If you’re tired of hearing about the “hustle” of players throughout sports because it’s the type of thing that can’t be quantified, the NBA playoffs may clear things up in that regard with new statistics.
These numbers will be calculated at the NBA offices in Secaucus, New Jersey, with the help of SportVu technology, then posted online about two hours after every game during the postseason. The NBA conducted a pilot program during the summer league in Las Vegas that people seemed to like, so the league is bringing it back for the big games.
What are the “hustle stats” being tracked? From ESPN.com:
The league will track how often defenders contest 2- and 3-point shots, deflections by defensive players, charges taken, which players recover loose balls, and so-called “screen assists,” which the league defines as picks that lead directly to a made field goal attempt by a teammate. The “screen assist” category will not include picks that result in a teammate drawing a shooting foul or that free up someone for a shot one or two passes down the chain, officials said.
This seems pretty cool. It’s sort of annoying that whenever you see a guy dive for a loose ball, announcers will drone on and on about that player’s hustle. But does he do that a lot? Is he giving a full effort in other “hustle” areas of the game? It’s not perfect, as there are holes in this system, but it’s still good.
Seth Partnow of Nylon Calculus showed good hustle by raising a point about the contested 2s and 3s:
The Contested 2 and 3’s will be intriguing to look at, but should be interpreted with caution on an aggregate level, especially with respect to evaluating individual players. For one thing, the player who ends up contesting a shot is quite often much more the result of a rotation scheme than the play (good or bad) of the player making the contest. Further, the effectiveness of a “hands up contest” in terms of suppressing shooting percentages is unknown. As a blatant plea for more and better data, I would say that combining a “contest yes/no” variable with the late, lamented SportVU shot logs would go a ways towards answering this question, though it would probably require a much larger sample than the 80 or so playoff games we’ll get this spring.
And this is coming from a guy who played three games of freshman basketball in high school and won a middle school championship the previous year, but how will the NBA define contested? What if my man is dragging me all over the court and I’m 3 feet away when I raise my arm? Who defines what is contested, and what is a token extension of my hand in the air?
Either way, it’s more data and information for fans to consume, which is what the NBA wants. It’s far more interesting than, say, a washed-up old man heaving 50 shots in his final career game.
(ESPN.com)
