He shoots... he scores
With 7:10 remaining in the first quarter of a recent game, Celtics guard Rajon Rondo drives for a layup against the Orlando Magic. Before the cheers die down, a team statistician records the play on a laptop and the data are sent to the Web as part of an NBA effort to beef up statistical reporting and share it with fans.
As Boston Celtics guard Rajon Rondo drove agilely through an Orlando Magic defense for a layup last week, statistician Shane Crawford connected with his every move.
Sitting a row from courtside with a touchscreen computer to log in every shot, turnover, and foul, Crawford is on the front lines of a numerical renaissance with the potential to reshape the National Basketball Association. The Celtics are among a growing number of clubs with computer scientists like Crawford on staff who can help analyze questions such as which lineups will probably score the most points or which defenses are most effective.
The NBA itself is driving this trend, hoping to connect with more fans in the same way that baseball statistics have spawned a cottage industry of fantasy leagues and analysis websites. The league feeds the numbers to broadcasters like ESPN and to fans through the league's website, nba.com, and provides the data to coaching staffs.
"We want people to understand that combinations of players yield some great results, since it's about teamwork," said Steve Hellmuth, NBA senior vice president for operations and technology.
Another technology proponent is Charles Klask, a scout for the Magic.
"The landscape is so competitive that even if you don't necessary believe in relying on numbers, you at least have to research them to keep up with your opponents," Klask wrote in an e-mail after the game Dec. 23. "Anything that analyzes the game to help predict certain events is an edge each team should be aiming for," Klask wrote.
Coaches long have kept track of statistics in basketball, and NBA.com shows leaders in categories including points and shooting percentages back to the 1946-1947 season, the first year of the league's predecessor, the Basketball Association of America.
But statisticians have grappled for years with two chief ways in which basketball differs from other sports. First, players can influence the game without even touching the ball, for example, by setting picks to block out defenders. Also, stars tend to handle the ball more often than role players, giving them a disproportionate share of assists or shots taken.
In response, number-crunchers have tried to come up with models that can show the most effective combinations of players, such as a plus-and-minus formula that aims to measure the relative contribution players make to the team during their playing time. Lately, the NBA has posted a version of this set of statistics on a page of its website known as the "Lenovo Stat," sponsored by the computer hardware maker. Also, the NBA has added new statistics to its database each year, such as the exact location of each shot taken.
The additional data are starting to reshape draft choices and game strategies, said Dan Rosenbaum, a University of North Carolina economics professor who has consulted with the league. In particular, defensive strategies seem to have the most to gain from statistical analysis, such as showing which shots an opposing team has most often taken successfully in the past.
Rosenbaum pointed out that one of this season's best defensive teams, the Denver Nuggets, is not known for having great defensive players, aside from center Marcus Camby. But the team does have on its payroll Dean Oliver, a statistician with a PhD whose 2004 book "Basketball on Paper," ignited much of the game's current interest in statistics. About 10 of the NBA's 30 teams have statisticians on their payroll, up from just a few several years ago.
Teams that look hard at their opposition "prepare faster for other teams, and, when they're having problems defending, they catch it faster," Rosenbaum said.
Rosenbaum and Hellmuth consider the Celtics to be among the more quantitative teams in the league, since the team arranged for a rare direct feed of data from the NBA and added Crawford to manage its database two years ago.
A former Celtic executive, Daryl Morey, is now with the Houston Rockets and is among the best-known proponents of quantitative analysis.
Celtics general manager Danny Ainge says that studying the numbers should be only one piece of a team's preparation.
"I don't ever want statistics to be a shortcut for the work that coaches and players have to do to win games," he said in an interview last week.
"Basketball is a game for players. Keeping the other team from scoring, scoring more points, and setting better screens - the fundamentals of the game will always be the key to winning."
At the same time, Ainge acknowledges that the team's staff has put in more hours this season gathering statistics, such as the number of times players pass the ball to the player in the post, the position near the basket. One of his favorite scouting tools, a digital video replay system, combines images of game events with some of the data produced for the NBA's website.
The Celtics' cyberoperations are overseen by Jay Wessel, the team's vice president of technology. An 18-year team veteran, Wessel started using DOS-based software that required him to type in "J-33" every time team legend Larry Bird sank a jump shot.
Today, the data entry is done with pen-based tablet computers, supplied by Lenovo Group, the Chinese firm that bought IBM's personal computer division in 2005.
At a Dec. 23 game at the TD Banknorth Garden, Crawford sat with two other statisticians, all of whom had been trained and certified by the NBA. In the midst of a boisterous Garden crowd, the data-entry team resembled a group of air traffic controllers hunched over their computer screens and muttering to each other before agreeing on each entry.
On Rondo's first layup against the Magic, Crawford tapped out the location of the shot, 3 feet from the basket, on a half-court on-screen diagram. He then selected from a series of menus to show the type of shot (other choices were dunk or jump shot) and then a further description of Rondo's basket (choices include running, reverse, and alley oop.)
Within seconds, NBA servers in Jacksonville, Fla., and Secaucus, N.J., carried a record that with seven minutes and 10 seconds left in the first period, Rondo had made a "3' driving finger roll layup."
For fans, the work product is extraordinary. On NBA.com during games, fans can call up diagrams of where shots were taken on the court, broken down by player, or sort players into narrow rankings, such as a list of which rookies in the Western Conference have blocked the most shots this month.
Within the league, however, how interesting the figures are can depend on who is reading them. After the Celtics defeated the Magic 103-91, Ainge said he saw nothing in Orlando's game plan that came from the numbers. "I think their game plans are done far more by scouts and coaches' study of film than by any quantitative analysis," he said.
One test of Ainge's approach will come Feb. 19, when the Celtics play the Denver Nuggets, their second meeting this season after an easy 119-93 Boston win in November.
Oliver, the statistician who is now Denver's director of quantitative analysis, said the first game came too early in the season for numbers to have played a big role in his team's planning.
But by the next meeting, Oliver said, he expect to supply the Nuggets players with a much better understanding of the Celtics' strengths and weaknesses, based on game data.
"One thing we'll look at is why their defense has been so good and what we can do to exploit it," he said. "Basketball is very much about what you can give up in order to take away."
Ross Kerber can be reached at kerber@globe.com.
