The absolute worst kind of egg to have in these trying times

And it won’t be me!

-guy who got YouTube TV and Prime just to watch the playoffs and then forgot to cancel it afterwards

First day on the internet?

what he (deservedly) say fuck me for

Hey!!! The Magic……yeah. I can’t defend that offense. Especially in the playoffs. It’s an awful watch. Unless you’re a fan of the other team.

That’s what you need to add strategy for. BUT NOT TOO MUCH!

Skywalker, The Professor, and the gang were the sh1t seeing those And1 episodes on espn

Honestly if the players took it seriously, that would be the single most entertaining basketball event I can imagine (outside of the actual playoffs of course)

I really like the idea of trying to shovel all the analytics and strategy into the players brains while off court, then they have to figure it out during game time themselves.

Seriously everyone here defending the heavy analytics are forgetting that this is an entertainment product. The league and playstyles across the league largely because of analytics have homogenized. Every team is playing nearly the same. It’s very similar to the three true outcomes era of Baseball which everyone agrees was the most boring baseball could possibly be. Watching 27 outs of Walk, Strikeout or Homerun with an end score of 3-1 was not entertaining. Watching two teams employ the same strategy of shooting 35-40 three pointers and whoever has the better shooting night is similarly not entertaining. We don’t really have style matchups anymore because everyone is playing essentially the same style of basketball.

I’m enjoying baseball more than I have in years, the changes have enhanced the game and viewer experience. (Also doesn’t hurt as a White Sox fan we aren’t full cheeks anymore)

It’s worth pointing out that threes actually haven’t replaced going to the basket (except possibly for this year’s Celtics). What’s happened is that threes have replaced midrange shots.

And I find it funny that everybody is complaining about how nobody goes to the rim anymore when two still outnumber threes. Yes, those numbers have shifted, but this season 58.5% of shots were two-pointers. 23.1% at the rim, 20.9% from 3-10 feet, and 15.4% from 10 feet to the arc.

You literally have the most insane guys like Jokic, SGA, Wemby doing things never seen before, league in the most competitive state than ever. JB just not worth his contract for how many flows in his game he has, he just not the guy he think he is.

???

Inside scoring hasn’t dipped. This is a myth that baffles me when we have readily available data that people could just actually look at. What’s largely been happening is the elimination of the long 2.

We’re in peak analytics era and the Finals were the Knicks - who are mostly college teammates- vs the Spurs who got lucky in the draft 3 times. Like it’s not that bad and analytics didn’t create those teams

Facts right here. When teams live and die by the 3 in a game I’m bored as hell. Don’t get me wrong when some of these contested 3s go in they are beautiful.

Some people are genuinely just here for stats and numbers, the actual basketball being played is distant second.

Or just actually let defenders play defense. Stop letting offensive players drive directly into and push off of defenders just to be rewarded with free throws. Start calling the 50 illegal screens every game.

The 3 itself isn’t a problem. It’s that every thing is overwhelmingly weighted towards the offense, especially foul baiting that slows down the game.

Ik its dumb but dam man i low key love this rule/concept i had when i was high af

So like on baseball teams get to have their own out field walls and stuff

I thought why not let every team design there own 3pt line arc distance. Then i went even deeper. Some teams can opt for only 2s retro style or you could add 4 point line.

Then i was like man it would be cool you would have had like grit and grid grizzlies actually having some crazy advantage over peak GSW cuz they would have opted for only 2s. Or at home at peak gsw they move theres back a bit so they are the only ones hitting 3s or 4s

Ik its dumb and will never happen i just found it as a interesting concept. Thanks for reading

A 3 second rule for the corner sounds absolutely fucking terrible.

Nobody appreciates that this is an industry and winning is a reflection of a job well done, not just by the players but the coaching staff, scouts, and the whole front office. There is no rule change that will prevent these organizations from trying to optimize the game to perfection, and for my money NBA basketball has remained incredibly exciting through this analytics revolution

I think that you’re underrating how well many of those “just get a bucket guys” grade out analytically. Jordan might have had some off nights like any star does, but all in all, he was an analytical god among the analytics that go back to his time. Jordan has the 7th best 5 year RAPM of all time and that’s not even including data from his entire prime, just his last two Bulls years. RAPTOR estimates from his prime have him at #1 in the stat for essentially every season of his prime. For the most part, we just don’t have the data to assess Jordan’s entire prime but when we do, he grades out like the GOAT.

Luckily, we do have analytical data for Kobe, and his peak also grades out very well, just not good enough to put him into GOAT talks like some say. His 5 year peak RAPM was 7.3, which is 18th since the stat began being tracked in 1997. Sounds fairly low for him but that’s absolutely still MVP territory. Kobe also ranks 5th all time in Offensive RAPM (only behind Curry, Jokic, Nash, and LeBron). His problem as far as analytics are concerned is that they grade him as a negative defender. His offensive efficiency is actually considered one of his strong suits and the analytics would agree that he was a tremendous help to his team in terms of scoring more efficiently even though the box score numbers might have looked ugly sometimes (plus he significantly reduced team turnovers). Kobe grades out like this for the entire mid to late 2000s. He’s not considered to be at superstar level before Shaq left and his analytics fall off pretty much right after the 2010 championship, so his peak maybe isn’t considered to be as long as some others, but at his peak, analytics would fully back up what you’re saying.

Jordan is top 3 in like every impact metric and Kobe is also very high. This thing I’m seeing where people are bringing them up to justify Jaylen Brown because they don’t understand analytics and assume analytics must under appreciate them because they were also known to take ‘bad shots’, is incredibly misguided

On top of both of them being wing-sized with extremely well rounded games, Jordan actually made his buckets at a very, very, very high rate, and Kobe while not nearly as efficient as Jordan, still had teams guard him like he was, which opened up the floor for his teammates. Luka actually might be the weirdest inclusion here because even if he wasn’t efficient (he is, scary efficient actually, especially in the postseason), as I’m sure you know, he’s in contention for best passer in the NBA

You can’t say any of that for Brown outside of them all being around the same size

Kobe and Jordan had nights that would’ve gotten them smeared by the analytics guys.

Oh yeah? please do tell how Jordan would’ve got smeared by the analytics guys

Baseball is easier to analyze though cause there is less teamwork/interaction between players. Basketball more complex cause it is more of a team sport.

Moneyball was funny because it was like “the 2002 A’s were good because Hatteberg was willing to play 1st base” instead of “oh this team had MVP Miguel Tejada, Cy Young Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and gold glover Eric Chavez of course they were sick”

The only money-ball that exists is rookie contracts and real stars.

Moneyball doesnt work in the nba because every mediocre 20 ppg scorer is on a max contract. Your whole roster is nothing at that point.

The knicks had an underpaid brunson. The spurs underpaid wemby,harper,castle.

Theres no way to get that level of value for small market teams without the draft.

Not even close, baseball is relatively easy to analyze because every play is in isolation with clearly delineated roles and each player only taking on one responsibility at a time.

Basketball tests a players decision making, shooting, play making, court vision, defense, hustle, ball handling, off ball movement, etc, and they have to rapidly switch between those roles / skills multiple times per possession.

Yeah, they chose to believe second round guy because his RAPM was insane. People doesn’t understand that analitics/mathematicians/nerds won battle of relevancy before they were born.

Yeah I was looking at some end-of-season advanced stats the other day, LEBRON and RAPTOR and whatever that shit is and I found all five Knicks starters in the top 50 (and Mitch right behind), only team to have that. OKC was close. But these guys all perform very very well in analytics, without having star power, which means good contracts and great value. These kinds of guys–and it’s the same type on OKC and the Spurs–are the dreams of FOs. Load the team up with \(20-30m A-tier players rather than 1 or 2 \)60m S-tier players and a bunch of Bs and Cs.

yeah OG is a borderline top 20 player in the league in all the advanced AIO stats to go along with Brunson and KAT

Exactly right. Teams will only lean on analytics more now that the Knicks actually won a title without a true superstar.

Physicallity has certainly changed for certain player profiles.

If you’re a smaller guard, handling the ball, the game is officiated to make it easier for you in the regular season and the playoffs.

Given most people just watch the ball, that’s why they feel the game is softer.

I actually think the game is too physical off ball, because the refs never call holding on the defense or moving screens, and it’s constantly happening off ball. But once you get the ball you can do all kinds of unnatural foul bating to get a call, especially if you’re smaller than the defender.

Heck, there’s a huge difference between regular season, the opening of the playoffs, and the finals, in terms of how games are officiated.

I felt like they did off the ball. I was fine with how they called it on the ball.

The problem is that Wemby basically gets played like Shaq in that he’s just so big you can get away with murder, and if you don’t try to get away with murder, you’re not doing everything you can to win and he’s going to just walk over you

I frankly loved it

That’s how it always was. They just don’t allow it during the regular season probably because they don’t want injuries before the playoffs. There’s no other explanation why the regular season is reffed completely differently from the playoffs.

Like you’re saying football is such a team sport stats are almost useless. It’s incredibly annoying but so much of football roster creation is the right GM having the right eyes.

There was a guy who did super comprehensive analysis on saquon barkley pre-eagles and the eagles o line pre-saquon and basically determined that exact thing. That saquon was genuinely not as good without the eagles and their o line was also worse without him. They were more than the sum of their parts

eh the knicks were way ahead of the curve on the possession-maximizing analytics trend, ever since Rose took over

Totally disagree about the Knicks. We’re obviously an analytics focused team. We spent the better part of 3 seasons shedding old school players like RJ and Randle and finding undervalued, analytics darlings like Hart and OG. And we paired them with the most modem big a big can be in Towns and an incredible contract value guard in Brunson who we knew was as good as other guys, but didn’t have the counting stats due to playing time.

Leon Rose was an agent. Every agent on the planet – the good ones anyway – need to be extremely familiar with analytics because that’s what gets guys paid these days. You’re seeing that with the Brown situation in the inverse. Rose understands what GMs are looking for and how to upsell his clients. He took that same mentality to NY.

The reason we won is because KAT had a good defensive season at the expense of offense. As for Brunson, analytics do not care about a player’s size. That’s old school. Size only matters if it affects on court results. For Brunson, it doesn’t affect his offense at all, so we eschewed the traditional thinking and went with the analytical one.

Well since Sam Presti is also an analytics guy, this kind of just reinforces the point.

You can, but the laws of physics make it more difficult.  If you swing early, you get less control than if you swing perfectly on time, but you make contact with the biggest part of the bat moving at the fastest speed, and the angle of contact causes the ball to be pulled to wards the batters side.  In order to go oppo, you have to swing later, which means hitting the ball with a smaller part of the bat, moving at a slower speed, and you get even less control than swinging early.  

Edit:  literally everyone at the major league level can consistently go oppo in batting practice.  If they’re just hanging meatballs over the plate and you know what’s coming, it’s a lot easier to go oppo than when you’re going up against a guy who has a 99mph fast ball and can also throw a changeup.

it’s really fucking hard to hit a professional baseball pitch

Pulling the ball is still generally better because you have more power that way. So you might hit it into the shift more often but you’ll also get more doubles and home runs

Pitchers are pitching on average faster than they ever were, with spin rates that have never been this high, so it’s harder than it’s ever been to control the trajectory of the ball. Analytics has also bred the “three true outcomes” approach of walk, home run, strike out, which basically means hitters value selling out for power more as long as they can also stay disciplined and work walks.

They banned it because its an entertainment product and the shift was bad for business. If anything its the younger fans who want offense they’re appeasing.

Baseball’s actually made a lot of good changes lately. They sped up the game with the pitch clock and added replay review on balls and strikes this year. Banning the shift has just led teams to come up with creative solutions to cut off the batter’s pullside.