Ex-NBA Coach Answers Sports Math Questions From Twitter

I’m Dean Oliver,

former assistant coach for the Washington Wizards

and a statistical analyst for sports.

I’m here to answer your questions from the internet.

This is sports math support.

[gentle music]

First up, @fwh1027,

what is the most efficient shot in basketball?

The most efficient shot in basketball is the layup.

Any shot around the rim.

Getting to the rim not only is a higher percentage shot,

it will more likely get you to the foul line

which players make at about 75 to 80%.

The second most important shot is any shot

beyond the three point arc.

Anything out here?

Shots out here are made at about 35%,

but because of the extra point awarded

for being beyond the arc they are more efficient.

@NBAADED, statistically speaking, who is better?

Jordan or LeBron?

Frankly Michael Jordan was probably

a little bit better defender.

LeBron is a little bit better passer

than Michael Jordan was.

LeBron adopted also the three point shot a lot earlier

than Michael Jordan did, but all in all

they are almost the same.

@Woumaxx asks what studies do you do

to become a sports statistician?

That is a good question.

This did not exist when I was a kid.

Having a career where you get to do math in sports

is a great innovation of the 21st century.

That being said

it’s not the easiest thing to get into anymore.

In order to do it, you really need to know sports for sure.

Sometimes people forget that,

but you also need to know things

like programming with a language like Python.

You need to know things about statistics, basic statistics,

or a little bit more advanced that will only help you.

Because this is an interdisciplinary job,

you need to know how to communicate it.

You need to know how to communicate math to sports people

and you need to know how to communicate sports

to math people.

From Ravens_Realest,

what is the most important quarterback stat?

The longest one in existence is the passer rating.

That one goes back 50 years.

It is a very simple metric that just evaluates

four categories of touchdowns, yards,

completion percentage, and interceptions.

It’s not great.

A better one is coming from ESPN, which is called QBR

which accounts for what is more important in modern NFL

which is the running quarterback, which is avoiding sacks.

The traditional stat that people probably latch onto

the most is quarterback completion percentage,

Of the more traditional stats

completion percentage correlates the best with success,

but it’s still not as good as something like QBR.

@AhnRee_ asks, bro, why are there so many no hitters now?

The bottom line for there being more no hitters is that

over the last 10 to 15 years, batting averages are down.

There are multiple reasons for this.

One of them is the shift.

In baseball they allowed a shift of fielders

to go basically wherever you wanted to.

When they studied the data, they knew that some players

hit the ball in certain areas more

so if you put more fielders in that area, you get more outs.

As of this season 2023,

the shift was made illegal to limit some of the ability

of a defense to shut down a hitter.

The other reason, probably they manage pitchers differently.

The pitchers don’t go

and throw a complete game nearly as much as they did

so you’re seeing a lot more combined no hitters.

20 years ago that wasn’t happening nearly as much.

It was all one pitcher doing the whole thing.

When you have multiple pitchers,

they come in, they’re fresh,

they have a better chance to shut down a hitter.

Moving on.

@MaxSportsStudio asks hypothetical,

a player is fouled at the buzzer.

He gets to shoot two free throws.

His team is down by one.

Is the probability that he makes the second shot affected

by the outcome of the first free throw?

First of all, the first free throw is usually much harder.

Players haven’t been able to dial in their depth perception.

There’s also this thought that their heartbeat is probably

a little bit faster because the action

is kind of calming down.

Usually it’s easier to make the ones after that,

but in this situation where the pressure is on,

players do react very differently under pressure

and there have been studies that have shown

free throw shooters who are under pressure,

they do shoot worse by five to 10%.

@CucuyOnline asks does defense really win championships?

In basketball in particular

what you see is that offense carries teams

through the regular season.

What happens when you get to the playoffs

is the best teams know how to ramp up their defense.

They are playing better offensive teams,

but they know how to strategically defend those teams,

take away the best players.

That is the way in which you see

defense winning championships.

Defense doesn’t win championships on its own.

Next up, Quora User asks,

how is Messi better than Ronaldo in stats?

The best measure we have for soccer performance

for individuals is goals.

It is not the best thing that could be developed

but over the years that Messi and Ronaldo played,

it is what we have.

@nicky_numbers asks, did you know that former

Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter was a below average fielder?

The numbers prove it.

Derek Jeter was not as good as his reputation

because some of the stats said that he gave up a lot

of extra runs on top of what other shortstops would do.

Won five gold gloves because when he got to a ball

he was pretty good at making the right throw,

making the right read,

but his ability to get to the ball was much more limited.

His range was limited and that mattered a lot.

@Ktwizzle512, how exactly is an NFL spread calculated

and what all goes into calculating the spread?

There is a lot of mathematical calculation that goes

into a spread including what players are gonna be available,

where the game is gonna be played,

whether the weather is gonna matter, wind, rain,

all of those sorts of things.

Who the refereeing crew is going to be.

All of these things have tendencies

for affecting the spread.

That is how an initial line can be set.

But what happens, because the NFL has bet so much,

a lot of the gambling houses,

is they just try to split the pot.

So at the end they’re just trying to make sure they have 50%

of the people on one side of line and 50% on the other side.

@elitedawg03 asked what is true shooting percentage?

I’ve been hearing it,

but what is the official way to calculate it?

True shooting percentage is just total points scored

by a player or a team divided by the shot attempts

they’ve taken which is a combination of field goal attempts

from the field and a fraction of their free throw attempts.

It’s more representative of the actual contribution

of a player because it captures how many points

a player is getting from their field goal attempts.

So if they’re shooting a lot from three,

it’s capturing that efficiency over someone who takes a lot

of twos and it’s capturing their ability to get

to the foul line, which can be enormous for players

like Jimmy Butler or Giannis or LeBron.

@AMiller10 asks when are stupid people going to realize

that pitcher wins are a meaningless stat

that shouldn’t be used to decide anything?

A pitcher win-loss record actually tells you something,

which is winning and avoiding losing,

but it doesn’t get at all the details very well

for what a pitcher is doing.

It doesn’t get at their ability to throw strikes.

It doesn’t get at their ability to limit

the opposing team’s hitters.

So it’s missing important details

but it’s getting at something important.

@RellDMC, have running backs ever been less valued

in NFL history?

It is true right now that NFL running backs

are being devalued, probably rightly so,

whether they’ve gone past where they’re getting devalued

too much, I don’t know.

The reason they are getting devalued is because

we’re recognizing that the offensive line matters a lot

in how many yards those running backs get.

So the credit that those guys used to get as superstars,

they’re not getting quite as much of as they used to.

So yes, they are getting devalued and probably rightly so.

Moving on.

@KingDJ_5297, I’m supposed to believe

that advanced stats work for the NBA?

Yes, advanced stats work for the NBA

probably better than other sports.

For instance, there are team offensive ratings

and team defensive ratings

which are how many points a team scores

and allows per 100 possessions.

That is a very accurate representation of how good

an offense or a defense is.

The NFL has maybe 14 drives for a team in a game.

Baseball has maybe 40 at bats.

In basketball, you have probably 80 possessions

where you have the best players able to touch the ball

and able to shoot the ball,

so you get a very good representation of how good teams are.

@dawblack, you can measure nearly everything statistically.

How do you statistically measure an offensive guard?

In football I presume?

In the NFL we have an immense amount of data

that tracks where all the players are on the field

at every point in time,

which direction they’re facing and so forth.

With all of this data now you can actually measure how well

offensive guards for instance, block,

how well can they win the block against a defensive player,

keeping that defensive player

from getting either to a running back

or to a quarterback.

From I.C. @nola_legend,

assists are the most overrated stats in basketball.

When will people understand this?

Assists in the NBA are probably given out too easily.

They give them for very simple passes

but they also give them for more difficult passes.

The players who get a lot of the easy assists

are probably overrated,

but the ones who have the passes for the alley oops,

for the layups,

the ones in transition, those are very valuable.

I wouldn’t call them overrated as a stat, but I would say

that some of the players who get assists are overrated.

@RZN2BLV asks did Bill James and Billy Beane

change the game of baseball?

Bill James did it by writing a book,

multiple books in fact called the Baseball Abstracts,

which got read by a lot of fans,

and then eventually by people working in baseball

like the general manager of the Oakland A’s Billy Beane.

The game of baseball, like a lot of sports actually is about

identifying the best players

and how to put them in the best position to succeed.

What they used is data to help make those decisions.

A particular statistic that they recognized as undervalued

was walks or on-base percentage.

The fact that walks get you on base on top of

getting a base hit is something that was not appreciated

by traditional major league baseball.

They did that behind the scenes

and gained a major advantage.

Next up, RedditUser360 asks what statistics

are most important in the NBA?

It’s not things like points

and rebounds and turnovers and assists.

It is offensive rating and defensive rating.

Points a team scores and allows per a hundred possessions.

Beyond that, when you’re trying to understand what a team

is doing to be efficient on either side of the basketball,

most important things are what call the four factors

and the four factors are how well you shoot,

which is an effective field goal percentage,

which weights three point shots more than two point shots.

A turnover percentage, an offensive rebounding percentage,

and then how often you get to the line.

Those four things will tell you why an offense

or a defense is efficient.

@VaguelyArtistic, if the triangle is such a simple shape

why can’t anyone explain the triangle offense?

I’m not going to explain the triangle offense here.

I can tell you that the triangle offense is successful

only with a couple coaches frankly.

It was successful with Phil Jackson with the Bulls

and with the Lakers.

You are creating good shots for good players and good shots

for even average players who are there to set screens

and just play off the ball

and what it does is it relies upon the strengths

of the players themselves to make decisions.

This is a good one.

@ehoichi, is red zone efficiency a good efficiency stat?

The red zone efficiency is how well an offense does

within the last 20 yards of the field.

Red zone efficiency is useful.

It is predictive to some degree

and it explains the success of teams.

Teams that are very good at it, they will be better offenses

and teams that are bad, they will be worse.

But is it perfect?

No, jst like pretty much every other NFL statistic.

Moving on.

@ItsAColeWorld26 asks what’s the most important stat

for a receiver?

Catches, if you’re gonna use very simple metrics

are the best representation of a receiver’s ability.

It is not the best metric when you start including

the analytical stats.

We have a lot better information on drops for instance,

for receivers, how difficult the catch is,

where the ball was, whether they had to pull it in.

There are better stats for that

but it’s a complex series of them.

There’s not a simple metric at this point

for overall wide receiver ability.

That’s all the questions we have for sports math.

Till next time.