Musings on Sloan: Inside Man

Posted by Rob Mahoney on March 10, 2010 under Commentary | 2 Comments to Read

Before this season began, I had the pleasure of chatting a bit with the Mavericks’ newly-christened stat head, Roland Beech. We haven’t had the opportunity to check in with him since, but Mark Cuban provided us with an update at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. Marc Stein asked Cuban about Beech specifically during the keynote basketball panel, entitled “Basketball Analytics,” and here was Cuban’s response:

If we were going to get to the point where we were able to collect more data and integrate the coaching staff more fully into using it, as opposed to just getting daily reports that we could sit down and review with the coaching staff, I wanted to have somebody there…on site that they could talk to at any time. Even during the game.

He talks to the players, don’t get me wrong — Dirk will give [Roland] as much of a hard time about his haircut as he gives anyone else. But that’s the type of thing where you don’t want too many voices. So we work back through the coaches.

Beech is officially a member of the Mavericks’ coaching staff, and he sits near the bench, often alongside Cuban, during the games. But even more important than the capacity in which Beech is working with the team is the note that Cubes touched on at the end, and one that was prevalent throughout the entire conference. Having the right statistics is one thing, and finding the right way to utilize them is something else entirely. You can’t just hammer raw data into a player’s head through their ear, it needs to be broken down. It needs to be analyzed.

Mike Zarren, Assistant GM and Team Counsel for the Celtics, hammered that point home perfectly:

I don’t know what it would mean to a player to tell him that “Some guy’s adjusted plus-minus is plus four.” I mean, how does that change what he does on a particular night? It doesn’t mean anything.

The most important thing to remember with advanced stats in basketball is that everything is contextual. That’s where the power lies. It’s the decoder that translates measures of all kinds into something usable, something real. It’s what separates those with an understanding of how to use the data — those who classify statistics as tools and never assume any metric to be omnipotent — from those who do not. The measures provided are simply descriptors of what we’ve seen on the floor. There are assigned values, calculations, and analysis that go along with those measures, but that’s simply another way to make sense of the information available.

But somewhere between that “adjusted plus-minus [of] plus four,” and the players on the court is a process. It involves the aforementioned decoding, it involves lineup analysis, and it involves evaluation of situational effectiveness. And it certainly involves Beech, the man working behind the scenes to ensure that the Mavs don’t miss a beat in the statistical revolution. Dallas is among the first franchises to not only embrace analytical research, but to have a full-time advisor on hand. Take pride, Mavs fans, because while franchises around the league are cavemen that run in fear of fire, your team, and more specifically your owner, realizes the value and application of it.

That level of analysis is the future of professional basketball. As teams accumulate more and more data, the advantages will become even clearer. There’s just so much that a coach can do when they know what Rick Carlisle knows. If basketball really is a game of match-ups, then the Mavs’ brain trust gives them a huge match-up advantage almost every night out; few teams are as  progressive as your Dallas Mavericks, and that’s something to hang your hat on.