Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion

by Andy Glockner

  The Houston Rockets (as explained in more detail in a few pages) have set an extreme standard for NBA shot selection, trying to take as few shots as possible that aren’t either at the rim or from behind the 3-point arc. In 2014–15, the Rockets set league records for both most 3-point attempts and makes, which helped fuel their league-leading (by a huge margin) 73.8 percent shot rate either from the restricted area encircling the rim or from 3-point range, per data collected from NBA.com. That shot strategy led Houston to have the best projected effective field goal percentage in the league, according to Sports Analytics Blog.

  The team that was second on that combined restricted area/3-pointer percentage list? The 76ers.

  For the 2014–15 season, the 76ers took 68.4 percent of their shots from those two zones on the floor. Additionally, they finished fifth in the NBA in free throw rate, a measure of how often you get to the free throw line. Visits to the “charity stripe” remain the sport’s most efficient offensive trip, with a leaguewide average of around 1.5 points per possession (given two free throws and a 75 percent average conversion rate). The principal problem with the 76ers’ offense wasn’t the system. It was that the players they had couldn’t actually make the shots they were taking. While on a normal team, you might criticize the coach for consistently creating shots his players couldn’t convert, the idea was backwards with the 76ers. Brown wanted to create these decent shots, and then have his players (or new ones) learn to make them.

  To wit, the 76ers only converted 56.4 percent of their restricted area shots, which was the league’s fourth-worst rate in 2014–15, per NBA.com. They also shot a horrible 32.3 percent from 3-point range, including a truly terrible 34.2 percent combined from the left and right corners, which are the shortest 3-point shots and typically are more open because it’s harder to rotate defensively into the far reaches of the court. Furthermore, they only attempted 407 corner threes all season (in comparison, the Rockets took 899), meaning nearly 81 percent of the 76ers’ threes came from “above the break,” where the shot is longer and defenders are more present. Finally, they were also the league’s worst free throw shooting team, at 67.6 percent, which negated a lot of their above-average team free throw rate. All told, the 76ers scored 592.7 fewer points than they “should have” based on their overall shot selection, per expected effective field goal percentage calculations from Nylon Calculus’ Seth Partnow. That’s more than 7.2 points per game for a team that finished the season with a point differential of minus-9.0. Just a normal return on its shot attempts may have doubled the 76ers’ win total.

  The horrendous offensive production also masked the 76ers’ above-average defense. They finished thirteenth in defensive efficiency, despite relying on a rookie rim protector in Noel and a team that hadn’t played together long enough to not routinely blow some defensive rotations. To compensate, they forced a lot of turnovers and also played at one of the quickest paces in the league in order to take advantage of their length and athleticism. As Torre noted:

  It remains scientifically impossible to develop arm length, an underrated characteristic on defense. (“Sam is very studied in regards to that,” Brown says.) But as Spurs wing Kawhi Leonard has verified, it is possible to grow a prospect’s shooting ability over time. And Philly, forcing turnovers at a league-high 15.6 percent through the All-Star break but shooting a league-low 41 percent, is incentivized to wait on such a large-scale renovation.

  So while there definitely were some rough edges to smooth out, Philadelphia was running a pretty decent system with bad offensive players, which is actually a good thing if you plan to improve the players. The 76ers plan to do so, eventually.

  In that vein, the 76ers have been engaging in two other areas of asset accumulation (beyond the controversial lottery picks) that have yielded dividends and should continue going forward.

  First, Philadelphia has frequently operated with a payroll well under the league salary cap floor. Since the penalty for being below the floor at the end of the season isn’t really a penalty at all—the team would then simply be required to pay out the difference between the payroll and the floor as “bonus” payments to its current players—the suppressed payroll has allowed Hinkie and his staff to operate very strategically when money is involved, in both contracts and trades.

  First-round draft pick contracts are guaranteed. They have a set rookie scale that dictates what the player has to be paid in the first two years of the deal, team option rights for years three and four, and the ability to match offers when the player is a restricted free agent after that fourth year if the team hasn’t worked out a new contract with the player. Second-round picks, though, have open-contract structures, and teams can design contracts that best benefit them.

  The 76ers have serially tried to collect and exploit second-rounders. On average, about 10 percent of second-round picks (or about three a season) will become solid NBA players, and Hinkie wants to place as many bets as possible to reap that potential yield. The 76ers, famously, had six second-round selections in the 2014 draft and loaded up with five more in 2015 because Hinkie has been able to use the 76ers’ financial freedom to nudge his way into trades as a facilitator, nabbing extra draft picks for his trouble. This has allowed them to stash several more players overseas to develop in addition to Saric. The ones who are intended for the current roster are then offered front-loaded deals that will reward the team heavily if the player develops well.

  In 2014–15, the strategy worked with the signing of Robert Covington, a former NBA Development League MVP whose four-year contract was less than 25 percent guaranteed in total. He made himself into a valuable wing shooter and slasher, and now the team has control over his next three seasons at their discretion at an extremely low cost. Similarly, Jerami Grant, son of former NBA player Harvey Grant, also signed a four-year deal, with the last two years not fully guaranteed. The team tried the same tack with athletic guard K. J. McDaniel, but he balked and gambled on himself, signing just a one-year, nonguaranteed deal. Hinkie then traded him midseason to the Rockets for guard Isaiah Canaan and, you guessed it, a second-round pick.

  Hinkie also used the team’s copious cap space to his advantage. At the 2015 trade deadline, the 76ers agreed to take on JaVale McGee’s onerous contract from the Denver Nuggets in order to receive yet another future first-round pick. Again, the team had to spend that money one way or another, either through player acquisition or as a distribution to their own players. Hinkie elected to use it to gain another valuable chip for down the road. The 76ers similarly exploited a cash-strapped team during the 2015 summer free agency period when they used the Sacramento Kings’ need to create cap room to lure free agents against them. In exchange for taking on two contracts from the Kings, the 76ers received their 2014 lottery selection in shooting guard Nik Stauskas, as well as a future protected first-round pick, and the right to swap first-round picks in both the 2016 and 2017 drafts, should the Kings land the better pick. Sacramento is considered unlikely to dent the Western Conference playoffs in either of those seasons, so a lucky break with the lottery ping-pong balls has the potential to deliver another huge asset.

  If a number of Hinkie’s bets pan out, and the team can overcome its growing reputation of coldly treating players as fungible assets, the 76ers could be a very formidable team sooner than anyone thinks—and one that will have the cap space and assets in both players and future draft picks to work a mega-trade if that’s determined to be the best path to becoming a contender. Of course, the bigger bets need to work out, and the Joel Embiid one may go bust on them, as the big man reinjured his foot and is expected to miss the entire 2015–16 season, as well.

  Only Hinkie and team management know when the gambit will end and the gamble will begin, and he’s still not talking about it. During a post-sessions happy hour at the 2015 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I introduced myself, offering up the double kiss of death that I was friendly with Pablo Torre though our time working together at Sports Illustrated,
and that I was writing this book.

  Hinkie cringed in mock horror, and pretended to start walking away.

  Given the chance to comment on the record, Hinkie predictably declined, but he was happy to chat for a couple of minutes. He even chuckled when I compared the 76ers’ rebuild to the famous Internet story “One Red Paperclip,” where a guy started with said paperclip and kept bartering for something else that had slightly more value, ultimately ending up with a fully paid-for house.

  After two seasons of designed losing, the 76ers had traded up from a paperclip to something akin to a toaster, but with Hinkie’s moxie, the assets he has collected, and the patience of ownership that supports this controversial path, he may someday get that house. There’s no guarantee it will have a roof or indoor plumbing, but whatever it ends up looking like, you can be sure that the neighbors will be talking about it.

  The Houston Rockets and 3-Point Extremes

  One of the major talking points during the 2014–15 preseason was the varying ways in which NBA teams viewed the 3-pointer. Even as the league as a whole continued to evolve away from dominant post play and toward the spacing/slashing/shooting mentality that fueled the recent Spurs and Heat championship teams, there remained considerable differences among the thirty franchises as to how to best utilize the shot.

  The discussion came to a hysterical and almost comical peak when first-year Los Angeles Lakers head coach Byron Scott, likely in an effort to disassociate himself from the Mike D’Antoni era where 3-pointers were launched somewhat indiscriminately, openly talked about putting specific limits on the number of threes the Lakers took. In an interview detailed by the Los Angeles Times, Scott said curious and/or worrisome things like “I like the fact that we only shot 10 threes” (in the preseason opener against the Denver Nuggets), “If we shoot between 10 and 15, I think that’s a good mixture of getting to that basket and shooting threes,” and “I don’t want us to be coming down, forcing up a bunch of threes.”

  Of course, no coach wants his team to force up shots of any vintage, but to seemingly put hard limits on one type of shot—especially one that, if used properly, has a much better points-per-shot yield than 2-point attempts, and creates much better spacing for the rest of your offense—raised many eyebrows in the media and analytics communities. It is extremely hard in today’s NBA to succeed over the long run if you’re constantly overmatched at the arc. The Memphis Grizzlies have been the most successful anti-establishment team, but they also have very specific personnel—potent bigs Zach Randolph and Marc Gasol inside, plus wing stopper Tony Allen and hard-nosed point guard Mike Conley—that cater to their defensive, grinding style.

  The Lakers, even before losing rookie power forward Julius Randle for the season after he suffered a broken leg in the regular-season opener, did not have that type of personnel. What they did have was a large group of players that shot the three fairly well. All of Nick Young, Wayne Ellington, Wesley Johnson, Jeremy Lin, and Ryan Kelly had made at least 34 percent of their 3-point attempts in 2013–14, and with Kobe Bryant also returning from injury, there was yet another capable 3-point shooter in the starting lineup. Yet, in their second preseason game, against the high-tempo, 3-point-gunning Golden State Warriors, no less, the Lakers attempted only eleven threes. Then, in their third preseason game, this happened:

  In that game, the Lakers attempted only three 3-pointers, including zero from either corner. That’s almost impossible to do. And it’s not like the Lakers didn’t have players shooting from areas below the free throw line; they missed all six mid-range shots they attempted from the right baseline area, and took eight more of various lengths (making four) from the left side.

  Instead of 3-point attempts, the Lakers took a hailstorm of shots from a couple steps inside the arc. They also fired away from deeper in the painted area, from the elbows on either side of the free throw line and, basically, from every place except around the rim and from behind the arc. It was a masterpiece of offensive inefficiency. Predictably, NBA Twitter howled. This was not how basketball was supposed to be played anymore, at least according to the wonks.

  As mentioned in the 76ers’ section above, the leader in the push toward eliminating mid-range shots has been the Houston Rockets, who have stretched the efficiency of offensive basketball toward its outer limits—as well as the discussion on how much is too much from an effectiveness standpoint.

  Daryl Morey has a bit of a reputation as a media darling, and detractors of this style—or perhaps of Morey himself—point out that the 2014–15 Rockets had a fairly average offense (at 1.04 points per possession, twelfth out of the thirty NBA teams, per NBA.com’s data), despite having one of the game’s superstars in guard James Harden and also having (when healthy) one of the NBA’s best traditional centers in Dwight Howard, both of whom get to the free throw line a ton. That’s a great advantage for Harden, a very strong free throw shooter, but not as much for Howard, who struggles to make half of his attempts from the line.

  The criticism about the offense’s effectiveness has some fairness. The 2013–14 Rockets finished above 1.07 points per possession (albeit with different personnel that were much worse defensively than the 2014–15 version). The chart on page 69 maps offensive efficiency (in terms of points per one hundred possessions) against percentage of field goal attempts that come from 3-point range. While the trend is up as you increase your 3-point attempt rate, the Rockets drop back below the trend line, and there are several low-threes offenses that score more efficiently:

  There has been significant discussion as to whether the Rockets, despite shot distribution that is more points-efficient than any other team in the league, have taken things too far. If so many of your shots are coming from two very specific areas on the court—at the rim and behind the arc—it might make you too predictable, which makes the job of the defense that much easier. The overall Moreyball philosophy, though, isn’t validated or negated by what the team he runs is doing. Personnel (and health) makes a large difference in the execution of a plan, even if the plan is strategically sound, and this general approach to offensive basketball, mathematically, is sound.

  Dr. Stephen Shea, a mathematician and the coauthor of Basketball Analytics: Objective and Efficient Strategies for Understanding How Teams Win, has noted that every team in the NBA would improve its effective field goal percentage if it adjusted its shot distribution closer to the Rockets’ strategy. He also posted a blog entry in February 2015 that showed the distribution of all NBA teams over the past three seasons by what he terms their “Moreyball Efficiency”—a function of a team’s percentages made and allowed in the restricted area and on 3-pointers—and suggested a very strong correlation between high positive figures and championship contention.

  In that entry, he noted that the last two NBA champions—the 2014 San Antonio Spurs and the 2013 Miami Heat—led the league in those seasons in Moreyball Efficiency, which makes sense since they also led the paradigm shift toward the present “spacing and shooting” era. They also met each other in the Finals both seasons, so the runners-up each year also ranked very highly.

  As the chart from that entry below shows, there was reason at the All-Star break to believe in teams like the Golden State Warriors, Atlanta Hawks, Portland Trail Blazers (who scored high in this metric despite having LaMarcus Aldridge, one of the world’s best midrange jump shooters) and, somewhat surprisingly, the Washington Wizards, who at midseason had the lowest “offensive Moreyball” percentage in the league, per the analytics blog Nylon Calculus. The Wizards were well known as a team that openly shunned threes, but they made a very high percentage of the ones they attempted, and they also had the frontcourt to make and prevent some easy twos, which helped them in this ratio calculation.

  There is a pretty strong data fit in this model, with the data suggesting that as you approach and then move beyond a 1:1 ratio on offense and defense, your winning percentage will see a significant boost. Below that Moreyball Efficiency of 1, most of the te
ams sit below the trend curve, or underachieve their projected win rate. At and above that point, that changes, and there are a good number more teams above the trend line that are overachieving.

  At the extreme positive end lie both recent world champs, the losing team in each of those finals, and the aforementioned candidates from 2014–15 that looked like legitimate title contenders. (The data also re-emphasizes the disappointment that Russell Westbrook’s injury in the 2013 playoffs was for Oklahoma City, when the Thunder very well could have ended up in the Finals and with a rematch against the Heat.) The blog entry concluded, presciently, by stating that the Warriors looked to be very significant favorites to win it all.

  Still, Morey’s concepts find themselves with a number of detractors, for varying reasons. Part of it is that Houston hadn’t had much playoff success under Morey before the Rockets’ run to the 2015 Western Conference Finals that included a stunning comeback from down three games to one against the Los Angeles Clippers. That was even though Morey had done a very commendable job refashioning the roster from the Tracy McGrady/Yao Ming days without having a significant drop-off in the standings.

  Part is that the Rockets can be frustratingly dull to watch at times, with most variety drained out of their offensive attack in favor of a three-prong attack made up of an incredible number of threes, James Harden drives that end in fouls, and mostly inelegant Dwight Howard post ups. Grantland’s Jason Concepcion wrote well about this aspect in November 2014, likening the Rockets to some of the historically more successful practitioners of catenaccio, the infuriatingly boring and—in the hands of the right team—incredibly successful Italian defensive soccer strategy. There were similar comparisons to the left wing lock era New Jersey Devils of the NHL, when they were winning Stanley Cups while playing a style that ultimately forced the league to enact rule changes to defuse it. The Rockets, despite Harden’s individual brilliance, come off as boring and soulless in their approach, and grading out as an average offense increases this particular category of ire.