Marshall’s Cinderella-like win over fourth seed Wichita State in the first round of the NCAA Tournament last week was a validating moment for head coach Dan D’Antoni.
With the team’s first ticket to the big dance since 1987, the tshirt-and-blazer-clad D’Antoni led Marshall to its first tournament win in program history by practicing what he’s been preaching since a memorable rant in 2016 that had him shouting to reporters: “I haven’t finished my damn analytics story yet.”
D’Antoni has spent the last few years pushing the power of analytics and data. If there’s a lesson to be learned from D’Antoni and his team’s first-round win, it’s that data-based playmaking matters, and the three-point shot may be the smartest play there is.
The backstory
In December 2016, following Marshall’s 112-106 loss to Pittsburgh, a reporter pointed out that Marshall took a lot of three-pointers and asked whether D’Antoni felt that “maybe there wasn’t quite enough working the ball into the paint early on?” D’Antoni, the brother of Houston Rockets head coach Mike D’Antoni, also a stat-heavy team, fired back by calling the reporter “old school” and asking whether he ever watches the NBA.
“You see those top three teams. Golden State — do they work in it? My brother in Houston, the biggest turnaround in the league — do they work it in? You can go get any computer and run what the best shots are and it will tell you the post-up is the worst shot in basketball,” he said. “If you want to run down and try to get it in there to shoot over somebody, then you’re beating analytics. The best shot in basketball is that corner three. The next-best shot in basketball is any other three.”
When the reporter attempted to butt-in with a follow-up question, D’Antoni shot him down by saying he hadn’t finished his damn analytics story yet and continued to point out the specific probabilities of post-up versus three-pointers.
“The last two championships have been Cleveland and Golden State. What do they do? You don’t see anybody post up. They just spread that thing out and go,” he said. “I changed a long time ago. I coached for 15 years like a dummy, running down there real hard so I can get it in there for the worst shot in basketball. I didn’t even know what I was doing.”
I’m so glad this man just won an NCAA Tournament game. pic.twitter.com/xSB7FmIYcr
— Brandon Kiley (@BKSportsTalk) March 16, 2018
Two years later in perhaps the most vindicating win of his career, D’Antoni upset Wichita in the NCAA tournament by leaning heavily on the concepts that fueled his 2016 rant: nearly half of Marshall’s shots were threes.
Basketball’s evolution
Precision coaching will increase as wearables give way to more advanced player data, which will advance analytics and the way people play.
This is something that those at the very top of the NBA already know and partially why they’re pushing for in-game wearables. The NBA, largely believed to be the most tech-savvy league of the four majors in American sports, has doubled down on data over the past few years, anchored by its 2016 deal with Sportradar and Second Spectrum that went into effect this season. Sportradar signed another data deal last summer to provide NBA teams with athletic performance stats about their players through Kinduct’s Athlete Management System, a platform designed to bolster player performance via analytics.
The NBA and National Basketball Players Association are still working to find common ground related to whether players can one day use wearables during games and what the league can do with the data collected from them if players ever do. However, the league’s ultimate goal is to use tracking devices to detect player motion, which when combined with the NBA’s existing optical tracking technologies would help computers better understand the game of basketball and improve it for teams, players and fans, according Steve Hellmuth, executive vice president of media operation and technology for the NBA.
At South by Southwest (SXSW) earlier this month, NBA deputy commissioner Mark Tatum said data collection and a better understanding of analytics has led — and will continued to lead — to an evolution of basketball.
“What we’re seeing is an evolution of the game based on that data. Scoring is up, pace is up, because teams and general managers are utilizing this data and understanding the value of a three-pointer, it’s much greater than a mid-range jump shot,” he said on a SXSW panel.
Just as we saw with D’Antoni, that access to analytics has changed coaching strategy, Tatum said.
Teams now say “‘we should be taking more three-pointers and we should be minimizing the amount of mid-range jump shots that we take,’ because the data says that you’re much more likely to be successful even if you miss threes, but taking threes as opposed to that mid-range jump shot,” he said. “We think it’s making the game so much more exciting, so much more enjoyable and so much more fast-paced.”
Perhaps D’Antoni was a ahead of the curve among NCAA coaches when he championed the three-pointer and analytics in his 2016 rant. Perhaps he yelled just loud enough for everyone else to heed the cause.