Update 10-13-21

Hey what's going on y'all it's been a little while. I've been very busy brainstorming what else I can do to put out some good content. Basketball season is almost here, but as a Boston native it's more important to me that the Red Sox made it to the ALCS. I mean really, can we talk about Kiké Hernandez? The dude is hitting like .450, I'm getting shades of David Ortiz.

Anyways, I think there are some good ideas kicking around in my brain so I'll provide an overview of what I've been doing and what you can expect to see going forward.

Offensive Versatility Score

I started this website because I had been calculating advanced statistics and wanted a place to post the results. If you want to read more about the concept of OVS, you can do so here. The essential idea being that it represents how many areas on the court a player can shoot from. I had previously been slowly, slowly, calculating scores by hand for each year. However, as you can imagine, this got tiresome, and I created some tools to make the process go much quicker. Using those macro commands I was able to calculate every score, for every player, for every year, between the 2003-2004 and 2019-2020 seasons, and will soon have calculated all the way back to 1997 when tracking data became available. The only thing I have to do now is to post the results I found, but this is a little bit of a problem. You see, I have so much data that I don't really know what to do with it all, and wordpress doesn't offer many services to make formatting easier. Because of this I will only be sharing the top 10-20 players on the website, and then I'll include a link to the sheet containing all the scores in the description. What excites me more about having a completed database of scores is using them to do some analysis with them.

Another big project that I have with OVS is calculating it for the ongoing NBA season starting on October 19. I'm going to put together a sheet and link it to this site so I can update the scores after every game, or at least do it weekly or bi-weekly. You can also expect to see some analysis related to OVS as the season goes on and I see what trends start to emerge. I'm interested to see how multiple players do, and to examine how that relates to team success. The Celtics are an excellent example of this, and Jayson Tatum will be a player to watch as the season goes on. With the strength he's added over the offseason it will be interesting to see if he continues to take mid-range shots when he isn't forced into as many by bigger players in the paint. Since it would be a valuable addition to a team which lacks a myriad of different ways to score, OVS will be a good way to measure how Tatum contributes to the offense.

Players like Trae Young and Luka Dončić will also be interesting to study. With changes made to the rules for drawing fouls, the way they play could change. Luka may be impervious to this due to his crazy shot-making ability, but the Hawks' point guard could be forced to step inside the arc more and more as 3 point looks become harder to come by. In 2019-2020 Young had a near average score of 0.268 in 2120 minutes played with 45.5% of his shots coming from 3 point range, while shooting 36.1% on these shots. Perhaps the rule changes will make him take more shots in the 16ft-3 point range (shots that made up just 0.5% of his shots in the previous year, which by the way he shot 41.3% on).

What overjoys me more than any of the work I'm going to do however, is that the stat works, IT WORKS!!!!!! Players like Chris Paul, DeMar DeRozan, and Dirk all are regulars among the elite in OVS, and players like Shaun Livingston and T.J. McConnell have been consistent high-scorers among role players. The consistency here is what really sells me, the fact that the same players appear over and over again makes me think I'm on the right track: that some phenomenon is being captured. Especially since those elite players mentioned above are players one would expect to dominate OVS due to their offensive style. Chris Paul in particular, each time I saw him at the top of the rankings I jumped for joy. It just confirms what we all knew, which is the huge value he provides in such a small package (sorry Chris).

So, to conclude, I'm very happy with where OVS is at the moment. I plan to continue calculating it, as well as do some studies on it so I can understand each part as best I can and hopefully create a fine-tuned version of it some day. Until then, I can be happy with the fact that long twos may have a place in the world of advanced analytics.

New Ideas

The new stuff that I'm going to start working on is what I really want to talk about with you guys. I had an idea to measure player impact by tracking what percent of action on the court they are a part of, as well as what % of point, rebounds, assists etc… they account for. But the idea that I am most excited about is creating a stat to measure how good a player's post game is. I'm giving myself a challenge with this one, and I really look forward to it. The current plan is to use data from NBA savant which tracks what type of shots a player takes (hooks, fades, pull-ups).

My attention was first drawn to this, and first started REALLY thinking about it while watching Giannis in the 2021 playoffs. He made a conscious effort to add more moves to his arsenal as the 'yoffs went on. And it had a notable impact: teams had to change the way they played him, even if only slightly. And it eventually gave the Bucks a big enough push to win the championship, which infatuated me with trying to measure what Giannis had done.

Quick aside: If Giannis spent a summer in the gym with Hakeem Olajuwon he could tap into bag akin to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's skyhook

But what really sold me is wanting to know how Zion would do in that stat. Since so much of his game comes from inside I wanted to see how he's able to get consistent looks from that range. It's an underrated art, getting a shot off in close quarters. A lot of physicality is involved with it for sure, but the best players are able to take it to the next level with skilled play near the basket.

The next thing I thought of was DEFENSIVE Versatility Score, which I could combine with OVS to make a complete stat. I think doing a DVS would help me understand OVS a lot better and would be able to improve both by adding other components. I think to start it off I would just do a base version such that its a mirror or OVS: 0 is average and then a lower score is better and higher is worse, kinda in the same vein as ORTG/DRTG.

-Nick