JJ Redick postgame on the Lakers shot quality - “We won expected score so it was good enough to win”
It’s an interesting data point but I’m sure the folks of this sub will take it the wrong way
yes in fairness he was asked directly about shot quality
but also in fairness this is probably why Mazzulla wanted to hire Redick onto his staff a couple years ago
what’s tough is that 7 games is just not that long
you can play “the right way” and expect “shots will go down eventually,” but that only has to betray you a couple of times before you’re headed to Mexico. I think it’d be the hardest part of coaching for a guy like me: do you stick and have faith in your priors, or do you adjust when the observations don’t match expectations?
this is the Daryl Morey problem that led to the Rockets being so fucking good. It also allowed the Rockets to be beat by the Warriors
Can confirm that despite you beating the shit out of us and taking the series, if we had shot our regular season avg of wide open 3s we would’ve won in 5. sometimes you just go cold.
AnOthEr mOraL viCtoRy
Well the way people are talking on here, the talking point will be a week from now “If Lebron had help, the lakers would’ve went to the finals”
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so if 40% of the time you lose a poker hand where you had a 60% chance of winning, you should change your strategy and fold on that hand instead?
The beauty of sports is it’s not something you can always solve on spreadsheet. These are human beings, not machines that don’t tire or hit the same outcomes at the same pace every time.
Analytics has a time and place, but it’s a tool in the belt, not gospel.
To JJ’s point, they got the high percentage shots they wanted. Just couldn’t make them. Do you try something different or just make the shots next time?
The problem is the Lakers don’t have the talent to adjust. They aren’t like the Celtics who keep shooting 3s when they could adjust. The Lakers are without their best player and don’t have a ton of depth.
Their best chance of winning is on shooting variance, particularly from 3. Gotta hope you get hot and the other team is cold… It’s their only shot (they have none really)
Yeah, that is literally the job of coaching/managing a team! The Wolves are doing so well in part bc Finch is excellent at making adjustments to games! That’s what being good at the job is!
It’s part of the job. It’s just the part we can all see and think we can judge so we all assign outsize importance to it.
If Finch was great at in game adjustments but had no vision for implementing/changing a system, reaching guys on a personal level, developing young guys, etc etc etc he’d be a valuable assistant coach and that’s all.
Thera a lot more to the job than telling Marcus Smart that if his shot isn’t falling he should try driving instead.
Sure, I think this conversation was mostly about following analytics as if they were god vs doing the job of a coach is all. Your additions aren’t wrong, but I also didn’t say that the coach’s only job was making adjustments, I just said making adjustments is literally the job. That doesn’t mean there aren’t other parts of the job, including managing players and also listening to analytics when it makes sense to.
Better translation for this sub:
“We were in position to make good shots, we just missed at a rate higher than our average. We’re not that bad, I think we’re still good enough to win if we do make shots.”
I am so tired of people dismissing shot quality as a metric because they think it’s just coaches making excuses. Zach Lowe of all people does that, which is weird to me since otherwise his analysis is pretty data-driven. If done accurately, shot quality can be very valuable to show if schemes are effective in the aggregate.
I think lowe made his point pretty well on the last pod (?) he did with Simmons. It’s a useful metric over the season, but if you point to it after a loss it just kind of shows that you weren’t able to switch things up and create offense when the good shots aren’t falling. One game or a series just isn’t a big enough sample that you can expect your %s to be close to what they are in the regular season
The fact this had to be explained this way just reveals what kind of brains we have in this sub 😂
Hey hey hey, no brains allowed in this house.
Yeah, shot quality metric is a real thing for analytics. It gives you a higher floor of winning games. Players have to make shots, simple as that. The Lakers didn’t last night.
Can someone help me understand what he means?
Edit: Thanks for the clarification ya’ll
They have statistical models based on how open a shooter was and what their historical percentages were. You could simulate if both teams shot their averages (factoring in shot quality).
I.E. AR sucked ass and LA would have had an extra 12 points if he wasn’t so rusty.
Rough time to come off an injury
I mean probably useful ordinarily, but open to flaws like AR will average back towards the norm and he’s just injured so that’s not true.
That being said if AR doesn’t go 3⁄16 I do think Lakers have a chance of stealing game 1. Not saying they can do that for the series but SGA was pretty bad by his standards.
SEC approves
It’s a little bs. This postseason is the most open three point shooters have been since the tracking data started. It is also the worst three point shooting that the league has seen in that time.
The tracking data hasn’t caught up or can’t quantify some things.
A lot of it is physicality. Yeah you got to your spot and you normally hit that shot… but you’ve been locked in a cockfight with Dort or Caruso for 20 seconds so you’re feeling it. Dort’s cumulative physical toll on his assignment absolutely juices their legs by the end of the game.
A what fight now?
When a guy is banging you
I mean same could be said for Smart or Lebron on the Lakers end. I know the game got away from of us towards the end but all in all I was happy with the intensity from the team. Also one of the better officiated games I’ve watched this post season.
they got good looks but the ball didnt want to go in
Austin Reaves contributing a good amount to this stat
Hachimuri with team-worst -21 net rating just shows he should be playing way less. But then we’re left with bums like Bronny on his Make-a-Wish tour in the NBA so that just shows how hopeless our Lakers bench is.
Using single game plus/minus data is a really poor way to analyze a game. Hachimura has flaws as a player but he’s the Lakers best shooter, I mean even tonight he was 7-13 and 3-6 from three. Austin Reaves, god bless him, was 3-16 with only 8 points and had trouble dribbling half of the game and didn’t offer anything defensively that made up for his terrible offensive game…yet he won’t *only* -10.
Hachimura was be a great 6th man ala Naz Reid (though he’s not as aggressive as Naz), but you are right that because the Lakers don’t have depth he’s forced into a starting role. It’s not going to be easy to upgrade the position.
It’s a statistic that’s been popularised by football (Expected goals), it measures how good of a scoring opportunity. e.g. open lay up is 2 expected points irrespective of if you miss.
It’s very popular in hockey too. xGA and xGF.
It’s just an extremely common statistical concept, expected value
Lakers were supposed to win but someone underperformed
Cough AR
AR gets locked up by any decent team in the playoffs? Who could’ve seen this coming
He’s coming off injury so that’ll be taken to account, but still a tough match up. Not sure how many players really do well unless they’re big guards so not sure what everyone is expecting
Haliburton did well
Ah so we’re comparing Reaves to one of the best point guards in the league lol at least they’re in the same convo
did reaves ever have good playoff showing? seems to always be injured come playoff time. goodluck winning in the west with a Luka + AR combo in the coming seasons.
Yeah against Memphis and warriors.
I’m not scared he can’t rise to the moment more scared his body can’t handle the role during the season and playoffs.
Don’t know why you’re being downvoted. It’s true.
This happened against Minnesota too lol. Even if healthy, I don’t expect AR to get 20+ points on good efficiency. If he gets 20+, it’s going to be on 25% fg and he hits 10 FTs
Yep. Simple as that
Expected Score is a stat that looks at the quality of shots and determines how much a team should have scored on average. Essentially all it means is that based solely on where the shots taken from and how close the nearest defender(s) were, the Lakers should have won.
they had good shot quality for the most part but Reaves underperformed.
Expected Score is an advanced stat that basically says “an average team shooting average would have scored X points on the shots you took”
So JJ is saying that the Lakers actually had better scoring chances than the Thunder and played a good enough floor game to win, but shot poorly.
They got the shots they wanted just didn’t hit them
“If that scrub AR15 shot average we win”
He means Lakers in 4.
He expected they only needed 90 to win tonight
Nah jk I have no idea lol
Is expected score the basketball equivalent of xG used in soccer? It’s a very popular metric in soccer, but I have never heard of whatever JJ Redick is mentioning
very possible that it’s an internally tracked data point that isn’t publicly available. naturally, you’ll hear about publicly available data more often since every content creator will have access to it
It’s not fair to all the stats nerds out there to have all of these teams hoarding their secret data. Imagine how powerful bill Simmons would be if he had new metrics that show that Jokic generated more expected score per minute than any other player in history
Each team is gonna have their own novel metrics to
xG version of NBA?
As Sean Dyche would say, “Utter Woke Nonsense”.
analytics are more powerful in basketball than soccer because there are more opportunities for a statistic to express itself, which means you can rely more heavily on normal distributions
I don’t know soccer like that, but if there are only 10 shots on goal per game, there’s a lot of room for an anomaly to occur. When there are 90+ FGA in a basketball game, playing to xG makes even more sense
Yeah, more events in basketball makes analytics more stable, while soccer has more variance.
Why don’t the Lakers just hoof it up the pitch?
Lakers with 2 bigs up front?
Is Ime the same as Tony Pulis?
It works better in basketball due to the sheer number of attempts. Also the fact that it’s more start-stop allows for better isolation as well. So it is a good metric, but is also just a metric
JJ Reddick has survived exactly zero relegation battles. I know whose opinion I’m taking here
Zach Lowe is gonna LOVE this lol
Hang the banner
Outside of the game slipping away in the fourth I feel like the Lakers played well enough to win. If Austin Reaves has an average game, it’s likely close enough at the end of the fourth to really challenge both teams clutch execution. Ultimately OKC is a better team, a more talented team, a deeper team, and a younger team. If the Lakers want to win beyond just a random fluke game they have to both execute well (which they did) and hit shots (which they kind of did).
No JJ u were 16 pts underdogs but lost by 18. /s
Clearly he’s not saying this is a good thing? Hes talking about how his guys missed open looks
That doesn’t get internet points, now does it
We knew it was coming
Lol
Lakers should win in the 3pt shooting. Tough to win when they still beat you at the 3s.
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Last night was exactly the game you need a player like Luka who can make tough shots and quiet the crowd. Idk if they woulda won but if Luka played last night that’s a different game. (Not the series, just last night)
This guy analytics
Are you dumb or you really don’t understand what he’s saying?
Aren’t those two options the same?
I’ll take it
LA got their Expected Shot Quality, but weren’t gifted their Expected Free Throws by the refs.
😎 so nothing to worry about then
Moral champs
maybe good enough to lose idk
Nerds ruined basketball 🥀
Lakers have found something for game 2 guys lol
Did your shot variance swing you into round 2 yet?
That really stings
Laker are already 1-0 in hypotheticals
He’s answering a question from the reporter if the shot quality was good for the lakers. Him saying “we won expected score” means he thinks the lakers had a lot of good looks
Hope OKC can handle getting morally swept
The NBA is so trash 🤣🤣🤣 nobody loses anymore. A team wins the game and the other team comes up with some complex analytical reason they didn’t really lose. Such a league of losers.
Expected score is such a bad metric. It doesn’t account for intangibles. Like how tired someone is in the 4th or hesitation after having your shot get blocked last time you were in the paint. Real impacts that teams use to swing the game. Getting a team to miss is part of defense. Making them run around and get tired helps with that. Hell even trash talk can work (ask KG).
I mean how is any of that relevant to how he is referencing it in the answer to this question? He’s just saying they had great shot quality according to the expected score. An open shot is still an open shot if you’re tired or hesitating.
Those things should be factored in because all those factors are relevant in the games that generate data for the model.
I guess the next step is how often does the Expected Score winner actually win the game?
Celtics have a championship (also amassed arguably a superteam for that year) and three bad postseason series defeats vs the Heat/Knicks/76ers utilizing all the expected score stuff.
What do you mean utilizing? I don’t really think it changes much of your scheming, it’s just a way to measure if you’re getting the open looks you want right?
I’m open to correction because “expected score” is new to me, but how do we know it’s bad? A hypothetically perfect expected score can control for how late in the game a shot is taken combined with pace of play and minutes played for the person taking the shot vs their normal performance in those conditions (approximating how tired someone is in the 4th). Do we know what expected score is and how in depth the calculation is?
All of that stuff is factored in as it includes every shot a player/team takes whether they’re fresh or fatigued, healthy or injured, etc.
JJ’s high, but he won’t cry, Vandy pinky said bye bye….Lakers in 5
Another analytical wacko, use your eyes, you don’t have the talent
If half our misses went in we would’ve won
Are you being intentionally dense or you really don’t understand how he answered the question?
Intentionally dense
this guy is a fraud please get luka a real coach by next year at least 🙏
JJ is not the problem