Ben | 17 October 2012
No comments

Staying Home

It happened again. Another loudmouth on Twitter proclaimed himself the Commissioner of Being a Good Sports Fan and declared, essentially, that none of us has any right to complain about our teams if we are not going to the games. Because, of course, “true fans” go to all the games.

True fans do this, true fans do that.

It’s not quite the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard, but it’s close. And people keep saying it.

First of all, I am not aware of a cabinet-level position that gives anyone the right to decide what makes a true fan. So please do us all a favor and stop pretending that what you say matters (although, to your credit, it did inspire this blog post, so you’ve got that going for you).

But, second, let me tell you all the reasons I typically avoid LaVell Edwards Stadium like the plague despite being, I think, a pretty huge BYU football fan:

  • At home, I have an HD TV.
  • At home, I have a remote control so I don’t have to watch freshmen make fools of themselves trying to kick field goals during commercial breaks.
  • At home, I have free food that is better than anything you pay $45 for at the stadium.
  • At home, I have a couch, which is extremely comfortable and inviting unlike the metal benches (with the roughly 36 square inches of space they allow you).
  • At home, I do not have to be surrounded by idiots yelling at the coaches, players, and officials at the tops of their lungs despite the fact that nobody who can hear them cares what they have to say.
  • At home, I can show up for the game whenever I want with no traffic, and when the game is over I don’t have to sit in the mass exodus for an hour.
  • At home, I actually get cell service so I can talk to a theoretically unlimited number of friends about the game while I am watching it.
  • At home, I have every stat in the world at my finger tips; I can analyze the game from every angle that you can in the stadium and then some.

So what’s the argument against staying home? The “thrill” of being surrounded by 74,000 of your closest friends? Yeah. . . no thanks. Not only does that not do it for me, but it also has nothing whatsoever with being a “true fan” (if there is such a thing). But hey, knock yourself out, Mr. Commissioner.

Arbitrariness. Such a confusing thing.

Category: Sports | Tags: , , , ,
Ben | 21 July 2012
3 comments

Good GM, Bad GM: Late Bloomers and Draft Prowess

I don’t expect to receive an answer to this question since I know there only three of you out there reading my blog, but I’m going to ask it anyway.

Let’s say you’re evaluating an NBA GM’s drafting/scouting ability. Should he get credit for picks who ultimately turned into solid players, but did so only after leaving the team that drafted them? Take, for example, Kris Humphries. I know you think he’s overpaid, but don’t forget that after his two seasons with the Jazz, everyone believed he was a total bust. He notched just 0.1 total Win Shares during his first two seasons in the NBA. But fast forward a few seasons and Humphries has tallied a totally respectable 10.7 Win Shares while averaging a double-double over his past two seasons with the Nets. So should Kevin O’Connor get credit for drafting Humphries, a serviceable NBA starter, even though the Utah Jazz never benefited directly from that pick?

This is vaguely similar to questions digital marketers face around multi-touch attribution. If a user arrives at your site by clicking a paid search link in Google but does not purchase, and then a month later arrives at your site by typing your address into his browser and this time he does purchase, should that original paid search click-through get credit? If so, how much? It’s a little different because most NBA players would have been drafted eventually anyway; if Kevin O’Connor hadn’t picked Humphries, someone else would have, and we’d be wondering whether that person deserves credit.

I can see arguments both ways. A GM who picks a player who only pans out later in his career might have correctly read the player’s potential, and we should reward that GM for his vision. But a GM’s job is to deliver concrete wins to his team via the draft, and a late bloomer does not help his cause. In case anyone is out there reading, leave me a comment: what do you think?

Category: Analytics, Sports | Tags: , , , , ,
Ben | 6 July 2012
7 comments

Pickup Basketball Purism

I tweeted about this last night, but 140 characters just wasn’t enough for me to state my case regarding the scoring in pickup basketball. (I only tackle the really important issues on this blog.)

pickup basketballI love pickup basketball. In fact, the widespread availability of pickup basketball is one of the best reasons to live in Utah. Not only do we have YMCA-like fitness centers in every town, but on any given weeknight or weekday morning there is an 87.9% chance that there are four churches where guys are playing ball within a one-mile radius of any given location along the Wasatch Front. I love that every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning at 6:00 AM I drive for two minutes and I’m at basketball. Same thing on Thursday nights. Oh, and sometimes I play during lunch at work. (Despite all of this, I’m pretty terrible.)

What I don’t love is keeping score by 1s and 2s. You know, what would normally be a two-point field goal in high school, college, NBA, or really any organized form of basketball becomes a one-pointer, and a three-pointer counts for two.

Here’s my argument:

  1. Basketball—real basketball—has what I consider to be a fairly simple scoring system. If it were, say, pickup figure skating, or even pickup tennis, I could see wanting to simplify the score-keeping. But honestly, how hard is it to credit each team with two points for any basket inside the three-point line, and three points for any basket outside it? Am I missing something here?
  2. More importantly, counting by 1s and 2s fundamentally changes the game. By making a three-pointer worth twice as much as a two, instead of 1.5x, you’re possibly incenting people to play outside; you’re giving them a good reason to play bad (i.e., not very fun) basketball. When a three is a three and a two is a two, the upside of jacking up a bunch of threes probably doesn’t outweigh the upside of good ball movement and working for a decent shot inside. But when you’re counting by 1s and 2s, suddenly it might make more sense to play three or four guys around the arc and hoist up three point tries all game. Three-pointer after three-pointer is great for the shooter(s) when he’s hitting. . . and completely annoying for everyone else. Everyone hates the guy who brings the ball up the floor and then calls his own number by pulling up for a three. I’m not saying people consciously decide to play differently when counting by 1s and 2s, but the possibility is there (and it doesn’t need to be; see point #1).
  3. Along these same lines, remember, there are no free throws in pickup basketball, so even if you’re counting by 2s and 3s in a pickup game, the incentive to shoot a lot of threes is already higher than it is in organized basketball. Let’s say I’m an NBA player who shoots 50% generally from inside the three-point arc and 40% outside of it. Some fans look at this and say, 40% * 10 three-point tries = 12 points and 50% * 10 two-point tries is = 10 points, so shouldn’t you always take the three? The answer is no, primarily because this faulty analysis ignores the fact that in organized basketball you are far more likely to get fouled and produce valuable free throws when shooting inside the three-point line (driving to the basket or helping to create shots for teammates), so your two-point tries are more valuable than they seem on the face of it. The possibility of creating free throws does not exist in pickup basketball, whether you’re counting by 1s and 2s or whether you’re counting by 2s and 3s, so you’re already more incentivized to play outside than you normally would be; why make things even worse by increasing the value of a three-pointer unnecessarily?

As you can tell, I’ve given this some thought. And maybe that’s because I’m too much of a purist; the NBA and college ball have been playing with 2s and 3s since the early 1980s, and the ABA had it even earlier. It just seems silly to change something that works so well.

So now I am counting on you, all three of my blog readers (hi mom!), to tell me what I’m missing. Who invented counting by 1s and 2s and why did they do it? Do you have a preference and why? Did I miss something important?

Category: Personal, Random, Sports | Tags: , , ,
Ben | 9 May 2012
No comments

NBA Team KPIs

Bear with me for a minute, basketball fans.

If you work in digital analytics, you are familiar with the concept of the Key Performance Indicator (KPI). A KPI is a piece of data, shown over time, that gives you immediate insight into how your business is performing against your goals. Sometimes they are very general (such as Orders per Visit, a.k.a. Conversion Rate) and sometimes they are more specific (for example, Bounce Rate for visitors coming from search). These things are lifeblood of some business goal you’ve set. A business typically has several KPIs that they monitor every day. And not every metric is a KPI; a common rule is that it isn’t a KPI unless it’s something that, if decreasing below acceptable norms, would cause your business to take immediate action to rectify.

If you don’t work in digital analytics, but you are an NBA fan, we can finally explain KPIs to you using NBA statistics, a language you probably already speak. Here it is, courtesy of basketball-reference.com:

How do basketball teams win games? While searching for an answer to that question, Dean Oliver identified what he called the “Four Factors of Basketball Success”:

Shooting (40%)
Turnovers (25%)
Rebounding (20%)
Free Throws (15%)

The number in parentheses is the approximate weight Mr. Oliver assigned each factor. Shooting is the most important factor, followed by turnovers, rebounding, and free throws.

The article goes on to explain that each of those four factors is expressed in a rate: Effective Field Goal Percentage, Turnover Rate, Rebounding Rate, and Free Throw Rate. These have all the markings of good KPIs. I want to be as good as I can be in each of those four areas, and if I succeed, I’m almost definitely going to win basketball games.

If I were compiling a basketball team, or coaching a basketball team (or advising a basketball team on how to begin analyzing itself), those would be my first KPIs. Those are the metrics that I would use to gauge success. And while basketball, like business, has one metric that trumps all others (for basketball, it’s wins; for business, it’s profit), these are strong leading indicators of a team’s ability to win.

So, basketball fan, think of your digital analytics friends as something like basketball coaches who are looking at effective field goal percentage and benching that wing player who won’t stop taking threes early in the shot clock, or a GM who sees that his team is weak in rebounding and therefore targets an athletic big man in the NBA Draft. It’s clear to an NBA fan, looking at how his team is performing in each of the Four Factors, how a coach or GM might address a deficiency in these areas, just as analysts are great at coming up with recommendations when a KPI is struggling and needs to improve.

In fact, that’s the great thing about KPIs: they provide a really nice, simple jumping off point for analysis. Why were the Jazz so bad at eFG% this past season? We can begin to answer that problem for management with some very specific advice, especially when we add in analysis of shot location and lineups/rotations. Why are my web site visitors who arrive after performing a Google search leaving so quickly? We can look at that user segment and see what they’re doing and where they are running into roadblocks, or look at our landing pages and analyze them for effectiveness. Same thing.

So now you’ve got something to talk about with your digital analyst friends. And digital analysts, you can ask your NBA friends how their team’s turnover rate has been trending lately. Your next cocktail party is sure to be a smashing success!

Category: Digital Marketing, Sports, Web Analytics | Tags: , ,
Ben | 18 April 2012
One comment

Intruder

Last night I woke up in my hotel room at around 3:00 AM. I got up to go to the bathroom. The bathroom door has a full-length mirror on the outside of it. Thus, as I approached the door in the nearly total dark of my room I saw a figure coming toward me.

It so terrified/startled me that I briefly lost feeling in my left foot, and did not get back to sleep until 4:00 AM.

C’mon, Marriott. There has got to be a better place for that mirror.

Category: Uncategorized |
Ben | 24 March 2012
14 comments

FAQ

Eight months ago, on this blog, I described with excitement my decision to leave Adobe and join ESPN as an analytics manager. At the time, I knew that I was embarking on a tremendous learning experience, and I thought I even knew how everything would go. Sports, analytics, and New England; how could I lose? Call it a youthful sense of invincibility, if you will.

Well, as of this past Monday, I have rejoined Adobe, and I am thrilled, excited, and grateful for the entire turn of events. The Adobe Digital Marketing Summit took place this past week in Salt Lake City, and as I wandered the halls of the Salt Palace among colleagues, customers, and industry folks, a few things happened.

First, I felt like I was home, immediately. Second, I answered a barrage of questions about the past eight months. I took mental note of these questions and I’m going to answer them here, in good old FAQ form. So here we go.

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT BEN’S RETURN TO ADOBE

Q: So. . . what happened?

A: This is actually a tremendously complicated question, but I will simplify it by saying that once I started at ESPN, I quickly started to realize that making software is what gets me out of bed in the morning. When one of the engineers at Adobe asked me this question, I told him that I was sure he could go be a fantastic analyst, but he probably wouldn’t enjoy it—he needs to be programming and solving problems using code. That’s just in his DNA. I certainly could have stuck it out—and, in fact, tried to stick it out—but it wasn’t for me. If I needed to spend this time in order to learn that lesson, I can’t say that it wasn’t worth it. I’ve got a strong sense of direction for the foreseeable future, and that’s valuable.

Q: How were the people at ESPN?

A: They were great, and I consider many of them friends. In fact, I saw them at Summit and it wasn’t weird. . . well, it wasn’t too weird, at least. I’m so grateful that they gave me a chance. They’re brilliant and they are doing cutting-edge things with digital analytics. If you ever have a chance to them talk about cross-platform analysis, as my former VP Dave Coletti did at eMetrics NYC last October, you will know what I mean.

Q: What will you be doing at Adobe?

A: I’m returning to the Product Management team, working on analytics products—SiteCatalyst and more. When I originally joined that team almost two years ago, I wrote that I felt like a minor-league baseball player getting the call-up to the majors to play with his heroes. I still feel that way, and am excited to be part of such a bright and talented group. It seems that Adobe’s recent acquisitions have only added to the brainpower and passion. I hope that I now bring at least a little bit of unique insight having been an analytics practitioner for most of the past year.

Q: Are you staying in Connecticut, or moving back to Utah?

A: Actually, we have really enjoyed our time in Connecticut. The area is beautiful and our neighborhood is full of kids who want to play with our daughters almost constantly. But we still own our home in Utah, and rented in Connecticut, and it’s time to get back to the family and friends that we’ve missed so badly. But we had a great quality of life in both Utah and Connecticut. We will definitely miss Connecticut and hope to visit our friends there in the future.

Q: Why did you go back to Adobe?

A: First, as I mentioned above, I need to be in tech/software. That’s a given. Second, I believe in what Adobe is doing in digital marketing and I want to be a part of it. Third, there is a reason that Adobe consistently appears on Fortune’s “top places to work” list. It really is a fantastic company in too many ways to list here, but I especially love the way Adobe trusts its employees and values input from all over the organization. At least, that has been my experience, and I hope it will be again.

Category: Business, Personal | Tags: , , , , , , ,
Ben | 11 March 2012
2 comments

A personal appeal to Jazz fans

I loved this quote from Bill Simmons’ recent 2012 NBA Trade Value column:

On TV a few weeks ago, Chris Webber said something that made me say, “I wish I had thought of that first.”They were talking about trades, and C-Webb pointed out that championship teams are always stubborn. In other words, instead of caving to the whims of their fans, the pressure of the media, the ebbs and flows of a season (or even someone’s career) or especially conventional wisdom, they say to themselves, “Screw this, I know what I have, I’m sticking with it.”

So, Jazz fans, you want a GM with a championship mentality, or one who wavers and waffles?

I know you hate Kevin O’Connor’s strategy: get very young, develop talent, suffer through a few seasons in the lower half of the conference, then emerge with a core that can contend for a top spot in out west. You want to win now. If you could trade Paul Millsap or Derrick Favors for a wing who can shoot, you would do it in a heartbeat, even though it would only make the Jazz a seventh or eighth seed in the playoffs, right? It’s almost like you expect not to be alive in two or three years, and all you want to do before the heart attack comes is see one more Jazz playoff series, at any cost.

You’re being ridiculous. Here are two people who are on record saying that they see O’Connor’s vision and they like it: John Hollinger and Chad Ford. It’s cute that you have 1,300 Twitter followers, but you don’t know the NBA as well as those two men do. I’m sorry, but you don’t. (I certainly don’t, either.) When they want to understand what the Jazz are trying to do, they can actually pick up the phone and call people around the league to discuss. Or they use (or invent!) advanced statistical measures that give us more an accurate, data-driven sense of what is really going on. In most ways, we can’t compete with that. We see C.J. Miles jacking up threes early in the shot clock and we cannot understand why that guy is on the Jazz roster, without bothering to understand that C.J. has actually been a more efficient offensive player this season than Kyle Korver. (I’m not defending wasted possessions, just pointing out that our view of the world is heavily skewed sometimes. It’s confirmation bias: we tend to see evidence that supports our position. We see the worst in C.J. because we’ve already decided that we dislike him.) This is all that Hollinger and Ford do. (Well, Ford also teaches at BYU-Hawaii, actually.) This is their life! They’re certainly not always right, but are any of us? I’ll take my chances with two smart, accomplished, respected NBA analysts, and they’re taking their chances with a stubborn Kevin O’Connor.

Look, if we were talking about a perennial bottom-dweller then I would say sure, let’s talk about firing KOC. You’re so used to winning that you have no idea how weird life could be under David Kahn or Bryan Colangelo. Growing up in Boston during the M.L. Carr and Rick Pitino eras, let me tell you: I know what a franchise devoid of direction looks like. Stubbornness is most definitely a positive trait.

You’re welcome to hate this team, hate the coach, hate the GM. But by ignoring your persistent whining and demands that KOC mortgage the farm for Rajon Rondo (who, by the way, is a HORRIFIC outside shooter) or Wesley Matthews (he’s not coming through that door, to borrow a line from the aforementioned Pitino era in Boston), O’Connor is actually displaying a trait that demonstrates one reason why he is general manager and we work elsewhere.

So here’s hoping that KOC ignores us all and sticks to the plan.

(I will now record a YouTube video in the style Chris Crocker called “LEAVE KEVIN O’CONNOR ALONE!” Where did I put my blonde wig?)

Category: Uncategorized |
Ben | 5 March 2012
4 comments

Sloan Sports Analytics Conference: Day Two

As I have been tweeting, blogging, and updating Facebook about the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I keep hearing comments like: “I wish I could go, but I will never be able to” and “this is definitely on my bucket list now.” A few things about this. First, at $500 for non-student admission, it’s a bargain; even with hotel and airfare I’ll bet most of you could do this conference for well under $1,500, and it will be a truly memorable experience. So start saving a few dollars a week in a cookie jar today. Second—and I don’t think people realize this—anyone can attend. You don’t need to work for ESPN or an NBA franchise. My sister has a friend who does Account Management for Google, but he loves sports and analytics so he pays his own way to fly out every year from the Bay Area. All are welcome.

The other thing which pleasantly surprised me (I touched on it yesterday) is that you do not need to be a Ph.D. candidate in advanced statistical modeling or econometrics to thoroughly enjoy the conference. There were some sessions that really stretched that area of my brain, and others that were accessible even to non-sports fans, let alone non-academics. So don’t let that scare you away.

Highlights and thoughts from day two:

  • There was a request on Facebook to hear more about Bill James. As the godfather of the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, he was definitely one of the stars of the show. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel like he shared much new information about himself or his work. Simmons did a live BS Report with James at the end of day one, during which they rehashed his rise from unheralded part-time stats geek to patron saint of sports nerds, but it’s all stuff we read about in Moneyball. Day two featured a “Boxscore Rebooted” panel with James, John Thorn (MLB historian), and John Dewan (baseball info solutions), but most of it is so widely accepted in these circles at this point (“Wins for a pitcher is too arbitrary! The Internet makes analytics easier!”) that I barely took notes. To be honest, it felt really strange to be so nonplussed by this guy who quite literally invented advanced baseball analytics. In talking to a few other attendees, I got the sense that I’m not the only one. We all have tremendous deference for what Bill James has given the world, but he does not seem to be on the bleeding edge of sports analytics anymore.
  • The conference (at least this year) leaned heavily toward basketball, probably because the millennials who dominated the conference are in a demographic where the NBA is excelling, whereas I believe I heard that the average baseball fan is between 45 and 55 years old.
  • I reviewed three basketball-themed research papers in yesterday’s post, but the best was yet to come. The two best research papers by far (in my mind) dealt with “spacial analytics” in the NBA, meaning the study of where the 10 players and the basketball are placed on the floor (or in the air) when key events occur, as opposed to pouring over isolated numbers to obtain insight. Jared Dubin of Hardwood Paroxysm did an excellent job reviewing these two presentations (he even has screen captures), so I won’t go into too much detail.
  • I will add that I thought the rebounding study was not fully matured—it presented a ton of potential to help teams understand how to position players in rebounding situations, but it wasn’t quite there yet. Key Insight: Teams’ offensive rebounding percentage decreases significantly the farther the shooter is from the basket, until you get to the three point line. Behind the three point line, offensive rebounds are more common than for mid-range jumpers. Especially considering that neither a mid-range jumper nor a three is likely to generate a lot of free throws, it stands to reason that mid-range jumpers are the least effective shot on the floor (which we’ve all kind of known for some time, but it’s nice to have data to back up the theory).
  • My absolute favorite research paper was Kirk Goldsberry’s creation of the “Range %” number, a statistic which tells us the percentage of spots on the floor where players are effective scorers (defining “effective scorer” as “one point per FGA”). The average NBA player is effective from 17.2% of the 1,284 spots on the floor that Goldsberry measured by breaking the floor into a grid. Even though Tyson Chandler leads the NBA in FG%, he is far below average in Range %, scoring effectively from just 4.3% of the floor (not that anybody thinks Chandler’s high FG% means he is a great shooter). Dubin recaps the top few players in Range %. I was mildly surprised that Steve Nash beat out Ray Allen for the top spot (using data from 2006-2011), but mostly the data confirmed what you would expect in terms of the most comfortable shooters and least comfortable shooters. Key Insight: I can’t express this in terms of a specific recommendation, but Goldsberry’s most immediately applicable contributions are “heat maps” which show exactly where players are effective scores, as well as where they are less effective but still love to try. If I were a coach, I would buy Goldsberry’s technology (he did have a chance to share his methods with Mark Cuban at the end of the conference, so I assume the Mavs will be employing it shortly) and try to get my defense to force opposing scorers to the spots on the floor where they can be coaxed into shooting despite low effectiveness. Similarly, I would design plays that put my players in the best position to score from spots on the floor where they shoot well. It’s not rocket science, but I believe it would work. Isn’t this the kind of thing that Shane Battier has been doing for years? (And where has he been getting his data? Presumably just from video scouting. Goldsberry’s method is more complete.)
  • Best panel of the entire conference in my mind was Saturday’s “Fanalytics” featuring Bill Simmons, Jonathan Kraft, Tim Brosnan (EVP Business, MLB), Nathan Hubbard (CEO of Ticketmaster), and John Walsh (EVP, ESPN). It was supposed to have Mark Cuban on it as well, which would have been even better, but Cubes was running late. The whole thing was about improving the fan experience through technology. This one deserves sub-bullets:
    • The NFL is improving in every possible metric except for fan attendance. Today’s fan needs to be able to use the Internet on mobile devices (for Twitter, fantasy football, live video of other games, etc.) or they won’t come to the game. Mark Cuban doesn’t want people using their cell phones at NBA games, but the NFL recognizes that its whole fan experience model is different because of the pace of the game (frequent stops and starts) as well as the nature of the NFL (everything is happening all at once, on the same day of the week).
    • Kraft: “We’ve spent $2-3 million [to upgrade WiFi infrastructure at Gillette Stadium] in the last couple of years.” He continued, saying that to allow 70,000 people to stream video over WiFi at Gillette would cost “literally tens of millions of dollars.”
    • Simmons asked whether it would be feasible to charge different prices for tickets not just by section, but by individual seat. For example, one section at an NBA game might stretch from the baseline to almost mid-court, and why are those tickets priced the same? I had wondered this, since obviously the technology to price tickets on a seat-by-seat level exists. The answer is that if a fan sees that the guy next to him has a different face value on his ticket, he is likely to get resentful and angry. So they do it by section and live with the fact that this isn’t fully optimized pricing.
    • On the night of the AFC Championship Game, when Kraft wanted to relive Billy Cundiff’s missed FG, he went not to NFL.com, but to YouTube. This is surprising since the NFL maintains strict media rights, and the video was available on NFL.com. Why YouTube? Because a guy sitting in the endzone had the perfect angle to film the kick sailing wide left, and had uploaded the video. It was the best angle Kraft had seen. The lesson regarding NFL media rights and fan-shot video? “You can’t stop it, so you better start learning how to use it.”
    • TicketMaster operates both a primary ticket vendor and a secondary market vendor (TicketsNow), so they can use Omniture (nice shout out for my friends) to analyze ticket re-selling and compare with original sales. According to Hubbard, “Technology is showing us that our tickets are worth more than what we’re selling them for.”
  • Weird recurring theme of the conference was presenters’ inability to pronounce player names. The professionals did not have this problem, but the student researchers did. The two most egregious (and there were others) were the old classic “Da-RON” Williams instead of “DARE-in” and the even-less-excusable Kevin “Dur-ONT” instead of “Dur-ANT.” I mean, Kevin Durant is a top-three player. How can you be presenting on the NBA at a conference of sports nerds and not pronounce his name correctly?

I could keep going, but I need to stop somewhere. Suffice it to say, SSAC was an absolute blast. I can already see myself looking at certain aspects of game action and the sports world at large a little differently, in a good way. As I said to people numerous times during the conference, I will definitely be coming back, even if I have to plunk down my own money to do it. Sports and data, together at last. I think it’s a beautiful thing.

Category: Analytics, Sports |
Ben | 3 March 2012
One comment

Sloan Sports Analytics Conference: Day One

It’s time for a different sort of analytics conference. The eMetrics festivities may not start until Monday on the west coast, but 2,200 sports dorks gathered in Boston this weekend to talk about sports analytics in the annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference.

What does this mean? Well, the sports world is full of data. Every dribble in basketball, every pitch in baseball, every snap in football generates new data points that we can analyze to understand the games we love. Last season, the Dallas Mavericks used advanced analysis to determine that their best starting lineup included J.J. Barea. They made the change. . . and won the NBA title. Analytics isn’t just for business anymore. That is what this conference is all about.

I won’t give a travelogue. Instead, some general, brief highlights and observations, from the perspective of a sports fan and digital analyst.

  • I know I just said that the conference is about analyzing the game and the players, but I was surprised at the amount of a.) sports strategy discussion devoid of data, and b.) sports business analytics (e.g., StubHub discussion ticket sales analytics; ESPN, NBC, and others discussing the world of media rights). There really is something for just about everyone.
  • There is a LOT of crossover between digital analytics and sports analytics. Maybe the tools are different, but the principles and challenges are the same. The basketball analytics panel featured a bunch of quotes that could have occurred at eMetrics or Omniture Summit:
    • “There is ‘counting things’ and there is ‘analyzing the things you count.” -Dean Oliver, ESPN Stats & Info
    • “Statistics do two things as a coach: they allow you to figure stuff out, and they allow you to communicate.” Jeff Van Gundy, ESPN analyst and former NBA coach
    • “”A lot of times in analytics, you don’t want to come out with a single number.” -Oliver
    • Oliver also talked about preparing insights for coaches, and said that he used “very few numbers” in these reports, instead translating everything into words that coaches (i.e., executives) could understand.
  • The people at this conference are crazy smart. 73 professional teams and something like 175 colleges are represented. I couldn’t even follow a lot of the math/statistics in the research papers. Unlike some conferences I’ve attended, I was mentally worn out by the end of the day. Great feeling.
  • This conference is a tremendous value. Admission was less than $500, in exchange for which you get to see the greatest minds in sports debate cutting edge strategy and analytics, and they are all accessible. If you ever wanted to ask ESPN’s John Hollinger a question about NBA analytics, this is the place to do it. People like Bill James wander the halls just like anybody else.
  • Jeff Van Gundy was a revelation today. Everything he touched was comedic gold. We’ve become familiar with his wit during the ESPN NBA broadcasts, but he was in fine form today, tossing out sardonic commentary at every opportunity. Everyone I’ve talked to has agreed that we all need more Jeff Van Gundy in our lives.
  • Just a few sports insights and possible recommendations, if you’ll indulge me. The great thing about sports analytics (for me) is that it’s REALLY easy for me to see the kinds of recommendations you might make based on the data.
    • One study of performance under pressure showed that the home team shoots free throws worse than usual in late-game, high-pressure situations, whereas the away team is unaffected. The reason, they hypothesized, is that the crowd tries to avoid distracting its own team in these situations by getting very quiet, which inadvertently allows the player to focus on the action of shooting, causing them to “overthink” the shooting motion. The away team has fans yelling and jumping during their free throws throughout the game, so there’s no real difference. Recommendation: Fans shouldn’t get silent during home team free throws late in the game.
    • Another study took the concept of plus-minus and broke it out by individual skills, making it possible to see how players impact their teams in very specific ways beyond top-level stats. They also demonstrated that some skills are synergistic, meaning that putting two players who excel in a certain area on the floor together make both players (and other team members) better in that area than they would be otherwise. The whole ends up greater than the sum of its parts. Recommendations: Find synergies and build rotations to maximize plus-minus in key areas. For example, put players who create turnovers on the floor together to get even more bonus turnovers.
    • Finally, a study attempted to show the relationship between  experience and playoff success; do teams require experience in order to succeed in the postseason, as is often assumed? The answer was no. Experience does not matter among players. Young teams fare as well in the postseason as experienced teams. However, coaches who have coached in the postseason before perform better in subsequent playoffs. Recommendations: Depending on your team’s situation, consider not overvaluing veteran leadership. Also, look for head coaches who have coached in the postseason (even if they haven’t won titles).

It was a very full day, but tomorrow looks great as well. Time for bed so I can fill my brain with more sports analytics tomorrow.

Category: Analytics, Sports |
Ben | 29 February 2012
2 comments

Dear Google+ enthusiasts. . .

Please stop blaming journalists or measurement firms for the fact that the time spent per visitor numbers on Google+ are so low. You are doing Google a disservice by blowing smoke and telling them that this place is vibrant. I hope they are not listening to you. The folks in Mountain View have done a terrible job marketing Google+ to the world and you need to let them know it. Friends don’t let friends fail to articulate the benefits.

As I understand it, Google aims to own all the world’s data; it wants to use Google+ data to better target ads to consumers. It cannot do that if the only people who are playing here are tech enthusiasts and social media gurus. It needs people of all demographics and psychographics to come, and to stay for a while when they come. Sure, comScore’s panel-based measurement does not represent you. But it does represent people that Google wants and needs to attract. Those people are not sticking. That is a problem for Google (and Google alone) to solve. But you need to remind them.

Some, like Robert Scoble, have said that they would prefer to have Google+ reserved for geeks. On his blog, he wrote,

Google+ is for the passionate users of tech. . . it’s clear Google has turned a corner. They have now proven to everyone that they can do social and get on the playing field.

But they haven’t yet proven that they can convince your mom to use it and that’s just fine with me.

That’s great, Robert. But it’s not fine with Google. It can’t be. When has Google ever been satisfied with a product that only appeals to a niche? Teen bloggers have Google Analytics, and grandparents everywhere have used AdWords. This is the greatest digital advertising platform ever created, and you really think they should be happy with a few thousand actively participating nerds like you and me?

So the latest Wall Street Journal piece, which claims that “Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore,” should be welcomed, not discarded.

No, perhaps you are not well represented in the comScore panel data. Your type would certainly bring up the average somewhat. But there is a group of people who are represented in that sample, and they are not giving Google+ a chance. You can discard that data, or you can do even just a little bit of critical thinking and realize that it tells us something really meaningful—that the average user does not understand why he or she should stay on Google+ and revisit it often. They don’t understand the benefit. They are not like you, but they are important to Google if it wants to win at social media.

To you it appears that Google+ is a vibrant community, a “discovery engine” that has introduced you to dozens or hundreds of new friends who have enriched your lives. But you are making a false assumption that, because you like Google+, everyone will (or should) like it. As they say in Pragmatic Marketing and elsewhere, “your opinion, although interesting, is irrelevant.” Unfortunately for you, Google has other aims, and they involve getting all of those people who use Facebook for hours every month to spend some of that time (or some additional time) on Google+.

I know you don’t think that Google and Facebook are competing, and maybe they aren’t. But there are only 24 hours in a day, and Google needs some of those hours. It needs the masses, the sheeple whom you so despise. Otherwise Google+ will not be what Google has intended it to be. It may remain a cute little place for nerdy discussion, but it will lose strategic influence in Mountain View and will become marginalized. I’m sure that is not what you want.

So what do you need to do? Stop worrying about it, because I think Google will figure this out. But, in the mean time, you want journalists to stop saying that Google+ is dead? You want comScore to stop recording data that shows low engagement?

Well, first, stop telling everyone that everything in the world of Google+ is fine. You can be elitist and not see the problem—and just accept that there will be negative reviews—or you can acknowledge the problem and help to change it.

Second, articulate the benefits of Google+ to your friends. Not your nerdy friends, but the guy across the hall or the lady who serves you coffee. Don’t just list a bunch of nifty features. “It has hangouts!” is not a benefit. How does Google+ improve your life? Share that with the people around you.

Slowly, they will begin to adopt it. They will learn tips from you that will help them see why Google+ offers unique benefits. They will download the app to their phones. They will start to tell their friends. I’m sure you can see where I am going with this. The comScore data will literally change, and there won’t be a story for the Wall Street Journal to write.

And maybe Google will do itself a favor and begin to market this thing correctly.

Category: Social Media |
« Older Entries