Jump Ball Pairings Between the Kings and Hornets
By Matt Femrite
Over here at Nylon Calculus you can find the go-to statistic to measure player value: jump ball win-loss records. Okay, maybe those stats are closer to completely meaningless than important, but with the help of Darryl Blackport I’ve made jump balls from the last 20 years publicly available and update them frequently. The results may surprise you!
While updating last night, I came across the Kings-Hornets game that went into overtime. Five minutes of free basketball can lead to box scores with a ton to point at, but I noticed a weird little thing while tallying wins and losses for those who participated in jump balls. The pairing during the overtime opening tip was completely different from the one to start the game. Al Jefferson and Willie Cauley-Stein got the game started at half-court while Cody Zeller and Kosta Koufos battled for the slightly more important jump ball in overtime.
I’m not sure how common that seems. Over 48 minutes, foul trouble will affect a player or two, and bigs can be vulnerable to this. One or two of them might foul out before the end of the game, leaving a backup to take the jump ball in overtime. There are also players who are pseudo starters, on the floor for the opening tip but only logging about 20 minutes per game and off the floor for the five-minute overtime. It’s hard to believe a coach would manage their players to the point they would sub in a player, preferably tall and long, just to win the overtime tip, but I guess you never know.[1. JaVale McGee would be a fun example with the Mavs, an all-time great at jump balls with a win percentage 25 percent greater than Zaza Pachulia, but you can trust Pachulia to do a few more positive things on the court.] Actually, why not go all-out and acquire a starting five with great jump ball win percentages? There’s no way that doesn’t work out.
It turns out that what happened during the Kings-Hornets game was pretty rare without accounting for foul trouble. It was the first time this season that neither player in the opening tip was in the one to start an overtime. Out of the 3,300 first quarter-overtime jump ball combinations I have from 1997 to 2015, only 185 (about 5.6 percent) had completely different pairings.
Let’s take a quick look at what last season’s different pairings were like, according to NBA.com, and throw in last night’s game, too:
As a reminder, winning the jump ball to start the game is far too noisy to measure with team success, but according to Inpredictable winning the jump ball in overtime increases a team’s chance of winning by 4.2 percent. That’s not a whole lot, but it does allow the team who gets the first possession a chance to start and end the overtime with the ball while never ending the overtime with one less possession. That has some value over a five-minute span where teams are getting around only 10 possessions each.
It also makes some overtime pairings like last night a little more interesting. Between Cauley-Stein and Jefferson, the latter player was favored to win the tip, and he came through, now 8-7 for the year and a winning percentage around 45 for his career in open tips. Meanwhile, Cauley-Stein is now 1-11 and still winless in open tips, though history says even the worst players at jump balls have a winning percentage of at least 20 percent over a sample of at least 100.
The pairing in overtime was in favor of Sacramento, though. Koufos won over 60 percent of his open tips for his career while I have Zeller at just 8-22 going into last night. Sacramento indeed got the first possession and even scored on it, but they ended up losing 127-122.
I so badly want to believe that just an ounce of why Koufos took the jump ball was because he has been so much better at them than Cauley-Stein, but often times that would be silly micro-managing. There were likely far, far more important reasons than jump ball matchups for why Koufos was on the floor, but whatever. If I was a GM and coach, I’d roll out this squad every day:
As a reminder, you can view jump ball stats here.