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Beat the Competition: Analyze Performance Data with Shane Battier, ESPN commentator and former NBA player
There’s no question that I was looking for every competitive edge that I could find on the basketball court. Through the study of analytics and basketball data, I was able to understand basketball in almost a binary fashion and basketball became very black and white, cut and dry. And I knew exactly what was good, what was bad, what was going to win, what was going to lose almost instantly.
Gain competitive advantage
Sports are about gaining the competitive advantage and really for the first time in the history of sports, we’re able to track down to the millisecond time and speed and force and effort, exertion. One of my favorite stats that I was told over the course of my last couple of years in Miami, they were able to track how often I possessed the basketball. And I’ve never been a big ball hog for lack of a better term but, in fact, when I was on the court I only possessed the ball, on average, for one second per possession. I was the NBA’s version of Mr. Hot Potato. I caught the ball, I’d pass the ball, usually to LeBron. Or I caught the ball and shot the ball. And it broke down to 98 percent of my time spent on the basketball court, I didn’t possess the ball.
So the hours and the days and the years spent honing my ball skills, passing, shooting, dribbling- to only use those skills for two percent of my playing time was a little mind boggling. Now that I’m retired, I realize, you know, I probably should have shot more. But just things like that were never before possible. And it’s opening up a whole new way to think about sports and specifically the game of basketball.
Anybody can look at their craft, their profession, their passion and with all the different ways of measuring success and failure nowadays, you can apply it to your life and become better. Again, it’s about finding that edge. It’s about improving this much. And if you do that enough across the board, you’re going to be more successful in whatever your craft is.
Study your field
After learning from the father of analytics in the NBA, Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, he was able to take me aside and show me the raw data on why a 15-foot jump shot was the worst shot in basketball. Now, you still have people who say oh, it’s part of the game. It always has been part of the game. It always will be part of the game. But there are metrics now that measure that that show that no one makes it at a high enough rate to deem it worthy. And for every 15-foot jump shot, especially off the dribble, off the bounce, that shot 100 percent of the time is less efficient than any other plays to shoot from on the court.
So my last two years in the NBA, I didn’t make one two-point dribble jump shot, which is unheard of. Most players make, you know, 100 to 500 two point dribble jumpers in a year. I didn’t make one, because I knew it was the single worst shot in basketball and I shot nothing but three point shots or layups at the rim. And that statistically gave me the best chance to have a high efficiency. And I was a very efficient player. I wasn’t prolific, but I was very efficient by just following the data.