February 2005 – This Month in Coaches Advisor…

In this issue:

Basketball – Applying the lessons of Moneyball to a basketball team.

Basketball – What the Heck is Grinnell Ball?

What really counts in winning and losing?

I recently read the book Moneyball, by Michael Lewis.  Baseball fans know this book as the catalyst for an out of control argument that went on in baseball circles about a year ago.  It seems that a few teams were using sophisticated statistical
analysis to sort just what really helps a team win versus what the conventional wisdom said.  This analysis then led to studying which players could produce those stats that led to winning and also gave them a system for assigning financial value to players. The Oakland A’s were the center piece of the book and Billy Beane the hero or villain depending on which side of the road you preferred.

The idea behind the  Moneyball philosophy was to simply look at the game in a new way and see if there was a way for small market teams to compete with the big boys by buying players that no one else wanted, but only if they showed a tendency to excel in those obscure (at the time)  measures of success the statisticians had produced.

On Base Percentage, for Money Ball teams, became the holy grail of offense. Bunting was a waste of time and so was stealing bases. Moneyball did notlike giving away outs.  It did not matter if you looked like an athlete or not, or if Smokey Joe the scout said you had a good “upside”.  What mattered were the stats as it related to outcomes of winning games. Scoring more runs than you gave up.

Apply Moneyball to basketball. As a basketball coach, do you really know what wins games for you? More importantly, for the style you play, do you know what wins games for you?  At the end of the year, do you know how many more games you would have won if you made 10% more free throws?  Do you know how many times each player actually got to the foul line per minute played? How many did they make?  These are just a few examples of digging deeper. Perhaps you already have this data.  In the  Moneyball sense, you would use this information more than things like judged natural ability, athleticism or even something like height advantage, to determine who the best players are for you.

More examples: How many points is an offensive and defensive rebound worth to your team?  An offensive rebound gives you a chance at 2 or 3 points and a defensive rebound takes away the chance at 2 or 3 points. Have you correlated your point differential in wins and losses with your total number of rebounds, offensive rebounds, defensive rebounds and the differential in those categories?  Do you know which of your players produces the best results in this area?  Based on your correlations, does it even matter?

All I am saying here is that if you are not happy with your team’s performance or the outcomes you get, maybe it’s time to step back and take a new look at what really matters to you and to your success.

What the Heck is Grinnell Ball

Grinnell College is a small, private, liberal arts school in Iowa. They used to lose all the time in basketball. That is until their coach, Dave Arsenault, decided to change the “unofficial” rules of how basketball was played.  Now they usually win more than they lose, take at least 100 shots per game, rotate 15-18 players, full court press and trap all game and do not have one person who plays more than 20 minutes per game. Alas, it does not always work as Grinnell is 4-13 so far this season.  Regardless, Arsenault has turned the program around for the most part and has no plans for slowing things down.

D3hoops.com’s Mark Simon’s recent article lays it all out of you in great detail.
Read the article .

It seems that the System, which was recently showcased in an ESPN game is catching on with other teams that are usually short on talent, but long on
players, hustle and shooters. Look at the top 5 scoring teams in the country in D-III:

  Team                         PPG      W/L
Redlands, CA            140.1       10-6
Grinnell, IA               110.9       4-13
Westminster, PA      109.2      13-6
Puget Sound, WA      99.3       13-3
Marietta, OH             99.1         2-17

In the pre-season, I was in the office of Washington and Jefferson men’s basketball coach Karel Jelinek who popped in a tape of their team’s recent scrimmage with Westminster. Said Jelinek “Wait until you see this, you are not going to believe it. The coach actually called me the day before and apologized for making the switch to The System. At least he gave me an advance warning!”

The tape rolled and it was chaos. Why shoot a lay-up when you can shoot a three? Let them have that easy bucket, if we hurry back we’ll have numbers! It was easy to see how basketball purists might be a tad pissed. The System borrows from hockey by making rapid, full line-up substitutions with the idea of going 100 mph for a short time, resting players while another 5 do it, and so on. While no one plays more than 20 minutes, they have actually played the equivalent of a full game in shots and distance covered.