Welcome to the 2018-19 UK basketball season with Hoops Insight!
Coming this season from Hoops Insight: Stats Profile dashboards!
I have spent some time developing a one-page stats profile dashboard that I can share with my subscribers in order to summarize some of the key stats that I like to look at when analyzing Kentucky's performances. This season, I'll be sharing these regularly with my subscribers via email in order to provide context around my analysis and insights about Kentucky basketball.
I try to stay away from just dumping stats and numbers out, and expecting my subscribers to be able to figure out what is meaningful. I prefer to discuss what I'm seeing in the data, and trace the impacts in the data back to things that are happening on the court. I view data as the results of choices and actions, and I'm less interested in the data itself than what it's telling me about what is happening, what's going well, and what needs to change. To that end, I've avoided just posting a lot of data, but I've decided to develop this stats profile dashboard so that my subscribers get more context than just my interpretation of the data.
I'm planning on regularly including these stats profiles with my emails. The profile may cover one game, a selection of games, or the full season. In the corresponding email, I'll walk the reader through what I'm seeing in the profile that is interesting. I'll supplement this with other newsletters about more specific topics, but I want my subscribers to get into a rhythm of seeing a consistent type of analysis using the stats profile. For you, the subscriber, this will probably mean a bit more frequent emails during the season that are more focused, mixed in with occasional editions of the newsletter which go more indepth on specific topics.
How do I read the stats profile?
As a dry run, here's an example using Kentucky's stats profile for the 2017-18 season (click link to view).
The stats profile is organized into tables. At the top of the stats profile will always be a list of the included games; this version covers UK's full 2017-18 season.
Table A lists key team stats for the selected game, and a comparison of that performance to the full season. Since this profile is for the full season, the comparison isn't useful, but for subsets of games it may reveal important trends.
Table B is an infographic showing the types of shots UK gets and allows its opponents to get, categorized by Putbacks, 1-10 seconds into shot clock, 11-20 seconds into shot clock, and 21+ seconds into shot clock. For each category, the infographic displays what percentage that category is of the total shots, and the effective field goal percentage. Each category is color-coded to display the eFG%; green is better, red is worse. In this example, you can see that UK shot better than its opponents on shots in each category except putbacks, and UK was especially good at shooting better than opponents late in the shot clock. The length and defensive ability of Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Hamidou Diallo were especially helpful in this area, as they were able to contest a lot of one-on-one shots late in the clock.
Table C shows how UK is performing in key stats as the number of opponent starters varies. The adjusted +/- per possession, which measures scoring margin per possession, gets better as opponents go deeper into their bench, as you'd expect. Looking across categories, you can see this is largely driven by better eFg% defense and forcing opponent turnovers, as both of these stats improve as UK faces more bench-heavy lineups. UK's lack of backcourt depth last season meant that the Wildcat starters got a lot of time against backups, and UK was clearly able to clamp down.
Table D shows the 5 lineups who played the most possessions. This will update to show the 5 most played lineups for whichever games are included. Looking at this example, you can see that the best lineups last season (by adjusted +/- per possession) were lineups including Wenyen Gabriel (firstm third, and fifth on this list). These lineups stood out in limiting opponent eFg%, strong defensive rebounding, and a high frequency of free throw attempts. Gabriel led UK in frequency of blocked shots last season, and was 3rd in defensive rebound rate (behind the otherworldly Jarred Vanderbilt and Nick Richards).While Gabriel drew relatively few free throws himself, his ability to step out and space the floor created driving lanes for teammates. In particular, Quade Green, Hamidou Diallo, and Kevin Knox drew free throws far more often with Gabriel on the court creating driving lanes.
Table E is a stat I created which tracks what I call "same four" impact. This is a measure of how lineups perform with a given player, compared to how lineups with the same four teammates perform with anyone else on the team substituted for that key player. This is a better way of approximating player impact than simple on/off court stats, since I'm controlling for changes in the rest of the lineup. For ease of reading, any stat where the player has a positive impact is shaded green, and those where the player has a negative impact are shaded red. For these tables, I'm focusing on the impact of two of UK;'s key returnees this season: Quade Green and PJ Washington. For Green, you can see that UK generally performed better when other players took his spot in the lineup. In particular, opponents shot worse and UK rebounded better when Green left the game. This is largely because the other options UK had were bigger players who were better defensively (mostly Diallo and Gilgeous-Alexander). This table is not meant to provide a simple evaluation of how good a player is, but rather it highlights how a player contrinbutes compared to the other options the team has. So, players who lack a viable backup are going to look great here. As you can tell by PJ Washington's table, he had a decidedly positive impact on UK last season. His return is a big positive for UK.
Lastly, Table F summarizes UK's best and worst performances in various stat categories. This data is less insightful, but is interesting to track during the season. As you can see, the range of performances during a season is huge. It's important to keep that in perspective during the season there will be some very dramatics highs and lows.
Whenever I post a stats profile, I will strive to tell the reader what the data says, and what that means. If you see anything interesting you'd like to point out, feel free to reach out to sean@hoopsinsight.com or on Twitter @hoopsinsights. Also, if you have any questions during the season, feel free to reach out as well. I hope you enjoy subscribing this season, and I will try to make every email worth reading.
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