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12-20-2013, 10:35 PM
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Fun With SportVU: Touches Per Possession
Fun With SportVU: Touches Per Possession
 Image by Paul Bech via FlickrYesterday, I took a look at how often players passed the ball when they had Possession of it, and there were a few names that seemed somewhat out of place. More bigs than you might think were near the top of the list, even when accounting for their ability to grab defensive rebounds and quickly get the ball to someone better suited to bring it up court. Data can be information, but used properly, it can also contextualize other bits of data. Without k**wing how often a player Touches the ball per Possession — and just where those Touches happen — the previous passing data is interesting, if **t entirely useful. Today’s Fun With SportVU focuses just that context. The Player Tracking database makes an important distinction between a player’s total Touches per game and the times they touch the ball in the front court. When parsed for the number of back court touches, an interesting (though perhaps altogether unsurprising) trend starts to develop. This investigation focuses on the same 116 players in yesterday’s data sample — players who had played at least 27.9 minutes per game in 16 games as of the Sunday. A quick methodology **te for today. I calculated the total number of possessions a player sees when he’s on the court by taking his team’s pace (which measures possessions per 48 minutes, **t per game) With said player on-court and multiplying it by minutes per game played, divided by 48 minutes. To the numbers!*(Once again, I’m making the spreadsheet with all of today’s data available here, where it can be sorted in multiple ways. Enjoy!) Top 25 Percentage of Total Touches in Back Court  That table puts quite a different face on some of yesterday’s passing numbers, once the context is fully introduced. All of the top 25 players in percentage of their total Touches that occur in the back court are either power forwards, centers or guys who play a little of both. Be it through defensive rebounds, inbounding the ball* or corralling a loose ball after a defensive stop, big guys get a huge portion of their total Touches in the back court. *Inbound passes are included in touches, per Brian Kopp of STATS, LLC, the company behind the SportVU tech**logy. Bottom 25 Percentage of Total Touches in Back Court  On the other hand, the players who touch the ball the least in the back court are a mixture of ball handling guards and wings. The variance from top to bottom is huge; whereas the median average for the top 25 back court Touches hovers around 47%, With DeAndre Jordan leading the pack at nearly 60% of his total Touches happening in the back court, the average for the bottom 25 is just over 11%, With Jeff Teague’s 7.25% a league low. Ball handlers averaged around 15% of their total Touches in the back court, and bigs averaged approximately 46%. There is quite the range among the bigs, however; Tim Duncan, Al Horford, DeMarcus Cousins and Nikola Pekovic all get the ball in the back court less than 35% of the total times the touch it. Yet for all the back court Touches that big guys get, they still don’t come close to the wings and guards when it comes to total Touches per possession: Top 25 Touches Per Possession  True, there are a few power forwards and a wing on that list, but it’s a group dominated by guys who run their teams’ offenses. Something fairly interesting is that even the guys who get the most Touches per Possession barely see the ball more than once per trip down the court. Kemba Walker, who leads the league in Touches per possession, only gets 1.42 Touches per possession. And on the other side of things, the guys who don’t touch the ball very often per Possession are either wings who catch and shoot or 4s and 5s who go to the rim or get rid of the ball to a shooter when they do touch it: Bottom 25 Touches Per Possession  So even the guys who touch the ball least get it about once every other Possession on average. One last chart, which shows the bottom 25 in front court Touches per possession: Bottom 25 Front Court Touches Per Possession  20 of these 25 players are power forwards or bigs, and the other 25 are wings. Unsurprisingly, the player classified as a power forward or big in this data set who gets the most front court touch per Possession is…LeBron James, at .83 front court Touches per possession. Of course. The next highest total for a big guy is Josh McRoberts, at .73 front court Touches per possession. * * * In conclusion, bigs might touch the ball a lot, but a pretty big percentage of those Touches happen in the back court. Even the guys who touch the ball least do so roughly every other possession, and ** one Touches the ball on an average Possession even 1.5 times.*The data really is limited only by the different combinations one can imagine. Feel free to peruse the data at your own leisure, but be careful; it can be captivating. Statistical support courtesy of nba.com/stats 
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