I once attended a summer basketball camp run by a wildly successful high school basketball coach. Each morning, before the drills would start, the coach would give a brief lecture of sorts. Topics breached the normal platitudes: Teamwork, effort, etc..
One morning, the topic was scouting. During the lecture, Coach let us in on a little secret of his scouting prep.
“Buy a program”, he said.
His assertion was that buried in that program are stats and in those stats is one magical column that allows unprecedented amounts of information to be gleaned: Free throw attempts.
It was Coach’s claim that free throws attempted were the strongest single-number indicator of the best player. The notion was that free throws not only indicate scoring prowess but a propensity for aggression.
I was floored by this wizardry but it was 1999 and I was ten years old. At that time, the only three-letter statistics I was familiar with were PTS, REB and AST.
MIT’s Sloan Sports Analytics Conference
Needless to say, the basketball community has become increasingly and effectively analytical since I was 10. In that process of time, hundreds of three-letter statistics have been developed to capture productivity in one single-number. Of the bunch, RPM — which stands for Real-Plus Minus — is probably the most respected.
In theory, RPM gives what Coach was looking for: A catch-all statistic broken down to a single number that allows those unfamiliar a bit of insight into a player’s on-court impact.
Tyus Jones’s Real Plus-Minus
Tyus Jones currently has the 12th-best RPM in the entire NBA. Which is to say: We still haven’t figured this out.
Jones has been a revelation for the Wolves this season. After jettisoning Ricky Rubio and Kris Dunn and only signing the oft-injured Jeff Teague and expert cheerleader Aaron Brooks, the Wolves desperately needed a suitable backup point guard. Jones has been that and more.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFZ7csnsEUY&t=22s
However, few — even in Minnesota — would argue he has been the 12th-best player in the NBA.
If Jones’s rank in RPM shows how far we have to go, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference that happened this past weekend in Boston is an example of how far the analytics community has come.
The most notable attendee of the conference was Barack Obama, who kicked off the event with a keynote speech. Less notable — but very notable to stat junkies, like me — were the appearances of Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey and former Philadelphia 76ers General Manager Sam Hinkie.
Morey, who holds the informal post of Commander in Chief of the analytics community, specifically spoke about RPM as one of the good but flawed statistics that are publically available to basketball fans. His assertion to the stat’s flaw was that there can be a correlation towards a player contributing to team success without being the explicit cause of the success.
“That player could be very replaceable by multiple players with that same skill set,” said Morey on a panel called Take That for Data: Basketball Analytics.
“Even though it’s correct that they’re creating that winning, in our roles [as General Managers] of having to decide player to player, you have to think about how else can you fill that role.”
The reason the Jeff Teague vs. Tyus Jones debate became such a thing in Minnesota was that when Jones stepped into the starter role for the injured Jeff Teague there was a correlation to success. Jones’s longest start streak was smack dab in the middle of the Wolves’ best run of the season.
It can be argued, that while this indicated a correlation between Jones and success, it did not firmly suggest causation.
Teague does not stack up anywhere near as well as Jones does in RPM but the team has still found success with him in other statistics and probably, more importantly, the win column. What often goes forgotten in Jones’s streak is the fact that the Wolves won the five games prior to Teague’s injury and the three games that followed his return.
To Morey’s point, Jones was creating winning but perhaps the point guard role in Minnesota was simply ripe at that time. Perhaps any suitable backup point guard would have found similar success to the windfall Jones produced because the Wolves as a team were peaking.
If this was the case, it would make sense that Jones’s RPM numbers became somewhat inflated during that time.
Thirty-one percent of the total minutes Jones has played this season have come in games Teague hasn’t played in. Perhaps due to the smaller sum of minutes Jones receives when Teague is healthy, he statistically benefited from that specific run more than any other player on the team.
On the same panel as Morey, Boston Celtics Assistant General Manager Mike Zarren said that if a stat is at odds with what you’re watching, then “either the way the number is calculated or the way you’re watching the game is probably wrong.”
If it can be agreed upon that Jones is not, in fact, one of the best point guards in the league while watching him play, it can be argued that the stat is at odds with Jones in this specific incidence.
Some sort of conflation with the statistic may have happened due to the role Jones was playing during that specific time period.
The New Point Guard Role
Jimmy Butler’s indefinite absence changes the role of every player on the roster. The first two games Butler has missed since his knee injury suggest the point guard role may be one of the most affected on the team. The way Teague functions in the offense has clearly changed in the small sample. Most notably, his propensity to attack on offense has increased.
Field goal attempts can wildly vacillate from game-to-game but Teague’s 31 attempts in the two games — a total he has only exceeded in consecutive games one other time this season — indicates a shift in his focus. A shift in aggression.
On top of 17 field goal attempts against Sacramento on Monday, Teague also attempted 12 free throws. The only game Teague has attempted more than 12 free throws was mid-January against the Clippers. He shot 17 that night on his way to a season-high of 30 points — another game Butler missed.
While that high school basketball coach may have been misinformed by the idea that free throw attempts indicate who the best player is, he may not have been off in the idea that FTA is a fair statistic in approximating aggression. For Teague, it has often been an indicator of not only aggression but the prominence of his role in a given game.
Tyus Jones has only played 29 minutes since Butler went down. Meaning, his role as a backup has not changed. An interesting question in the Teague versus Tyus debate, now, is: How would Jones fair in this new role?
It is known that Jones thrived as the team’s fourth or fifth option while starting in Teague’s stead, but would it be different now that there is a heavier offensive burden on his position?
Perhaps Jones would continue to flourish but his past performance — that helped lead him to be 12th in the league in RPM — cannot be banked on because the role is inherently different.
This isn’t to say Jones has become obsolete. He is still pretty clearly one of the team’s strongest defenders with or without Butler. It is also a safe assumption that Jones will continue to lead the second-unit admirably. But if there are questions about how he would now contribute amongst the starters then Teague’s value further increases.
This is all very speculative as there have only been two games played post-injury — both against awful teams — but it does raise interesting questions. Questions that require the use of statistics but also the utilization of perception.
Jalen Rose also spoke at the Sloan Conference. He provided his subjective insight on the state of the functionality of analytics.
“I’m not a person that frowns upon analytics,” said Rose. “I do think it’s a tool, but not the toolbox.”
That notion seems fair, particularly in the Teague and Jones conversation.
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