Nylon Calculus: Statistical impacts of moving up positions

In this era of positionless basketball, it’s less important than ever to define players by the nominal position they play on the court. However, position denominations are still a useful proxy for the general roles a player has on the court. Guards tend to carry most of the ball-handling burden, while forwards and centers are more responsible for a team’s rebounding and shot-blocking. Smaller players are generally more “skilled” than their big men counterparts, at least in terms of shooting and playmaking.

As the game evolves, however, these roles are getting more blurry. Big men are running the pick-and-roll with each other, forwards are shooting nearly 80 percent of their shots from deep and one of the best passers in the NBA is a center. As Krishna Narsu pointed out, lineups aren’t necessarily getting smaller, but they are getting more skilled. That’s why it’s inevitable to see that players whose skillsets have fallen behind the league-wide skill level at their position, or who play for ambitious teams looking to increase the amount of ball-handling and spacing in their lineups, have “moved up” positions to a traditionally less skilled one (i.e. playing the majority of their minutes shooting guard one year to small forward the next).

Among players with at least 500 minutes played in consecutive seasons, there have been 316 cases of a player moving up positions, compared to 279 cases of a player moving down over the past ten seasons. Since 2010-11, only one season saw more rotation players move down positions than move up, and 40 players have moved up positions this year:

*I’m defining a player’s position as the one they spent the most time at, per Basketball-Reference.com’s position estimates

More specifically, I’ll look closely at three cases: players moving from shooting guard to small forward, small forward to power forward and power forward to center. These position changes are more likely to indicate a team explicitly trying to add more skill in their frontcourt. As players like Draymond Green, Carmelo Anthony and Ryan Anderson have redefined the power forward position, small forward to power forward transitions have generally been on the rise over the past decade. A whopping 13 players who spent the most time at small forward in 2016-17 are considered a power forward in 2017-18:

Here are some notable players that are spending significantly more time at a different position in 2017-18 vs 2016-17:

Some of these position changes, like Tim Hardaway Jr. arriving on a team with Courtney Lee and Jabari Parker still recovering from a torn ACL, happened due to a change of team or personnel while others, like Kevin Love’s move to center, were the result of deliberate lineup modifications by the coaching staff.

The results on this group have been mixed. Domantas Sabonis appears to be much better utilized at center while Aaron Gordon being more effective at the 4 was one of the worst kept, and most frustrating secrets in the NBA. Evan Fournier and Hardaway both rate over 2 points better in Box Plus-Minus early on vs. last season, but it’s unclear whether their nominal position change had anything to do with it vs. natural growth for young wings. Gorgui Dieng and Patrick Patterson have struggled spending more time at the 5 this year — Patterson was never good enough on the boards to be a center while Dieng’s block rate has mysteriously fallen off a cliff (0.7 percent this year vs a 3.1 percent career rate). Kevin Love is more or less doing what he’s done during his Cavs tenure but is shooting 3’s at a lower rate and getting to the rim and line more, resulting in the highest true shooting percentage of his career (59.7 percent).

Although the sample size over ten years is too small to make a conclusive argument, it appears that players who move up positions are actually more statistically similar to their new position than their old one, even before they moved up. Shooting guards who become small forwards are typically better rebounders and less prolific playmakers than their peers. Ditto for small forwards who become power forwards, in addition to also generally having higher block and lower steal rates than other small forwards who remain in the position (it is interesting to note that small forward to power forward players still shoot 3s, which indicates an explicit effort to build lineups with more spacing). The power forwards who become centers have higher rebound and block rates than other power forwards while shooting 3s at a lower rate, showing that they can hang with other big men on the block while lack the shooting desired at the modern power forward position.

I plugged this information into a model to try and identify players who could be candidates for moving up positions in the future. David Nwaba fits the profile of a shooting guard that could spend more time at the 3. Despite standing 6-foot-4 (but with a 7-foot-0 wingspan) he posts excellent defensive rebound and block rates for a 2-guard. Defensive wizard Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, who swats over a block per 36 minutes, could be an effective power forward, where his shooting woes would be less detrimental. And finally, my model believes Noah Vonleh — less skilled than most 4s —  could be spending more time at the 5, and that the Bucks and Heat could experiment with smaller lineups featuring Giannis Antetokounmpo and Justise Winslow as small-ball centers (the Greek Freak already spends about 3 percent of his minutes there, per Basketball-Reference).

It’s also interesting to note that outside of modest improvements in defensive rebounding and shot blocking, which are largely a function of the player staying closer to the post on defense, the statistical profiles of these players generally don’t change much even after moving up positions.

Next: Nylon Calculus -- A Thanksgiving meal to represent every NBA team

The chart below is kind of convoluted, but it illustrates these points. Blue bars indicate player statistics in the year before they moved up positions. Green bars indicate player statistics in the year they moved up positions. And the red and purple bars show average player statistics for both the old and new positions. I converted all values to percentiles to get everything on the same scale.