Do you want an easy way to evaluate the “Four Factors” in each game you play?

This #SJICoachesCorner post is a follow up to the previous ones that dealt with each of the “Four Factors of Basketball Success” separately.

There has been a wealth of information to help you analyze each factor, however like many coaches you likely want to use your analytics in a wider scope than statistic by statistic. With that in mind here is an Excel document that we hope makes it easy to evaluate all “Four Factors” for you and your opponents, game-by-game in one document. Of course this tool can be used in your current season, or you can even look back at past season’s to see trends.

Simply enter 7 stats for each team and it will automatically compute each factor, giving you a comparison of how you did compared to your opponents for each of the factors every game. It can be a good way to look at why you may have won or lost each game. For example, if a team’s eFG% and turnover rate is consistently better than their opponents, but their offensive rebounding % and free throw rate is consistently below their opponents, a coach can focus the team’s efforts in practice on improving the team’s rebounding skills and drawing more fouls.

As a reminder, listed below are Dean Oliver’s “Four Factors” and what he computes as the relative percentage of importance of each factor.

Four Factors of Basketball Success

1. Shooting (40%) – Effective field goal %   eFG%
2. Turnovers (25%) – Turnover rate   TR 
3. Rebounding (20%) – Offensive rebounding %   OR%
4. Free Throws (15%) – Free throw rate   FTR

Sports Journeys International hopes you find this, as well as all of our blogs, useful. Some of this information have you interested? Keep an eye on our blog as we continue to talk about things that have helped us over the years. Let us know at info@sportsjourneysinternational.com if there is a specific topic you are interested in.

In our final #SJICoachesCorner mini-series post, based on analytics guru Dean Oliver’s four factors of basketball success, we consider the fourth, and final factor, free throw rate, the rate at which a team gets to the free throw line.

Is your team getting to the free throw line often enough?

Some coaches will argue that the most important free throw statistic is the percentage of free throws made. While that is certainly an important statistic, a strong argument can be made for the importance of the rate at which a team gets to the line. Drawing fouls on an opponent creates two significant problems for teams, foul trouble and bonus free throws. A team that shoots a high percentage from the free throw line but does not shoot many free throws will not create those problems for teams. Oliver assigns a percentage of importance to this factor of 15%.

The rate at which a team gets to the free throw lane is calculated by dividing the number of free throws attempted by the number of field goals attempted.

Helpful formulas:

• Regular Free Throw Rate
  • FTR = FTA/FGA 
• If you want to take into account pace, calculate the rate this way.  
  • FTR = 100*FTA/FGA 

Free throw rate lends itself well to evaluate individual player success at getting to the free throw line. You can use the same formulas while plugging in the individual statistics allowing you to compare how effective your players are at drawing fouls. Here is a chart to get you started.

For example:

X University  523FTA/1726FGA = .31   

Opponents  465FTA/1805FGA = .26

The team has a 5% free throw rate advantage over its opponents which is very good. Although the average rate will vary from level to level, .25 or 25% is a fair average to use.

PlayerA: 133FTA/427FGA = .31      

PlayerB: 65FTA/307 = .21      

PlayerC: 99FTA/134FGA = .74

Players A, B, and C are teammates on X University, A is above average on that team and B is below average and C is outstanding.

We hope you have enjoyed our mini-series on the Four Factors of Basketball success. Although these posts have come to an end, our blog posts certainly haven’t. Stay tuned for more exciting posts throughout the winter and into next year!

How does a team know whether it is a good rebounding team?

Most teams simply look at the rebounding totals for both teams, and the rebounding margin between them and their opponents. However, rebounding totals alone can be deceiving. By using rebounding percentage you can take into account pace and field goal percentage which can differ widely by team and season.

Additionally, focusing on offensive rebounds considers their importance in the game. They can demoralize a defense by extending possessions and creating easy put-back scoring opportunities or open kick-out jump shots. A good way to look at this is to compare your offensive rebounding percentage with your opponents offensive rebounding percentage and the margin, positive or negative, that is created. You can do this game by game and compare how it affects your wins and losses. You can also do this season by season comparing your seasonal success, or you can do it with all of the teams in your conference and see how it compares to the success of teams in the conference.

Helpful formulas:

• Your offensive rebounding percentage:
  • Your ORB% = OffReb / (OffReb + Opp DefReb)
• Your opponent’s offensive rebounding percentage is:
  • Opp ORB% = Opp OffReb / (Opp OffReb + Your DefReb)

For example:

            2018-19 OFF REB % = 28 % vs OPP OFF REB % = 27 %   + 1% 

            2019-20 OFF REB % = 24 % vs OPP OFF REB % = 29 %   – 5%  

Using rebounding percentages, you can see that rebounding fell off significantly from one season to the other. Now you have another statistic to use in comparing the two season’s results. Here is a chart to get you started.

Stay Tuned for the next coaches corner blog, and the final post of the Factors of Basketball Success – Free Throw Rate.

Turnover percentage is defined as, “The percentage of offensive possessions that end in a turnover”. It is considered by many to be a better indicator than the two most commonly used turnover statistics, the total number of turnovers, for comparing opponents in the same game assuming a similar number of possessions, and assist-to-turnover ratios, for comparing individual players.  However, these commonly used statistics do not consider pace of the game and do not help you look at comparisons of turnovers on a game to game, team to team, and year to year basis.

Why is this important? Over the course of a season, where a team plays against every other team in the league, larger trends play out, including differences in pace. Turnover percentage or rate allows you to compare, in one season as well as multiple seasons, to other teams in your league, region, or in the country.

Using per-possession turnover stats also allows you to measure the game at its smallest possible unit of measurement that takes both teams in a particular game into account. By normalizing stats to a per-possession basis, we take out the differences in pace of play and in doing so can get closer to crafting real comparisons. A possession in 1999 is the same as a possession in 2019. If you take this one step further and break it down to per-100 possessions, you have a number not a percentage. For example, if a team has a turnover percentage by possession of .194, they have a turnover rate per 100 possessions of 19.4.

The end of a possession is when:

1. A field goal is attempted that is not rebounded by the offense. Offensive rebounds are treated as continued possessions, and by subtracting them from the field goal attempts it ensures that both teams have almost the same number of possessions in each game.
2. A team commits a turnover.
3. A team goes to the free throw line and does not get the ball back. There are some catches here that you need to account for: technical free throws, and 1’s, missed 1 and 1’s, 3 shots, and lane violations. .475 is a good determination that 47.5% of all free throws take up possessions.

Helpful formulas:

• Possession = (FGA-OR) + TO + (.475 X FTA)
• Turnover percentage per possession: TO/(FGA-OR) + TO + (.475 X FTA)
• Turnover Rate per 100 possessions: TO X 100/(FGA-OR) + TO + (.475 X FTA)

For Example:

Team A has 17 turnovers, 81 field goal attempts, 10 offensive rebounds, and 21 free throw attempts.

17 /71+17+(.475*21) = .175% turnover percentage

100*17 /71+17+(.475*21)+17) = 17.5% turnover rate.

This team turned the ball over about 17 and a half times of every 100 possessions. This is good as an average turnover rate would be around 20.

To help you get started we have created a spreadsheet for team turnover rate per 100 possessions. Feel free to use this however you see fit for your specific team. You could enter the statistics for each game, up to 33. Use every other row for you and your opponents. Or you could use eight rows for the eight teams in the conference. As you enter the relative information in the first four (A-D green labeled) columns the formulas in the last three (E-G red labeled) columns will start to calculate and give you the information you desire.

Individuals

Using turnover percentage, or rate, for individuals is a bit more complicated because if you wanted to do it by possessions you would have to calculate the number of possessions a player is on the floor. The easiest way to look at the individual percentage is to take the percentage of minutes a player is in the game and divide that into the number of possessions. 20 minutes of play would be ½ of the game or ½ of the possessions. While not 100% accurate, it provides a good baseline for your individual statistics.

Turnovers are like most stats, in that what matters most is the comparison of what you are trying to do on offense and what you are trying to do on defense. During the down time this off season you could insert the season turnover stats for every team in your conference, offensively and defensively, and see how they compare. You could also do the same thing with every game on your schedule. Compare the game to game gaps in turnover rates and see if the gap correlates to wins and losses.

Stay Tuned for the next coaches corner blog – Offensive Rebounding %.

The summer is a great time to look at your past seasons statistics as an evaluation tool. Therefore, the newest edition of our coaches corner summer series is focused on basketball statistical analysis.

In our most recent blog, Coaches Summer Reading List, we referenced fifty books that could be of interest to coaches. One of those books was “Basketball on Paper” by Dean Oliver. He has an excellent chapter in which he does a statistical analysis of what he calls the “Four Factors of Basketball Success”. Below is his list and what he computes as the relative percentage of importance of each factor. He recommends that coaches chart these for their own team, as well as their opponents, creating eight factors, and use the results for analysis. The first post of the series discusses the use of Effective Field Goal Percentage to evaluate your team and players’ shooting. Enjoy!

Four Factors of Basketball Success

1. Shooting (40%)-Effective field goal %
2. Turnovers (25%)-Turnover %
3. Rebounding (20%)-Offensive rebounding %
4. Free Throws (15%)-Free throw rate

We will focus on each each of his factors in separate posts during this mini-series in order to allow the proper amount of time for each. In keeping with his rating, the first factor discusses the use of Effective Field Goal Percentage to evaluate your team and player shooting. Enjoy!

Effective Field Goal Percentage-eFG% – The Most Important Factor of Basketball Success

eFG% is the measurement of your team or player success from the field. It is calculated by assigning a worth of 1.5 for made three-point shots. While this may seem obvious, field goal percentages are not calculated this way but are instead calculated separately for 3-point and total attempts. Looking at field goal % this way allows you to account for 3pt% and 2pt % with one statistic. The formula for calculating the eFG% is (2pt FGM + 1.5 * 3pt FGM) / FGA.

This site provides a simple eFG% calculator to help you so that you will not have to subtract the 3pt FGM from the total FGM since the calculator does that for you.  

There are many ways to use eFG%. Here are a couple of thoughts. As with all stats it is important to look at what you are trying to do both offensively and defensively. A hypothetical team had a 53.27% eFG% while their opponents had an eFG% of 46.34%. The second figure would be your eFG% defense. The gap between the two is almost 7%, very good for any team. Any positive gap is good and the greater the positive margin between your team and your opponents the better. Coaches can look at ways to improve both their teams offensive and defensive efficiency, both on 2-point and 3-point field goal attempts, especially if the gap is a small positive one or negative. Coaches can also look at changes from season to season to analyze reasons for those changes. For comparison purposes, college teams generally have an offensive eFG% range of 60%-40%, and players generally have a range of 75%-40%.

Another way to use the eFG% is to look at individual players and their effectiveness offensively. This is the easiest of the four stats to do that with. Let us take for example a young player who is inconsistent offensively but was a highly effective rebounder and defender and played many minutes as a starter. The player had an eFG% of 50.20%, rather good for a young player. When you separate out the 2-point FG% (51.9%) and 3-point FG% (28.6%), it is tempting to coach the player to eliminate 3-point shots. However, any improvement this player makes from 3-point range will have a greater effect than improvement from 2-point range, and it would be easier to do if the player were already highly effective from 2-point range. Another way to use eFG% is to look at your entire team’s individual eFG%. If one player is at the top and is a good defensive player, wouldn’t it make sense to have that player in the game as much as possible? Just a couple of thoughts about using eFG%, and you can probably think of many more.

Stay tuned for the next blog, Turnover %!

There are lots of ways for coaches to learn and grow in the summer and especially this summer with most coaches sheltered in place for the foreseeable future. One of the best ways is to through reading so we have put together our summer reading list of 50 books for you to consider. Many of the books are available as audio books and e-books if you prefer either of those formats to actually having the book in your hand. Those who prefer to have the book may be surprised to find how inexpensive they are through Amazon, Ebay and other booksellers. You can shop online and have them delivered to the door quickly. Why not get started today and take another step towards personal growth. Happy reading!

We hope you can find something in this blog to help you for this off-season as well as for future seasons. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Some of this information have you interested? Keep an eye on our blog for more thoughts throughout the summer as we continue this series of comments from our Owner and President Jim Walker. Let us know at info@sportsjourneysinternational.com if there is a specific topic you are interested in.

Are you thinking of taking an international team tour some time down the road? We would love to help you get started planning. Whether it’s Ireland, Canada, or any of our alternative sample tours, or even somewhere else you had in mind. Contact us, or call us at 610-390-9298 for more details.

If you are interested in videos from the past 30+ years of Greyhound Coaches Clinic’s please complete this form to order and receive them by mail.

This weeks entry in our SJI Coaches Corner series, featuring Owner and President Jim Walker, is from coach Pete Carril’s book, “The Smart Take from the Strong”.

Summers are a great time for coaches. They are great for rest, relaxation and re-energizing, but they are also great for reading and preparing for the next season. Every coach has a bookshelf with plenty of basketball books and yesterday I was browsing through mine and came across a book that I first read over twenty years ago. It was a good read then and just as good now. My good friend Pete, with whom I have shared both tears and beers, has lots of interesting philosophical thoughts about the game of basketball. If you don’t have this book, perhaps you want to add it to your shelf? He ends the book with this helpful list of coaching “tidbits” that I thought you would enjoy. Even if you find only a few things to help your coaching, this would be a worthwhile read and you will be a better coach.

Twenty-Five Little Things to Remember

1. Every little thing counts. If not, why do it?
2. When closely guarded, do not go to the ball. Go back door.
3. Whenever you cut, look for a return pass.
4. When you commit to a cut (or back-door) do not stop and do not come back to the ball.
5. Bad shooters are always open.
6. On offense, move the defense.
7. Putting defensive pressure on the ball makes it harder for the other team to run an offense and gives your team a better chance to defend.
8. In a zone, or in any defense, when their five men guard your three men, throw a cross court pass.
9. Watch the man in front of you. He shows you what to do.
10. Keep your dribble. Use it when you’re going to do something useful.
11. A pass is not a pass when it is made after you have tried to do something else.
12. A good player knows what he is good at. He also knows what he is not good at and only does the former.
13. You want to be good at those things that happen a lot.
14. When the legs go, the heart and the head follow quickly behind.
15. Defense requires three things: courage, energy, intelligence.
16. If your teammate does not pass the ball to you when your open and he doesn’t say anything, then he did not see you. If he says “I’m sorry,” he saw you and did not want to throw you the ball.
17. In trying to learn a specific thing, the specific thing is what you must practice. There is little transfer of learning.
18. Whatever you are doing is the most important thing that you are doing when you are doing it.
19. Anyone can be average.
20. Being punctual is good in itself. However, what is more important is that your punctuality tells your teammates what you think of them.
21. Hardly any players play to lose. Only a few play to win.
22. I like passers. They can see everything.
23. The way you think affects what you see and do.
24. Rarely does a person who competes with his head as well as his body come out second. That was said even before Coach Vince Lombardi, by the Greeks and Romans, and probably by the Chinese.
25. The ability to rebound is in inverse proportion to the distance your house is from the nearest railroad tracks.

We hope you can find something in this blog to help you for this off-season as well as for future seasons. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Some of this information have you interested? Keep an eye on our blog for more thoughts throughout the summer as we continue this series of comments from our Owner and President Jim Walker. Let us know at info@sportsjourneysinternational.com if there is a specific topic you are interested in.

Are you thinking of taking an international team tour some time down the road? We would love to help you get started planning. Whether it’s Ireland, Canada, or any of our alternative sample tours, or even somewhere else you had in mind. Contact us, or call us at 610-390-9298 for more details.

If you are interested in videos from the past 30+ years of Greyhound Coaches Clinic’s please complete this form to order and receive them by mail.

Welcome back to another weekly installment of the SJI Coaches Corner series brought to you by Owner and President Jim Walker.

Whatever system you use to evaluate your past season, notes taken during or after games, notes taken after watching video of games, or your post season notes from you and your coaches, the off season is a great time to use those notes to evaluate the season and prepare for the next season.

As a volunteer assistant coach sitting in the stands for the past four seasons, I have been taking notes on things that I see that we can do better. For the first three years I would simply write comments and then compile them into topics sometime in the next 24 hours and then summarize them after several games. These would be regularly shared with the head coach, as well as the other assistants. There was also an end of the season summary prepared.

Two of our previous Coaches Corner blogs, Evaluating the Past Season and Using Your Game Notes for Off-Season Planning, described this along with the system used by John Beilein in Michigan’s run to the 2103 National Championship game. Over time, I became more aware of the number of possessions missed while writing the notes and decided to change the system.

Working with the coaching staff we chose 21 different offensive and defensive topics that we identified as areas of concern to us and made a chart with space for tally marks. By making a tally mark, a coach hardly has to look down and can concentrate on the game better. Many coaches will have a coach doing this already on the bench for various topics.

Here is an example of a chart for some ideas that may help you and your team. Also, here is what a summary chart might look like and how to use for the post season analysis. These documents are for you to use as you want and feel free to download them and tailor them specifically for your team.

We hope you can find something in this blog to help you for this off-season as well as for future seasons. Please feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Some of this information have you interested? Keep an eye on our blog for more thoughts throughout the summer as we continue this series of comments from our Owner and President Jim Walker. Let us know at info@sportsjourneysinternational.com if there is a specific topic you are interested in.

Are you thinking of taking an international team tour some time down the road? We would love to help you get started planning. Whether it’s Ireland, Canada, or any of our alternative sample tours, or even somewhere else you had in mind. Contact us, or call us at 610-390-9298 for more details.

If you are interested in videos from the past 30+ years of Greyhound Coaches Clinic’s please complete this form to order and receive them by mail.