Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Bucks eager to get ahead in analytics game

- Lori Nickel Milwaukee Journal Sentinel USA TODAY NETWORK - WISCONSIN

It’s hard to watch the game of basketball without bias, emotion, judgment or opinion, and it’s impossible to see everything anyway.

So the Milwaukee Bucks rely on their director of basketball research, Seth Partnow, to simply provide the facts.

And those analytics – the gathering and interpreta­tion of situationa­l statistics – have in turn changed the way the Bucks look at the game.

The Bucks use this data – some of it available to the public, some proprietar­y to the team – to evaluate talent, scout opponents, devise game strategies and self-scout. General manager Jon Horst embraces analytics so much, in fact, that he expanded his staff of math geniuses in the hopes that the Bucks can find the next stat that changes the game.

“There’s not like this 400-page book of stats that the Milwaukee Bucks use to

make decisions,” said Horst. “The goal is not that. Analytics is one of the filters we use to make decisions.

“We run everything through analytics; we run through medical, we run through our scouting, our eyes test, from a cap strategy standpoint, and then we’re going to make a holistic 360 view decision on everything we do. Analytics is a piece of that.”

That means Partnow has become an influentia­l member of the organizati­on behind the scenes. The native of Anchorage, Alaska, who wears running shoes with his jeans and sports jacket and plays pick-up ball with the rest of the front office staff, has a healthy appreciati­on for the beauty of this 125-year old game.

He just watches the game very differentl­y than most of us.

“The best analogy I would use is sampling music,” said Partnow. “If you take a piece of this and a piece of that, are you creating something new or not? Yes and no.

“It’s not just coming up with the right answers; it’s asking the right questions.”

Partnow and the Bucks start their evaluation­s with the Four Factors, written by analytics expert Dean Oliver, which are:

Effective field-goal percentage; turnover percentage; free-throw rate; rebound rate.

Looking at these and other numbers, the Bucks knew that, even during a losing stretch a few weeks ago, that their “offensive rating is extremely high,” said Horst. “Like top 10.”

That was encouragin­g for a team looking to make a jump this season in both total wins and playoff advancemen­t. The stats also tell the Bucks they don’t turn the ball over and they get to the foul line at a decent rate.

The analytics can give more details on performanc­e than the final box score.

“We’ve been a top-10 offensive team for basically the entire season,” said Partnow.

After that, Partnow goes much deeper into the numbers but is careful to present only the relevant informatio­n, which is appreciate­d by the coach.

“Sometimes you can inundate people with too much informatio­n,” said interim coach Joe Prunty. “You can overload them. As a player – you also want them to be instinctua­l.”

You can thank Oliver for this hoops math. He wrote “Basketball on Paper” in 2002 to explain how a team’s performanc­e offensivel­y and defensivel­y can be measured.

Partnow, who got his economics degree from Carleton (Minn.) College (where he also played a year of basketball), was in law school at the University of Minnesota in 2005 when he read the book.

“I had sort of been approachin­g basketball from a numeric standpoint, semi-seriously, for a long time,” said Partnow. “It kind of confirmed, and crystalliz­ed, a lot of intuitions I had.”

Said Horst: “It’s definitely one of the things that brought analytics to the forefront in basketball. Sabermetri­cs was a thing in baseball, and leagues are copycats of each other.”

The NBA teams that really started to pick up on analytics 5-10 years ago had a competitiv­e advantage. But now teams have caught up, said Horst.

Horst, in his first season as GM, wants to get ahead of the rest of the league now. He values analytics so much that he expanded the staff to include two more in the research department last year.

Analytics aren’t used during games. They serve their greatest purpose to Prunty in pregame preparatio­n. The numbers can show trends of teams and players. They can tell the Bucks what should be the priority — to offensive rebound or get back on transition defense. They usually choose the latter.

Prunty said the analytics chart the offensive plays that are successful against certain opponents, or of late.

“The numbers certainly help us prepare,” said Prunty. “You understand things that are coming, but you still have to make adjustment­s.”

Horst and Partnow said one of the values of analytics is that their scouts will see only 40-50% of a player’s games.

“No one person is going to watch all 1,230 NBA games of the season,” said Partnow. “Certainly not to the level of detail to know all of these things about all of these players.

“But deep diving into the numbers, I can watch — at a different level — every game (with analytics). And I can do it for every game the last five to 20 years.”

And then Partnow, who started writing detailed analytics blogs at Nylon Calculus, gives his interpreta­tion of the numbers and what they mean. He looks for certain numbers to tell if a player did something as a habit or a fluke, if a player is on the rise or on the decline.

“I’ll go and watch an hour of film on a guy,” said Horst. “I like to take that and support with the analytics because I watched an hour (of film); the analytics has the last five years of his career.

“Hopefully you’re making really wellinform­ed decisions. That’s the overall philosophy of analytics. I know I have a healthy appreciati­on for analytics and I utilize it. I totally trust science and numbers and believe in it.”

But even the interpreta­tion of the data can be debated.

“He doesn’t always agree with everything I say,” said Partnow, “but there’s never been a time (Horst) hasn’t given me a chance to explain why I think something.”

Jason Kidd was interviewe­d for this story four days before he was fired as the Bucks’ coach. Kidd never played with these kinds of analytical stats, but he had tried to accept their place in the game.

Kidd said he found analytics to be useful to determine if his team was in the right position on defense, for example.

“Where guys are guarding,” said Kidd. “Are we closer than we should be? Are we in the right positions? When you see it on film, you can say, ‘We’re not in the right position.’ And then you ask Seth and analytics, and that validates that we’re not in the right spots.”

Sometimes it is hard to match up what we see on the court and what we see on paper.

Take the three-point shot vs. the open lane to the basket. Maybe you’ve wondered why the Bucks — and so many other NBA teams — bypass the easy drive to the lane and instead pull up for a deep three. The reason: analytics.

“Everyone says ‘drive the ball,’ ” said Kidd. “The game has changed. A threepoint shot is better than the mid-range for sure. And it’s almost better than the layup.”

Whoever coaches the Bucks next season and beyond under Horst surely will need to embrace analytics.

“Every decision we try to make, every direction we try to go, we’re going to involve analytics in it,” said Horst. “I truly believe, when it comes to data, and the combinatio­n of data and personnel, that we’re near the top or at the top of the league in analytics. We’re also an organizati­on that is extremely hungry to blow past it. Just keep going.

“I always tell these guys, ‘Three and D’ is the thing. San Antonio, Houston created the three and D guy. The threepoint shot is a thing.

“What’s the next thing? I want to find the next thing — so we can be three years ahead of everyone else on the next thing.”

 ?? LORI NICKEL ?? Seth Partnow is director of basketball research for the Milwaukee Bucks.
LORI NICKEL Seth Partnow is director of basketball research for the Milwaukee Bucks.

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