The Basketball Podcast: EP348 with Jack Van Deventer on the Current State of Basketball Analytics

Jack Van Deventer Quotes:

“I feel like we’re depending too much on box scores. In my view, box scores give us about 4% of the information we really need to manage a team well . . a lot of it is getting past the thought that line items in a box score are additive . . sometimes there’s an additive effect, sometimes there’s a multiplicative effect, and sometimes there’s a very negative effect. You have producers and you have enablers. And so, you want to know as a coach which ones grease the skids for the other ones.  The enablers tend to be undervalued.”

“The stat that I use to measure success is how much score separation does any combination create between our team and the opponent? Because the goal is to win, right? And the way you win is by scoring more points than the opponent. So, the goal of any coach is to maximize that score separation. If I can find the combos that advance that score separation, then I’m onto something big.”

“There are so many basketball stats out there, it’s overwhelming. And so coaches, how do you prioritize? Are they all the same? No, of course not. One of the things we discussed is the be all, end all stat to win the game is to create score separation. You want to score more than the other. So, the one single stat that drives everything else is maximizing the score separation.”

“Even with the score separation, there are two components of that. I may want to maximize the offensive component of that. I may want to maximize the defensive portion of that, because the best offensive team may not be the best defensive team. In score separation you need to do both together. But you can subdivide and with other stats . . reveal just what’s working and what’s not working and where the weaknesses are and how to improve them.”

“One of the teams this year, we identified a case where with the apparent top player, the team was actually losing points when he was in the game. And the issue was he was weak on defense and we didn’t want to lose his scoring ability. But the coaches worked with him to shore up the defense, and now he’s a complete player.”

“The secret to analytics in fluid sports is being able to chunk up the game into pieces. And that’s the gold. I mean, if you can do that, you win . . basketball has a huge advantage in that there’s lots of scoring, so we can tell a whole lot about what leads to scoring and what detracts from scoring if you’re focused on the defensive side.”

“We’re going to release two metrics. One’s called overall shooting percentage, which gives us a shooting quality metric. We’re going to release another one that’s basically the equivalent of shots on goal. It’s, it’s attempted points. Those two things. Shooting quality, shooting quantity. The team that has the higher shooting quality, the shooting precision wins the game 86% of the time. And so basically five out of six times, if you have a higher shooting precision, you’re going to win the game.”

“Scoring streaks in basketball . . those are what make the difference in many games. We are deep down the road on streak analysis.”

Jack Van Deventer Breakdown:

Jack Van Deventer Selected Links from the Podcast:

Jack Van Deventer
Shane Battier
Sydney Harris
Michael O’Connell
Jaylen Wells
Kymany Houinsou