NBA.com Silently Releases Tons Of New SportVU Toys

Oct 29, 2014; Portland, OR, USA; Portland Trail Blazers forward LaMarcus Aldridge (12) reacts after making a basket against the Oklahoma City Thunder during the fourth quarter at the Moda Center. Mandatory Credit: Craig Mitchelldyer-USA TODAY Sports

Perhaps responding to the desires of deep-diving stat-nerds everywhere, or at least in my living room, NBA.com has dumped a staggering amount of new data from the on us from SportVU player tracking system to start the year. For example, for every shot taken going back to last season, we can now identify not only the time, location and result of the shot, but also

• Time remaining on the shot clock
• Number of dribbles taken before the shot
• Length of time the shooter possessed the ball before shooting
• Identity of closest defender
• Distance to the shooter of that defender

Without being at all hyperbolic, this represents an exponential increase in the amount and granularity of data available to describe and evaluate NBA basketball. While it’s not “everything” (which we the public are never going to see), the release of this information provides a real opportunity for some digging into fundamental building blocks of the game.

Finding the goodies might take a little bit of digging. Find your way to an individual player page on NBA.com, and click the “Tracking” tab to the far right:

As you can see, these shot logs are only the tip of the iceberg, as there is similar information available for passing, defense and rebounding. The fact that data goes back to last season is especially helpful because it provides a robust data sample to begin toying with, which, of course, I’ve spent way too much time over the past few days doing. Thanks in part to our own Darryl Blackport (TNC’s master of data collection), here are some interesting factoids from last season’s data:

• The averages distance between a defender and shooter was 4.18 feet on all shots. This broke down into 3.5 feet between defender and two-point shooter and 6.11 feet to three-point shooters.

• Kevin Love passed the ball to Ricky Rubio 2373 times last season, the most of any such combination in the league. Rubio passed the ball to Love 1815 times.
• Speaking of three-point-shooters and defensive pressure, a minuscule number of threes were attempted with the defender within two feet of the shooter[1. It’s important to remember that SportVU tracks center of body mass rather than arm or hand position. 2 feet of separation in body position still translates to pretty smothering defense on a shot release]. No player took even 1/10 of a three per game under this kind of duress, and they accounted for just under 1.7% of total three-point attempts. Many more 3s were attempted with the defense between 2 and 4 feet from the shooter. Here are the league leaders in per game attempts under these (extremely Swaggy) conditions. League average was 30.4% on these shots:

• Completely uncontested, wide open threes were made at a rate of 39.3%. Trevor Ariza may owe John Wall a cut of his deal, as Ariza led the league by averaging three such uncontested attempts per game, of which Ariza knocked down 45.6%.
• An open 3 is almost literally a layup for some players. Kyle Korver shot 53.6% on completely unguarded threes. This translates to an effective field goal percentage of 80%. Uncontested shots at the rim are scored at around an 80% clip as well. Four other players (on at least 1 attempt per game) hit over 50% of their uncovered threes: Pablo Prigioni, Terrence Ross, Mike Miller and Bradley Beal. On the other end of the spectrum, Josh Smith shot 30.3% on completely unguarded threes, while Corey Brewer shot 23.1%.
• DeMar DeRozan was the “most heavily contested” 3-point shooter on average followed closely by Kevin Durant. Boris Diaw was the most wide open, having almost 9 feet of space on his average three attempt.

• Every two feet of space seems to be worth about 5% of 3pt FG%:

Do any of these “discoveries” mean anything? At this point, who knows. This is just a quick pass through, and I’m quite certain we’ll have much much MUCH more to come here at Nylon Calculus.