Update 3-9-26

This update is to give an update on what I have been working on for the past number of months. It has been a busy time, but rewarding in equal measure. I am excited to share the work I have been doing.

Basketball Quebec U17

Over the summer I did volunteer work with the Basketball Quebec U17 team for the Canada Games that took place in August. I connected with coach Dan Martin, who also coaches the Champlain St-Lambert Cavaliers, and he graciosuly invited me to a practice to discuss how I could help the team.

Using my analytics system, I can track location and contest level of shots, and lineup +/- data. So we decided to start there and with box-score statistics like points, rebounds, assists, etc... That is the usual suite of analytics that I have been offering to Concordia for the past two seasons, so it was no trouble to simply translate it to the Quebec team. To make statistics more accessible to coaches, I also coded an online dashboard which allowed them to see shot charts and lineup stats on demand. Additionally, we discussed tracking stats for defensive schemes and offensive sets, which I was able to incorporate into the existing system without too much trouble. This was an exciting opportunity to improve, and was both a good coding exercise and a good for building knowledge of basketball coaching.

The last piece of this arrangement was putting together film sessions for the team. This was something I did not have as much experience doing before, and is where I learned the most. Dan liked his film sessions to not just focus on the negative, but shine light on positive examples as well. Before the team travled to the tournament at St. Johns, I put together a small film session of 20-ish possessions from scrimmages and practice matches that were instructive or demonstrative of the story the analytics painted. The team did not get the result we wanted (losing in the semi-final against the team from Alberta), but I am thankful for the opportunity and experience.

Concordia Basketball

My Role

This season I once again worked with the Concordia Men's Basketball team as the resident "stats guy", but I expanded the amount of data I was making available to the coaching staff. During the offseason I had meetings with head assistant coach Aleks Mitrovic to discuss how I could improve. The biggest change was related to coaching statistics. It was an area that I had personally identified as a weakness, so during the offseason I committed to learning offensive and defensive sets. This involved the work I did with the Quebec U17 team, and I used that experience as an opportunity to integrate tagging sets into my analytics system. The work payed off because once the Concordia season started I was able to identify plays and generate statistics related to those schemes. I deepened my understanding of basketball and fundamentally changed the way that I analyze film. I am proud of that improvement; although I still see even more room for improvement. In previous seasons I was mostly concerned with data collection, with not a lot of time for analysis, but this season I put aside time to deeply analyze the data I collected. I put together scouting reports and deep dives for the coaching staff. Some of the reports I was most proud of were a comprehensive self-scout of our team following the preseason, and a detailed scout of Laval in preparation for our playoff matchup against them.

I got more involved with the coaching staff this season by being in the office when I had the time outside of my other job. Since I was doing more analysis I had lots to share with Aleks and head coach Damian Buckley. They graciously made time to teach me about offensive and defensive sets, and were available to discuss throughout the week while I was watching film and tagging. This was aided by integrating the Hoopsalytics system with great success (more on Hoopsalytics below). Since it has a built-in analytics dashboard, all the statistics that I was collecting were instantly made available to the coaching staff once I was done watching film.

Concordia Basketball

Season Recap

After last season making it to the national tournament and coming in 5th expectations were high. Mitigating that was a lot of roster turnover: Alec Phaneuf, a star point guard for us, transferred to UOttawa and a number of other returning players did not join the team until the second half of the season. Thankfully, Sami Jahan, another star PG, returned from an ACL injury after missing all of the 2024-25 season. The team also added two more guards in the transfer portal: Victor Bonsu from Simon Frasier, and Anthony Gibson-Maxwell who played at UMass Lowell and JUCO Gulf Coast State. Along with 2024-25 All-RSEQ first teamer Jaheem Joseph, big man Karam Sahly, and 2024-25 All-Rookie wing Yohan Leger, the team was still poised to play good basketball. This was absolutely necassary because of the strength of the RSEQ, Quebec's collegiate sports conference which operates as a part of Canadian USports. Bishop's returned their 1st team All-RSEQ big man tandem of Charles Robert and Etienne Gagnon and RSEQ 2nd team wing Yanis Malanda. And Laval, who had won the national championship two years prior, quietly cooked in the recruiting game (more on that later).

We came out of the gate hot. We started 5-2 in our non-conference schedule, dropping a frenetic game against Queens and a drubbing at the hands of last season's champion Victoria Vikes on their home court. Notable wins were against top 10 UOttawa in Phaneuf's return to John Dore Court and a dominant 104-60 dismantaling of Cape Breton University. During this stretch the team posted a 106 offensive and a 96 defensive rating for an impressive +10 net rating. Karam Sahly and Yohan Leger shone. Across the 71 possessions where Sahly got a post-up, 42 of those led to a score (translating to 1.30 points/post-up). It wasn't just his scoring that was impressive, but his passing as well. He was consistently able to find Leger in the corner when doubled. Leger punished defenses by shooting 53.8% (14/26) on catch and shoot 3s and finished the preseason as the most efficient player in the country with a 77.8 EFG%. Bonsu also demonstrated his shooting acumen, shooting 45% (13/29) from behind the arc. With Jahan acting as a floor general, Gibson-Maxwell filled in as an off-dribble shot creator, and despite a dip in efficiency Joseph continued to apply strong rim pressure and draw fouls at a high rate. At the end of the preseason Concordia was ranked 5th in Usports, only sitting below powerhouses Victoria, Bishops, TMU, and Western.

Then the regular season started. We lost a close 62-66 game at UQAM on a poor shooting night from both teams (36.6 EFG% Concordia / 41.3 EFG% UQAM). Then came a 72-78 loss to Bishops in the home opener. It was a back-and-forth game with 10 lead changes, but Bishops posted a 35.7% offensive rebound rate and in the end those extra shots were the deciding factor. Then came a 57-76 loss in Quebec City against Laval. In that game our weaknesses started to show. We settled for pull-up jump shots and went 3/9 on those looks, we went 4/10 at the line, and shot 5/20 on threes. We weren't comfortable playing out of our sets: 17 points on 25 set play possessions (0.68 points/possession). At the same time our defense struggled to contain Laval, posting a 106 defensive rating. Laval tore up our press, scoring 28 points in the 24 possessions I tagged as press (good for 1.40 points/poss). Laval's size gave us trouble: they went 19/33 (57.5%) and held us to 15/37 (40.5%) on within 6 feet of the rim. We got right with back-to-back home wins against McGill (62-68, closer than it should have been) and UQAM (84-74), but then took a decisive 86-73 loss at Bishops in which they completely dominated the 2nd half. It was a poor shooting night from both teams, but Bishops once again dominated the boards with a 44.4% offensive rebound rate and maintained a low 12% turnover rate, along with 20 trips to the FT line. That left us at 2-4 against RSEQ opponents, and dropped us out of the USports top 10 rankings going into the winter break.

We started the new year with an overtime win over eventual USports national champions Carleton in a defensive battle. The return of Junior Mercy supplied energy and playmaking, and we went 2-0 in a series against McGill to start the second half of the RSEQ schedule. Unfortunately the good vibes didn't last as we went 0-2 in a series against Laval. In those games the offense was passable, but the defense had a 111 defensive rating. That was when I started to really take note of Laval's rookie brother/guard duo Thierry and Chris Tshibola. Chris in particular made tough shot after tough shot and was able to get to the rim seemingly at will (Chris would go on to win not only RSEQ rookie of the year, but also RSEQ player of the year straight up). Laval's size continued to give us fits, and they ran a combination of roll-replace and spain actions that destabilized our interior defense, forcing backside help which they exploited to get open looks consistenly. Next was a 58-75 loss at Bishops in which we had a -24 net rating, and as a result of the three game skid our position in the bottom half of the RSEQ was solidified. We were able to hold on to a 64-60 win at home against UQAM in which neither team found rhythm, and we turned the ball over on nearly 30% of our possessions. Our next game was as must-win home matchup against Laval. It was a hard fought, defensive game. Concordia started 0/14 from 3 during the first three quarters while Laval shot a barely better 4/21 (19%). Despite a 4th quarter surge from Jahan and Mercy, Laval stuck to their gameplan and emerged with a 66-63 win. We demolished McGill 91-41 in the George Lengvari Cup, which featured the return of senior Tyrell Williams, but then lost 56-72 at home against Bishops in which we did lead at any point outside the first minute of the game. That loss all but cemented our position in the 3-seed going into playoffs, and then a 92-82 win over UQAM where we led the whole game made it a certainty.

Depsite a couple of wins over Bishops, Laval was in the 2-seed, and thus was our playoff matchup. The team made the drive up to Quebec City ready for a battle, and they showed up. Laval led for most of the first half, but then late in the 3rd and going into the 4th Concordia was able to put together an 11 point lead. Behind a parade of free throws and a couple of big shots, Laval was able to send the game to overtime. In the overtime period our offense stopped flowing, and we shot 3/11 while allowing high percentage looks on defense. The game ended 85-76 in favor of Laval. Concordia did what it took to make it a game: rebounding well and limiting turnovers, but Laval still shot 61.9% (13/21) at the rim. The refereeing was somewhat suspect in that game, and that stance is supported by the stats. Laval had 24 trips to the charity stripe for an absurd 0.67 free throw rate, compared with 6 FT trips and a 0.10 FTR for Concordia, the foul count over all was Concordia-29 and Laval-18.

Hoopalytics

As I was preparing for the Concordia season, researching methods and approaches to analytics, I encountered a company called Hoopsalytics. Their website can be found here. I first reached out to them regarding job opportunites, detailing the work I had done with Concordia. Although they did not have any openings they got back in touch with me saying "You sound as crazy and enthusiastic about analytics as we are, Let's talk!" We arranged a meeting with the two founders of Hoopsalytics, Bill Dettering and Mike Murphy.

Truly it was a joy to talk hoops with two like-minded individuals. As we talked we realized that we had taken very similar approaches to the problem of implementing advanced analytics for basketball, although Hoopsalytics had been built out with much more resources. They kindly agreed to give me free access to the Hoopsalytics system for use with Concordia, so that I could test and experiment with the system and provide them with some feedback. Over the season I used Hoopsalytics in conjunction with my own system, taking notes on potential areas of improvement. Mike, Bill, and I met approximately once a month to go over my experience with Hoopsalytics, as well as just to talk basketball. They were great about recieving feedback, and implemented some of my ideas right away, like the ability to see a timeline of lineups rotations in a game with the associated plus-minus of those shifts (something I came up with for Concordia which the coaches found very useful). Often those meetings devolved into just talking basketball, which I for one did not mind at all.

The beauty of Hoopsalytics is that it is completely customizable. In its base form it allows you to upload video to their server and then score the game as you would with other live-scoring systems; but with more detail. Instead of just tagging "shot taken by this player" you would tag "lighly-contested catch and shoot 3 taken by this player" then click on the location on the court where the shot was taken. Then the customizability comes into play. You are able to add the offensive and defensive sets that teams run into the system, and then tag possessions based on what teams run during the play. Then using offensive/defensive action tags you can really capture almost anything. For example I tagged all post-ups and variations of set plays using this feature. After tagging, Hoopsalytics has a sleek and intuitive system for veiwing stats. It enables you to filter by games, and see stats related to players, lineups, shots charts, coaching stats, assist maps, and on-off player impact metrics. And since there is integrated video, it allows you to simply click on a stat or event, and see all the video clips related to it. This was especially useful to me for scouting, since I was able to quickly pull up all the clips of a set a team ran against us and all the possessions where they deployed a certain defensive concept, or just view every catch and shoot three to see how the team was able to get those opportunities.

Hoopsalytics has also debuted an AI assistant that uses the Google Gemini system to analyze play by play data and answer queries. That tool was very helpful to me and the Concordia coaches, and can generate accurate analysis and insights related to both your team and opponents.