Rajon Rondo does as the ball handler on side pick-and-rolls, or what Lamar Odom does when you force him right off the dribble. You get the idea. Very valuable scouting tool.
But if you’re trying to tell a player to attack off the pick-and-roll and stop pulling up for a jumper behind the screen, showing him a string of video on how he does in that situation (miss, miss, miss) is far more valuable then showing him stats on a page.
Abbott is right, the statistical revolution has to be televised for it to work.
