## The Risk of The 3-Point Shot

As more and more teams are increasing the number of threes they attempt based on some misplaced logical fallacy that this somehow leads to an efficient offense, we show below that it is in fact in a team’s opponent’s interest for a team to attempt as many three point shots as possible.

Looking at this season’s data, let us examine two things. The first thing is the number of points a team’s opponent is expected to score for every three-point shot the other team attempts. We discovered that remarkably, the number of points obeys a lognormal distribution:

$\boxed{P(X) = \frac{2.86089 e^{-25.713 (\log (X)-1.3119)^2}}{X}}$

This means that for every three point shot your team attempts, the opposing team is expected to score

$\boxed{\int X P(X) dX = 1.87475\, -1.87475 \text{erf}(6.75099\, -5.0708 \log (X))}$

which comes out to about 3.7495 points. So, for every 3PA by a team, the opponent is expected to score more than 3 points based on the most recent NBA data. Keeping that in mind, we see also by integrating $P(x)$ above that there is a 99.99% probability that the opponent will score more than 2 points for every 3PA by a team, and a 93.693% probability that the opponent will score more than 3 points for every single 3PA by the other team.

This would suggest a significant breakdown of defensive emphasis in the “modern-day” NBA where evidently teams are just interested in playing shot-for-shot basketball, but in a very risky way that is not optimal.

The work so far covered just three-point attempts, but, what are the effects of missing a three-point shot? The number of opponent points per a three-point miss also remarkably obeys a lognormal distribution:

$\boxed{P(X) = \frac{2.81227 e^{-24.8464 (\log (X)-1.7605)^2}}{X}}$

Therefore, for every three-point shot your team misses, the opposing team is expected to score:

$\boxed{\int X P(X) dX = 2.93707\, -2.93707 \text{erf}(8.87571\, -4.98461 \log (X))}$

which comes out to about 5.87345 points. This identifies a remarkable risk to a team missing a three-point shot. This computation shows that one three-point shot miss corresponds to about 6 points for the opposing team! Looking at probabilities by integrating the density function above, one can show that there is a 99.9999% probability that the opposing team would score more than two points for every three-point miss, a 99.998% probability that the opposing team would score more than three points for every three-point miss, a 99.583% probability that the opposing team would score more than four points for every three-point miss, and so on.

What these calculations demonstrate is that gearing a team’s offense to focus on attempting three-point shots is remarkably risky, especially if a team misses a three-point shot. Given that the average number of three-point attempts is increasing over the last number of years, but the average number of makes has relatively stayed the same (See this older article here: https://relativitydigest.com/2016/05/26/the-three-point-shot-myth-continued/), teams are exposing themselves to greater and greater risk of losing games by adopting this style of play.

## What if Michael Jordan Played in Today’s NBA?

It seems that one cannot turn on ESPN or any YouTube channel nowadays without the ongoing debate of whether Michael Jordan is better than Lebron, what would happen if Michael Jordan played in today’s NBA, etc… However, I have not seen a single scientific approach to this question. Albeit, it is sort of an impossible question to answer, but, using data science I will try.

From a data science perspective, it only makes sense to look at Michael Jordan’s performance in a single season, and try to predict based on that season how he would perform in the most recent NBA season. That being said, let’s look at Michael Jordan’s game-to-game performance in the 1995-1996 NBA season when the Bulls went 72-10.

Using neural networks and Garson’s algorithm , to regress against Michael Jordan’s per game point total, we note the following:

One can see from this variable importance plot, Michael’s points in a given game were most positively associated with teams that committed a high number of turnovers followed by teams that make a lot of 3-point shots. Interestingly, there was not a strong negative factor on Michael’s points in a given game.

Given this information, and the per-game league averages of the 2017 season, we used this neural network to make a prediction on how many points Michael would average in today’s season:

Michael Jordan: 2017 NBA Season Prediction: 32.91 Points / Game (+/- 6.9)

It is interesting to note that Michael averaged 30.4 Points/Game in the 1995-1996 NBA Season. We therefore conclude that the 1995-1996 Michael would average a higher points/game if he played in today’s NBA.

As an aside, a plot of the neural network used to generate these variable importance plots and predictions is as follows:

What about the reverse question? What if the 2016-2017 Lebron James played in the 1995-1996 NBA? What would happen to his per-game point average? Using the same methodology as above, we used neural networks in combination with Garson’s algorithm to obtain a variable importance plot for Lebron James’ per-game point totals:

One sees from this plot that Lebron’s points every game were most positively impacted by teams that predominantly committed personal fouls, followed by teams that got a lot of offensive rebounds. There were no predominantly strong negative factors that affected Lebron’s ability to score.

Using this neural network model, we then tried to make a prediction on how many points per game Lebron would score if he played in the 1995-1996 NBA Season:

Lebron James: 1995-1996 NBA Season Prediction: 18.81 Points / Game (+/- 4.796)

This neural network model predicts that Lebron James would average 18.81 Points/Game if he played in the 1995-1996 NBA season, which is a drop from the 26.4 Points/Game he averaged this most recent NBA season.

Therefore, at least from this neural network model, one concludes that Lebron’s per game points would decrease if he played in the 1995-1996 Season, while Michael’s number would increase slightly if he played in the 2016-2017 Season.

## How to Beat the Golden State Warriors

The Golden State Warriors have posed quite the conundrum for opposing teams. They are quick, have a spectacular ability to move the ball, and play suffocating defense. Given their play in the playoffs thus far, all of these points have been exemplified even more to the point where it seems that they are unbeatable.

I wanted to take somewhat of a simplified approach and see if opposing teams are missing something. That is, is their some weakness in their play that opposing teams can exploit, a “weakness in Helm’s deep”?

The most obvious place to start from a data science point-of-view seemed to me to look at every single shot the Warriors took as a team this season in each game and compile a grand ensemble shot chart. Using the data from Basketball-reference.com and some data scraping scripts I wrote in R, I obtained the following:

Certainly, on the surface, it seems that there is no discernible pattern between made shots and missed shots. This is where the machine learning comes in!

From here, I now extracted the x and y coordinates of each shot and recorded a response variable of “made” or “missed” in a table, such that the coordinates were now predictor variables and the shot classification (made/missed) was the response variable. Altogether, we had 7104 observations. Splitting this dataset up into a 70% training dataset and a 30% test data set, I tried the following algorithms, recording the % of correctly classified observations:

 Algorithm % of Correctly Predicted Observations Logistic Regression 56.43 Gradient Boosted Decision Trees 62.62 Random Forests 58.54 Neural Networks with Entropy Fitting 62.47 Naive Bayes Classification with Kernel Density Estimation 57.32

One sees that that gradient boosted decision trees had the best performance correctly classifying 62.62% of the test observations. Given how noisy the data is, this is not bad, and much better than expected. I should also mention that these numbers were obtained after tuning these models using cross-validation for optimal parameters.

Using the gradient boosted decision tree model, we made a set of predictions for a vast number of (x,y)-coordinates for basketball court. We obtained the following contour plot:

Overlaying this on top of the basketball court diagram, we got:

The contour plot levels denote the probabilities that the GSW will make a shot from a given (x,y) location on the court. As a sanity check, the lowest probabilities seem to be close to the 1/2-court line and beyond the three-point line. The highest probabilities are surprisingly along very specific areas on the court: very close the basket, the line from the basket to the left corner, extending up slightly, and a very narrow line extending from the basket to the right corner. Interestingly, the probabilities are low on the right side of the basket, specifically:

A map showing the probabilities more explicitly is as follows (although, upon uploading it, I realized it is a bit harder to read, I will re-upload a clearer version soon!)

In conclusion, it seems that, at least according to a first look at the data, the Warriors do indeed have several “weak spots” in their offense that opponents should certainly look to exploit by designing defensive schemes that force them to take shots in the aforementioned low-probability zones. As for future improvements, I think it would be interesting to add as predictor variables things like geographic location, crowd sizes, team opponent strengths, etc… I will look into making these improvements in the near future.

## The “Interference” of Phil Jackson

By: Dr. Ikjyot Singh Kohli

So, I came across this article today by Matt Moore on CBSSports, who basically once again has taken to the web to bash the Triangle Offense. Of course, much of what he claims (like much of the Knicks media) is flat-out wrong based on very primitive and simplistic analysis, and I will point it out below. Further, much of this article seems to motivated by several comments Carmelo Anthony made recently expressing his dismay at Jeff Hornacek moving away from the “high-paced” offense that the Knicks were running before the All-Star break:

“I think everybody was trying to figure everything out, what was going to work, what wasn’t going to work,’’ Anthony said in the locker room at the former Delta Center. “Early in the season, we were winning games, went on a little winning streak we had. We were playing a certain way. We went away from that, started playing another way. Everybody was trying to figure out: Should we go back to the way we were playing, or try to do something different?’’

Anthony suggested he liked the Hornacek way.

“I thought earlier we were playing faster and more free-flow throughout the course of the game,’’ Anthony said. “We kind of slowed down, started settling it down. Not as fast. The pace slowed down for us — something we had to make an adjustment on the fly with limited practice time, in the course of a game. Once you get into the season, it’s hard to readjust a whole system.’’

First, it is well-known that the Knicks have been implementing more of the triangle offense since All-Star break. All-Star Weekend was Feb 17-19, 2017. The Knicks record before All-Star weekend was amusingly 23-34, which is 11 games below .500 and is nowhere mentioned in any of these articles, and is also not mentioned (realized?) by Carmelo.

Anyhow, the question is as follows. If Hornacek was allowed to continue is non-triangle ways of pushing the ball/higher pace (What Carmelo claims he liked), would the Knicks have made the playoffs? Probably not. I claim this to be the case based on a detailed machine-learning-based analysis of playoff-eligible teams that has been available for sometime now. In fact, what is perhaps of most importance from this paper is the following classification tree that determines whether a team is playoff-eligible or not:

So, these are the relevant factors in determining whether or not a team in a given season makes the playoffs. (Please see the paper linked above for details on the justification of these results.)

Looking at these predictor variables for the Knicks up to the All-Star break.

1. Opponent Assists/Game: 22.44
2. Steals/Game: 7.26
3. TOV/Game: 13.53
4. DRB/Game: 33.65
5. Opp.TOV/Game: 12.46

Since Opp.TOV/Game = 12.46 < 13.16, the Knicks would actually be predicted to miss the NBA Playoffs. In fact, if current trends were allowed to continue, the so-called “Hornacek trends”, one can compute the probability of the Knicks making the playoffs:

From this probability density function, we can calculate that the probability of the Knicks making the playoffs was 36.84%. The classification tree also predicted that the Knicks would miss the playoffs. So, what is being missed by Carmelo, Matt Moore, and the like is the complete lack of pressure defense, hence, the insufficient amount of opponent TOV/G. So, it is completely incorrect to claim that the Knicks were somehow “Destined for glory” under Hornacek’s way of doing this. This is exacerbated by the fact that the Knicks’ opponent AST/G pre-All-Star break was already pretty high at 22.44.

The question now is how have the Knicks been doing since Phil Jackson’s supposed interference and since supposedly implementing the triangle in a more complete sense? (On a side note, I still don’t think you can partially implement the triangle, I think it needs a proper off-season implementation as it is a complete system).

Interestingly enough, the Knicks opponent assists per game (which, according to the machine learning analysis is the most relevant factor in determining whether a team makes the playoffs) from All-Star weekend to the present-day is an impressive 20.642/Game. By the classification tree above, this actually puts the Knicks safely in playoff territory, in the sense of being classified as a playoff team, but it is too little, too late.

The defense has actually improved significantly with respect to the key relevant statistic of opponent AST/G. (Note that, as will be shown in a future article, DRTG and ORTG are largely useless statistics in determining a team’s playoff eligibility, another point completely missed in Moore’s article) since the Knicks have started to implement the triangle more completely.

The problem is that it is obviously too little, too late at this point. I would argue based on this analysis, that Phil Jackson should have actually interfered earlier in the season. In fact, if the Knicks keep their opponent Assists/game below 20.75/game next season (which is now very likely, if current trends continue), the Knicks would be predicted to make the playoffs by the above machine learning analysis.

Finally, I will just make this point. It is interesting to look at Phil Jackson teams that were not filled/packed with dominant players. As the saying goes, unfortunately, “Phil Jackson’s success had nothing to do with the triangle, but, because he had Shaq/Kobe, Jordan/Pippen, etc… ”

Well, let’s first look at the 1994-1995 Chicago Bulls, a team that did not have Michael Jordan, but ran the triangle offense completely. Per the relevant statistics above:

1. Opp. AST/G = 20.9
2. STL/G = 9.7
3. AST/G = 24.0
4. Opp. TOV/G = 18.1

These are remarkable defensive numbers, which supports Phil’s idea, that the triangle offense leads to good defense.

## So, What’s Wrong with the Knicks?

As I write this post, the Knicks are currently 12th in the Eastern conference with a record of 22-32. A plethora of people are offering the opinions on what is wrong with the Knicks, and of course, most of it being from ESPN and the New York media, most of it is incorrect/useless, here are some examples:

A while ago, I wrote this paper based on statistical learning that shows the common characteristics for NBA playoff teams. Basically, I obtained the following important result:

This classification tree shows along with arguments in the paper, that while the most important factor in teams making the playoffs tends to be the opponent number of assists per game, there are paths to the playoffs where teams are not necessarily strong in this area. Specifically, for the Knicks, as of today, we see that:

opp. Assists / game : 22.4 > 20. 75, STL / game: 7. 2 < 8.0061, TOV / game : 14.1 < 14.1585, DRB / game: 33.8 > 29.9024, opp. TOV / game: 13.0 < 13.1585.

So, one sees that what is keeping the Knicks out of the playoffs is specifically pressure defense, in that, they are not forcing enough turnovers per game. Ironically, they are very close to the threshold, but, it is not enough.

A probability density approximation of the Knicks’ Opp. TOV/G is as follows:

This PDF has the approximate functional form:

P(oTOV) =

Therefore, by computing:

$\int_{A}^{\infty} P(oTOV) d(oTOV)$,

=

,

where Erfc is the complementary error function, and is given by:

$erfc(z) = \frac{2}{\sqrt{\pi}} \int_{z}^{\infty} e^{-t^2} dt$

Given that the threshold for playoff-bound teams is more than 13.1585 opp. TOV/game, setting A = 13 above, we obtain: 0.435. This means that the Knicks have roughly a 43.5% chance of forcing more than 13 TOV in any single game. Similarly, setting A = 14, one obtains: 0.3177. This means that the Knicks have roughly a 31.77% chance of forcing more than 14 TOV in any single game, and so forth.

Therefore, one concludes that while the Knicks problems are defensive-oriented, it is specifically related to pressure defense and forcing turnovers.

By: Dr. Ikjyot Singh Kohli, About the Author

## The Most Optimal Strategy for the Knicks

In a previous article, I showed how one could use data in combination with advanced probability techniques to determine the optimal shot / court positions for LeBron James. I decided to use this algorithm on the Knicks’ starting 5, and obtained the following joint probability density contour plots:

One sees that the Knicks offensive strategy is optimal if and only if players gets shots as close to the basket as possible. If this is the case, the players have a high probability of making shots even if defenders are playing them tightly. This means that the Knicks would be served best by driving in the paint, posting up, and Porzingis NOT attempting a multitude of three point shots.

By the way, a lot of people are convinced nowadays that someone like Porzingis attempting 3’s is a sign of a good offense, as it is an optimal way to space the floor. I am not convinced of this. Spacing the floor geometrically translates to a multi-objective nonlinear optimization problem. In particular, let $(x_i, y_i)$ represent the (x-y)-coordinates of a player on the floor. Spreading the floor means one must maximize (simultaneously) each element of the following distance metric:

subject to $-14 \leq x_i \leq 14, 0 \leq y_i \leq 23.75$. While a player attempting 3-point shots may be one way to solve this problem, I am not convinced that it is a unique solution to this optimization problem. In fact, I am convinced that there are a multiple of solutions to this optimization problem.

This solution is slightly simpler if one realizes that the metric above is symmetric, so that there are only 11 independent components.