Putting up big numbers
SFU’s men’s basketball team is taking analytics to new heights in a successful experiment
As is the case with many coaches, James Blake’s voice is not operating at its full potential. There is too much screaming and cajoling involved in the profession for anything less than the sturdiest of voices to persevere for months at a time. Just six weeks into the season, Blake sounds hoarse.
Blake, though, has not been harping on the usual crutches of the coach. There is no discussion of pinpoint defensive rotations or the beauty of sharing the basketball on offence.
“It’s put some grey hairs on me and resulted in some long nights,” said Blake, the coach of Simon Fraser University’s men’s basketball team, over the phone this week. “As you can tell, my voice is a bit raspy right now because you’re putting a lot more energy into ( emphasizing) motivation and effort because the guys’ pace is so frantic. The kids really like to play fast. The kids like to play where they get the 100plus possessions. It’s basically enabled us to use the analytical side of it to motivate our kids to increase the number of possessions so that they get more shots. Everybody wants to shoot the ball. By playing this style, and using this system and the statistics, you can prove to your kids and your coaching staff that it’s something that can work.”
Blake’s team, which is eight games into its season in NAIA — essentially the NCAA’s second division — is undergoing an experiment that has never been seen at this level in Canada. The team’s goal is to push the total number of possessions from 80 to 100 per game, which has been a success so far. That comes with two subgoals: attempt at least 35 three- pointers and force at least 25 turnovers, via an aggressive defensive press, per game.
The style of play has two main influencers: the late 1980s Loyola Marymount University teams of Paul Westhead and the various prep school, community college and university teams of Vance Walberg, who now serves as an assistant with the Philadelphia 76ers. However, it was borne of the twin needs of Blake and Peter Chow- White, an associate professor at Simon Fraser’s school of communications.
Blake’s desires are obvious: Simon Fraser went a dismal 3- 15 in conference play last year ( 10- 16 overall), and he was looking for more success in the NAIA, which is guard dominant since most legitimate post players go to Division- I schools. Meanwhile, Chow- White is in the midst of working on a research project that studies the role of big data in health, social media and professional sports.
Chow- White was in contact with many executives in the NBA, including Alex Rucker, the Raptors’ senior analytics consultant. The information most professional teams gather is proprietary, and therefore unable to be shared. So, Chow-White searched for an opportunity to obtain his own data. Chow- White and Blake were familiar with each other not only from their connection through Simon Fraser, but also from coming up in the same Victoria basketball scene that produced Steve Nash. Chow-White played at St. Michaels University School, the same school Blake started his coaching career at in 2001. Blake played and coached at the University of Victoria, after he won a CIS title as a player at Brandon University.
In particular, Chow- White is interested in how to take data and implement it into real world settings — “turning numbers into words,” as he put it. At times, this has been a significant obstacle to the analytics movement in basketball, with coaches finding little practical use in the data being collected because of a communication gap.
“The technical analyst creates numbers and supplies them, but they have to know what the user is going to do with them,” Chow- White said. “What does the user need? That’s how the conversation started. I’ve been studying this for a while. I don’t just study big data in my lab. We also ( collect) big data. So I’m thinking, ‘ How can I apply this to the SFU basketball team? If it can help the Oakland A’s, can it help a team here that has had some challenges in the first two years of ( league play).’ I approached James and asked, ‘ Can we do this?’ He was very supportive.”
Chow- White and Blake meet twice a week: once on Tuesday, to go over the statistics from the previous weekend’s games, and once later in the week to prepare for the next weekend’s games.
“From an analytical side,” Blake said, “he can give me two key components from a statistical standpoint that can help us get better each weekend when we meet on the Tuesdays.”
The offensive principles should be familiar to anybody who has watched basketball evolve recently. The most desired shot is a layup, then a three- pointer, and then a pullup jumper in the paint. Midrange shots are frowned upon, and turnovers are detested. Through eight non- conference games — the Clan are 5- 3 after defeating Western Washington University 122- 118 on Saturday — Simon Fraser has attempted 44.7 three- pointers per game, which accounts for more than 46 per cent of their field- goal attempts. For comparison’s sake, the Houston Rockets, who have attempted the most three- pointers in the NBA, shoot three- pointers on 43 per cent of their field- goal attempts, averaging 34.4 per game despite working with eight more minutes of time per contest. Reno, where Canadian Brady Heslip has caught fire recently, and Rio Grande of the D- League operate with similar philosophies. Neither of those teams is using quite the percentage of three- pointers that Simon Fraser is.
The defensive end might be more interesting, though. The goal is to play at a quick pace, and the way to influence that on defence is to use a full- court press that does not stop trying to force turnovers. When it fails, of course, the result is an easy layup for the other team. To play that style requires Blake using his entire 12- man roster each game.
“The goal in doing that is to put offences, the other team, in a position that makes them uncomfortable because nobody is playing at that speed,” Chow-White said. “If everybody is, then you don’t have an advantage. You’re back to square one. If everyone else is preparing for set defence, running the shot clock down to the latter half, an 80 possession game, then you’re forcing them out of that comfort zone.”
“Move your feet, slide your feet, and know where to go on defence: If you don’t know where to go on defence, you’re going to mess up the whole defensive set and easy layups are going to occur,” said guard Justin Cole. “You have to be really well- conditioned and know how to move your feet laterally. If you can’t, you can’t play.” The learning curve has not been a nightmare for the players. Blake recruited four players, including Cole, from Chaffey Community College in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif., where the head coach is Jeff Klein, a disciple of Walberg. Blake also has previous experience with the system from when he was an assistant at Cal State-Stanislaus in Turlock, Calif.
The biggest lesson has been an unintended consequence of abiding by the system: Problems rebounding the ball have hurt Simon Fraser. Part of the advantage of taking threepointers is that they produce longer rebounds, and therefore more offensive rebounding opportunities.
While Simon Fraser has averaged 14.7 offensive rebounds per game over the last three contests, that is a tiny percentage, given all the three- pointers the team takes and misses.
“The box score can be deceiving,” Chow- White said. “The efficiency ( data) can show you what the box score is missing. Implementing that and taking that information and going to practice and implementing in practice and then see it happen in a game, I think that’s fantastic. We saw that happen this weekend in our first win down in the U. S. It’s very simple: You need to improve your rebounding percentage. What does that mean in real terms? It means you need to take one more person and send them to the glass regularly.”
Blake’s bigger concern is rebounding on the other end, which is when he starts to sound like a more traditional coach.
“A point guard, in our rotations, will be boxing out a 6- foot- 10 kid,” Blake said. “That means while he’s boxing that big kid out, a wing has to come in and actually get the rebound. It’s talking about our rotations and talking about the fact that you’re not going to be guarding a like- sized person. All five ( players) need to rebound at the defensive end, even though we want to still play fast and ( run) out on those wings.”
Nonetheless, both the academic and the coach are finding the process rewarding. Chow- White is getting firsthand experience with a subject he has spent years studying, and wants to apply the lessons to not only basketball, but other sports and entirely different subjects, as well.
For Blake, he gets to coach in an entirely new way, while relying on some more orthodox motivational techniques.
“I tell the kids all the time: It’s not buying in, it’s selling out. They really have to sell out to the idea,” Blake said. “They’re getting closer each game. The statistics are proving that.”