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Statistics Key To Success In Run-and-Gun Basketball
theodp writes "Two decades before Moneyball hit the Big Screen, Coach David Arseneault of tiny Grinnell College came up with a unique style of run-and-gun basketball that he called The System, the principles of which were subjected to statistical analysis in Keys to Success in a Run-and-Gun Basketball System, a paper for the 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings. Well, as they say, sometimes The System works. On Tuesday, biochem major Jack Taylor, just three games into his career as a Grinnell College basketball player, made national news when he poured in 138 points — yes, 138 points — in a 179-104 victory over Faith Baptist Bible College. Even LeBron and Kobe were impressed. The old NCAA Division III record of 89 was set last year by Taylor's Grinnell teammate, Griffin Lentsch. Taylor's feat also bested what was deemed to be the unbeatable overall NCAA scoring record of 113 points, set by NCAA Division II performer Clarence 'Bevo' Francis of Rio Grande in 1954."
Jesus cries when he loses to statistics.
Respectfully disagree. By descending from their ivory towers and showing how math can be useful in everyday life scientists can greatly inflate the common man's understanding of these techniques and advance science.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
This system of play is real old, it goes back to Frank Keaney's "Firehouse Gang" system at Rhode Island State College (now URI) in the '30s and '40s. Basically it was the ultimate fast break, five guard-size players sprinting up court after each change of possession to wear out and demoralize larger opponents. They generally got open shots and a surprising number of rebounds, even at the defensive end, because the other team was back on their heels.
I read about it in a layman's guide to hoops (now out of print) written by Celtics' Hall of Fame coach Red Auerbach about 40 years ago. Auerbach said that the system was often wildly successful in Division II, but could be defended relatively easily by the more talented teams in Division I ball.
What part of the quants invading sports and demonstrating that brains can win over brawn in the physical arena isn't news for nerds?
* looks for TwineLogic posts complaining about video games being unimportant * ... nope, not finding anything.
The part where it's about a boring an irrelevant sport.
Some of us nerds aren't jealous of athletes because we also get off our asses and do stuff in the real world like play sports and exercise (something other than our typing fingers). Get over yourself.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
This "basketball" game - what console is it on?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Probably a holdover from high school social structures in which jocks are lionized and get laid and pick on the weaker nerd types. I don’t know how common this is today outside of TV/movie clichés; I never saw it in school in the 80s, but I didn’t go to a normal school (Strat-O-Matic baseball was more popular than varsity baseball,) so who knows?
Sorry to burst the bubble, but watching game tape from Grinnell shows Arsenault to be an opportunist more interested in promoting his "system" (and of course the handy video and text guides he sells so that you too can be an "innovative" baskeball coach) than in winning games or even satisfying the majority his players. But as long as it's "fun" for (some of) the players and makes him tons of money, who cares, eh?
Here's how to be like Coach A:
-Press, but leave one Special shooter to stay in the offensive zone all game, leaving his teammates out to dry on defense
-Let the other team score once they move it past you
-Get the ball to your shooter and let him jack threes all game.
-Other players who collect rebounds and attempt to lay them in are pulled. Only the Special One may shoot.
-Platoon all the other players, because who cares about them?
-Hope that your opponent is either
---a) brain-dead, unathletic and unwilling to play on their own terms
---b) a team from the second division of the fifth tier of college basketball (seriously), from a school with 330 students (seriously) who believe Satan made dinosaur fossils (well, maybe)
-Collect a few wins, some notoriety if you're the Special One, and gobs of money (if you're the coach)
He picked this opponent for a regular season game, mind you, despite the fact that for them it was an exhibition game. Nothing special about this. You want to be innovative? Try competing against someone on your level first.
Commodore 64, among others. The best example would be Dr.J. Vs. Larry Bird
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_on_One:_Dr._J_vs._Larry_Bird
"Success", my ass - this only counts as "success" if you're not watching the utterly shit game that's produced by the technique:
http://deadspin.com/5962514/d+iii-players-138-point+game-is-a-sham-record-and-shouldnt-be-celebrated-by-anyone
TL;DR - it's basically turning the entire game into "give D00d X the ball no matter what". In Slashdot-friendly terms, the basketball equivalent of spawn-camping.
All of the "Why the hell are we talking about sports on Slashdot?" commentary above is to be expected... but let's get this established for the record: You people are talking about of your ass.
To the uninitiated, watching basketball can feel tedious and repetetive, with guys running back and forth, making similar looking movements, play being stopped for unfathomable reasons, and so forth. If you experience this sensation, it is because you are a noob. N00B. You are not trained to understand the numerous split-second decisions that are being executed within the span of a 24-second shot clock. Of all professional sports, watching basketball has the steepest learning curve. That is reason #1 why it is the perfect spectator sport for geeks.
This leads to the next point, which is that basketball is the most cognitively demanding of all professional sports for the player as well. Because the game is has a relatively small number of players on each side, and each player faces an ongoing series of 1-on-1 interactions with those players over the course of a quarter, a game, or a season. Good players study detailed scouting reports of their opponents in each game which details their strenghts, weaknesses, and habits. If you are going to defend Steve Novak knowing he is a phenominal 3-point shooter but not good on the dribble drive, then you are going to close in on him so that you can bother his jump shooting. But a guy who has a strong ability to drive will get right past you if you get too close to him on defense. If you're defending a guy like Kobe Bryant who can both shoot and drive, you've got a much harder job. Another player on your team may have to offer "help defense" which means rotating off of his own man to help you defend. That means the NEXT player over on the court has to notice that the help defender has left his own man, and the next guy "rotates" over so that the one guy on the floor being left open is as far away from the ball as possible. If the player on offense then chooses to throw a pass to the open man, the entire defensive lineup needs to rotate back into proper position. Good team defense requires the coordination of a dance team while improvising like jazz musicians. So that's reason #2 for nerds to like basketball. The stereotypical "dumb jock" will not excel in this game.
Actually, I have to cite another example for reason #2 because I know I'm going to get pushback on the notion that people who devote their lives to physical activity might possibly be really smart: Guys who have phenomenal bodies and weak minds can be successful in pro ball assuming they don't get injured... but eventually their limited mental agility makes them predictable, which makes them less effective. "The book" is out on them and they become easy to counter. Once they start getting near 30 years old, they lose their elite athleticism as well and become largely useless. Guys like Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Ray Allen who continue to be highly effective, star-level players into their mid-30s do so because they have tremendous minds for the game they are playing.
"Moneyball" was largely about using statistical analysis to acquire players who were undervalued by other teams because the old-school methods of player evaluation were unscientific and based on folklore and assumptions regarding pro baseball. Baseball is, in video game parlance, a "turn based" game. It is slow. Everyone has a clearly defined role. The mathematics involved in baseball analytics isn't trivial, but it's roughly akin to "value investing" in financial terms. It's harder than balancing your checkbook but it ain't rocket science. OTOH, basketball analytics really *IS* rocket science. Basketball is chaotic and non-deterministic by nature. Outcomes result from a rapidly cascading series of interrelated events. Quantifying this is possible, but it is really, really hard. The Moneyball revolution has led to many NBA teams hiring and retaining full-time analytics teams where statisticians and data miners vie to determine who should b
Faith Baptist Bible isn't even a Division III team. Everything I've read, from people in the know (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.12195 -- starting around page 814) indicates that Grinnell specifically intended to have Jack Taylor set this record. He literally wasn't playing defense -- he was standing around at halfcourt to receive an outlet pass so he could jack up yet another 3.
Somebody watching the video noticed that Faith was cheering this on, and the Grinnell crowd was cheering scoring by both teams (http://www.d3boards.com/index.php?topic=4558.msg1469592). I have a suspicion that they were in on this joke. Given that their opponent was not an NCAA team, I don't think this record should count.
It's interesting that for all this, they've never won an NCAA tourney game (Division III, that is). I don't think they've even won their conference (see http://d3hoops.com/teams/Grinnell/Men/2011-12/index and look at the other years -- usually their last game is against a conference team, and they've always lost). That kind of run and gun and press may be fun to play and watch, but it doesn't work against good teams.
And there's plenty of very good basketball being played in Division III. Yes, it's very rare for Division III teams to beat Division I, but a couple of weeks ago MIT lost to Harvard 69-54, and the game was not a blowout -- Harvard had to work hard for its W (Harvard shortly thereafter beat Manhattan College, which is also Division I, 79-45). If you watch the real power teams in Division III -- schools like MIT (yes, MIT is ranked #1 in Division III right now, and they have some damn good players, including a point guard, Mitchell Kates, who was abusing the Harvard back court all game), Amherst, Williams, Franklin and Marshall, Cabrini, UW-Whitewater (which beat MIT last year in the semifinal, and went on to win the title), it's very high quality basketball, just not the kind of athleticism you'll find in Division I. Teams like these, that play real defense and are in control on offense, would make short work of Grinnell.
And one of our (MIT) alumni, Jimmy Bartolotta '09, was Division III national Player of the Year, and is now playing professional basketball in Iceland.
(Yes, I'm an Ancient and Honorable Nerd of the Infinite Corridor -- VI-3 '87. I'm unofficially one of the team photographers. See http://rlk.smugmug.com/Sports/Basketball)
All that presumption and defensiveness really detracts from your otherwise insightful post. Basing on your own broad brush stereotypes is also a bit hypocritical too. Get over it.
Maybe in Div III basketball it's hard to find the right players to play this style.
I would think it is hard to find the players to fit this type of slow-down system, but it has been used with success in Div. III. Look at University of Wisconsin-Platteville (Div. III school). They won four national championships at that level (1991, 1995, 1998, 1999) using a "slow-down" system called the Swing Offense. The coach who brought in those national championships was Bo Ryan, now the head couch at University of Wisconsin (Go Badgers!), where he uses the exact same system. It works. He hasn't missed an NCAA Tournament since going to Madison, and hasn't finished lower than 4th in the Big 10 in that time. It's a slow and somewhat boring game to watch, but it's effective all the same- and it works at the lowest to highest levels of play.
I would bet that any of the Bo Ryan coached UW-Platteville teams would have beat Grinnell had they played (I did a little research and couldn't find any box scores or even if these two teams had played each other during that time frame- it's possible, Platteville is in the southwest corner of WI and Grinnell is in Iowa, so they're close enough geographically). My research also shows that the run-and-gun system of Grinnell doesn't always come with the results they want. They rarely make the Div. III NCAA Tournament. They rarely have less than 8 losses a season. I went to a school in the same conference as Grinnell for a while. No one ever thought that they were in the upper tier of the conference, that's for sure.
I can only conclude that you've never watched anything BUT basketball by that statement.
Quite frankly, the rest of your post contradicts all the assertions in your first paragraph. Both soccer and ice hockey eclipse basketball in terms of athletic ability and forethought required.
tl;dr: Because it's "hacking" the sport by trying unusual things.
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Your opponent was Faith Baptist Bible, not even an NCAA team. Translation - tomato can. To me the greatest feat in basketball still belongs to Wilt Chamberlain and the 100 point game. Done without the benefit of the 3 point shot by the way. That same year he averaged 50.4 points and 25.7 rebounds per game. Astounding. Those records will never, ever, be broken at the professional level.
I know nothing about basket ball, other than it has a ball and bounces and you have to throw it through a hula hoop or something, and have to be over 7 foot to play.
But, in all sports there are certain systems that work at certain levels of play - in soccer it's the "long ball". The theory being that most goals are scored within the penalty box, therefore the quicker you get the ball into the penalty box the more likely you are to score. One dimensional teams fair well in lower divisions where the talent pool is lower, and the system can compensate for that. An ideal candidate for this would have been John Becks teams in the early/mid 1990s, and he was so rigid that the overriding aim was to get the ball into the box that would substitute a player who passed backwards ...
Eventually, once the successful coach moves up a division (either with promotion, or moving on to another team due to their brilliance) the "strategy" becomes less effective - with better players/coaches in opposition being better able to cope with nullifying it.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die