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In Non-Moving Pictures: How Real Almost Threw Away the Copa (But Didn’t)
After Felipe Reyes hit a pair of free throws with 1.11 left on the clock in the Copa del Rey final in Malaga yesterday evening it seemed like Real had the game sewn up with a 75-68 lead. But an 8-0 Barcelona run over the next minute put Real behind and set up Sergio Llull’s game winning long two from the right corner.
Real’s defence had been superb over the weekend, but it was a number of key lapses in the final minute that almost cost them the game, with their normally air tight help defence being found wanting by Barcelona, before Barcelona’s own defensive mistakes allowed Llull to get open in the final seconds.
Play Number One: Llull gets Lost (Three Times), and Oleson Drains a Three
The logical first play to look at is Brad Oleson’s three, coming after Joey Dorsey pulled down a huge offensive rebound. On the play leading up to this we saw a Marcelinho Huertas layup knocked out of the rim by Rudy Fernandez. It seemed as if Barca were shaping to send Huertas left around a Dorsey screen, potentially setting up another of his floaters. But as Dorsey came to set the screen both Sergio Llull and Felipe Reyes were found out of position, allowing Huertas to drive right uncontested to the rim, only for Fernandez to knock the ball out. Real’s disorganisation on that play led to Dorsey’s offensive rebound, as Reyes had stuck close to Dorsey, anticipating having to hedge out to stop Huertas’ floater, he was recovering very late, as both Reyes and Llull turned towards Huertas heading to the rim the both crashed in on him. Leaving Dorsey unchecked to step into the paint and pull down the offensive rebound. With Reyes’ being the help defender, Llull, having already been beaten should have had the responsibility of putting a body on Dorsey.
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Ride the Hot Hand
Back in 1985 Amos Tversky, an Israeli behavioural psychologist, published one of the earliest papers that could be categorised as ‘Advanced Analytics’, where he proved that shots should be categorised as individual events. This went against the assumed knowledge that players and teams should ride the ‘hot hand’ and that if a player had made a few shots in a row, he was more likely to make his next shot. Though widely accepted now at the time Tversky’s theory was rubbished with legendary Celtics coach and GM Red Auerbach commenting “Who is this guy? So he makes a study. I couldn’t care less” and Bob Knight saying “There are so many variables involved in shooting the basketball that a paper like this really doesn’t mean anything.” This led Tversky to assert “I’ve been in a thousand arguments over this topic. I’ve won them all and I’ve convinced no one.”
While writing the article published yesterday on shot allocation I thought a lot about just how teams can achieve an efficient shot allocation, having read long-time Tversky collaborator Daniel Kahnemann’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (which is definitely well worth a read) shortly before I begun thinking about the “hot hand” fallacy. The issue at hand with the “hot hand” fallacy is that humans are intuitively bad statisticians, and we will instinctively ascribe some kind of causality when we see something that we believe is a statistical anomaly (like a player hitting three or four shots in a row), which is actually within a random distribution. As with this being an issue with instinct, shot allocations are too guided by instinct, players will take the shots that they believe are best for the team at the spur of the moment, it is the job of coaches to guide the instinct of players. But, given that the shot allocations are imperfect, how can we find a short cut to efficiency?
Allocate to Accumulate: Efficiency and Effectiveness of Shot Allocation
We all have our own gripes while watching basketball, mainly about players taking bad shots (my own personal gripes on this topic are typically aimed at Pero Antic), but how can we qualify whether a player is taking a poor shot in the context of his team? Furthermore, how can we quantify whether an entire team is being effective in its allocation of shots between the available players?
As a former Economics student when the word ‘allocate’ appears my mind automatically makes a jump to allocative efficiency, which is a condition that leads to maximisation of economic welfare in a market, as the value put on a good or service by the consumer is equal to the cost of production, that is to put it in economical terms, where Marginal Benefit is equal to Marginal Cost. To put this in laymans terms it means that any dead weight is lost and that any resources are allocated to their best use.