Lakers Plan Staff Move To Beef Up Analytics Operation

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/operation-671640-coach-plan.html

 

yup...more information is never a good thing...aint that right, coach?

 

Thank god...a basketball mind and someone with coaching experience who can translate numbers into basketball decisions. This good. Question is will the info fall upon deaf ears? Mitch needs to sit down with Byron and figure out a plan to at least test some of the hypotheses this analysis will provide.

Another thing....if one of our assistants is moving into the FO for this position, that means we have another staff position open, right? I'd love to see us nab an assistant coach for offense. Sadly everyone available is not known for offense/X's and O's, or they already run what we run:

Adelman, Scott Brooks, Mark Jackson, Brian Shaw, Thibadeau.

How's Monty Williams? I know he's a high character guy but what about his basketball acumen?

 

Monty Williams was just recently hired by the Thunder as part of their coaching staff.

 

You can hire all the analytics guys you want, if the head coach won't listen to them.....

 

Agreed. I'm still not sold on analytics being able to replace traditional stats or that they are significantly better. IMO there are some useful stats and then some stats that have just as many holes as standard basketball stats. That being said analytics as a whole....not just 'advanced metrics' are definitely useful.

I think what Byron means in that he's "old-school" is the sense that he doesn't believe in small-ball, Morey ball, all of the above. He believes in taking smart 3's, and taking what the defense gives you. I think some of what Houston is doing is useful....emphasizing attacking the rim and shooting corner 3's....but by no means do I think we should ONLY shoot 3's and layups. I mean Houston hasn't overly impressed me with their offense. It's good, but they have good players.

If anything I want this new staff member to shed light on how certain kinds of plays and sets will increase in higher percentage shots and more offensive options for our guys (in the spots on the floor where they are effective). I feel like that's just watching film.....but whatever.

 

Exactly, teams have been using analytics for a long time before it was called that.

It frustrates me when Byron is so stubborn to his approach, refusing to adapt his schemes to his personnel. And when he comes out and says things like no 3 pointers or no pick and rolls, it's even more frustrating.

Pop is arguably the best coach right now, he doesn't like a lot of the things he runs but he realizes that that's what it's going to take to win so he runs it.

 

@trodgers Hey man you gotta get that job!

 

Good move.

 

or his coaching....

 

hate that analytics proponents paint the other side as too stupid to get what they're doing. the telling line in the article to me was the translation aspect: folks who crunch the numbers often don't understand what it would actually mean to follow their numbers-based suggestions, and they almost never have a way of statistically accounting for the practical issues that coaching staffs have with employing these ideas.

I mean, Houston is supposed to be the world's greatest analytics team, and they've completely abandoned the midrange shot. which has led to a sub-mediocre offense that nearly grinds to a halt against good defensive teams. imo, this is because using context-less numbers that rely on faulty assumptions (not to mention extrapolating from small sample sizes to completely different situations...egads!) is not the path to enlightenment.

I do suspect that scott may partially dismiss these things because they come from nerdz, and that's wrong. but there are plenty of grounds to dismiss a lot of what I've seen from modern analytics in basketball. speaking as someone who attempts to use statistics to get a grasp of how people do things, I can say it's quite difficult. effect sizes are generally small and thus fairly inconsequential in practical terms. you can tell a coach that running iso doesn't work as well as running a play at the end of a quarter, but your job's not the one on the line in the instance where ball movement's increased propensity to give rise to turnovers outweighs the bare points-per-possession analysis.

I could go on. in short, I've never given a s*** if the lakers had the best analytics team. I think it's good to have folks on staff trying to look at things in different ways. I don't buy the myth that having the best group of these guys represents some tremendous competitive advantage. if lamarcus Aldridge thinks so, I don't think he's very smart, and I wonder why he didn't go to Houston. but I know why: because his good ol' horse sense tells him that harden and howard are losers, despite the stats.

 

This part really resonates with me. I mean you can quantitatively and qualitatively document almost everything. Even still there are factors unaccounted for. Even still there may be no practical way to apply what you have gathered from the analysis.

 

the "it" factor

 

to be clear: I'm the last person to be against attempting to create better metrics by which to estimate the value of things--the absence of a perfect metric should not preclude attempts at improvement. I just think people need to keep in mind how likely minimal the influence of these things can be.

the lakers shifting some folks around sounds like PR face-saving. ok by me. they've obviously been skewered in the media (and apparently by at least one FA target--midrange specialist, btw...irony!) and feel the need to put a different foot forward. they'll probably ask scott to reign in his public comments about this stuff being useless, too. but I don't expect scott to turn to the analyses when he's thinking about whom to play and how. this could well be a shortcoming of scott, as far better coaches have admitted to at least attending to some of their stat guys' suggestions (btw, if you read between the lines on most quotes from Carlisle or pop, you can tell they feel more like scott does than is characterized in the media).

as a psych prof, I'm sort of predisposed to looking at things quantitatively, but I'm teaching a new course right now in which I decided to incorporate a brief section on qualitative analysis (considered sacrilegious by some colleagues, I'm sure). I still prefer the more "objective" way of looking at human behavior on the whole, but I have to admit there are some advantages to the freedom from attempts to quantify everything and that one can learn quite a bit without translating observations to numbers. the real value is in the quality of the observation: coming up with new ways of seeing, quantitatively or qualitatively. I think the best coaches have been doing the latter for a long time, and there are some new folks in the business trying to do the former. given the nature of the game--all its interdependent parts--I think the qualitative approach will retain its value despite what the newcomers (and really, some uninformed members of the media) are suggesting.