Darryl Blackport, data wizard, designer and the one who often makes our Nylon Calculus dreams into reality, has written a computer program that tabulates possession counts from the official play-by-play rundown. That means, from this point forward, analytics will have access to ACTUAL efficiency on offense and defense.
The difference between actual possession counts and estimated possession counts may seem like a small advancement, but it is an important one. It made sense back in the days of Dean Oliver’s “Basketball on Paper” to estimate possessions. Play-by-play accounts weren’t readily available! They have been for several years now, and it’s time for the analytics field to use the actual counts. Devin Kharpertian discussed this very idea back on December 1, 2012 in an article written for The Brooklyn Game. It’s almost December 1, 2014 so the real counts are long overdue!
Actual possession counts means we can standardize measures of offensive and defensive efficiency, as many statistical sites like NBA.com and Basketball-Reference use slightly different formulas for their estimates, and thus have slightly different offensive and defensive efficiency marks.
Darryl’s possessions counts will be found here for this season, here for last season, and on the main menu bar for the site under the “Our Stats” heading. Each set will be organized by each team’s games and will include:
- Final Score
- Offensive and Defensive Possession Counts
- Offensive and Defensive Efficiency
- Date of the Game
We invite you to check out the log of your favorite team to review what’s happened thus far. And, we hope you’ll continue to do so throughout the season. We believe they’ll provide quick nutshell assessments for fans and media, and helpful information for anyone involved in the legal betting markets.
We focused on these particular categories because they’re at the heart of so much team analysis in the modern game. We made sure to include the date of each game so analysts can monitor back-to-back spots and other fatigue related issues in a team’s schedule. Overtime games are noted with asterisks to help you recognize when extra playing time has inflated a full game possession count.
Nylon Calculus team logs are purposely brief and to the point. A lot of websites have monster-sized charts that can make it hard to pin down the essential elements that deserve the most focus. As a result, they’re not widely used by the mainstream. We’re all about “basketball numbers for the people!” These will get you what you need to know quickly. Updated daily.
The deeper we get into the season, the more valuable the logs will become in helping to understand team strengths and weaknesses amidst the flowing narratives of a long campaign. We hope you enjoy them. Please send any comments/feed back to TheNylonCalculus@gmail.com. And bookmark the page so you can follow your favorite team(s) and monitor their season(s) from this point forward.