Interesting article from the WSJ on Cal Tech's BB program and what it learned from analytics and applied to team construction (with constraints):
"The basketball gym is right next to the astrophysics building on the campus of the
California Institute of Technology. The basketball coach has three computer screens on
his desk and a ball signed by the school’s Nobel Prize winners on one of his
bookshelves, and the basketball players are computer science majors whose stats are
listed next to their STEM research projects on the team’s website. It’s all very Caltech.
But the most Caltech thing about Caltech’s basketball team is how they actually play
basketball. On this campus synonymous with scientific innovation, a place known for
its expertise in theoretical physics and complex engineering, the basketball team is
exploiting a profound mathematical breakthrough.
It’s the simple arithmetic that 3-pointers are worth more than 2-pointers.
The Caltech Beavers have become excellent in one statistical category: how many
3-pointers they shoot. There are more than 400 schools that play Division-III men’s
basketball, and Caltech is flirting with the top-10 in terms of the percentage of its shots
SPORTS COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Caltech’s Rocket Science: Shoot More
3-Pointers
The school known for scientific innovation and embracing technology has its most successful basketball
team in decades. Why? Because the 3-point revolution has come to Caltech.
|
Jan. 28, 2019 9:48 a.m. ET
By Ben Cohen
Caltech’s Rocket Science: Shoot More 3-Pointers - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/caltech-shooting-more-3-pointers-115...
1 of 5 1/29/19, 6:35 AM
that come from behind the line. It was only three years ago when threes accounted for
30% of their field-goal attempts. Now it’s 50%.
“We want to shoot as many threes as we can,” said coach Oliver Eslinger. “The more
threes you take and the more threes you make, the math works out.”
If you happen to know anything about Caltech’s basketball team, it’s probably that
Caltech’s basketball team was very bad for a very long time. There was no
mathematical formula that could make them better. The school lost 310 straight
conference games in a streak that lasted for longer than today’s players have been
alive. They finally ended it by winning one game in 2011. And then they proceeded to
lose 55 games in a row.
The epic amount of losing from 1985 until 2015 seems almost statistically impossible
because of what’s happening now: Caltech is having its best season in more than a halfcentury.
The Beavers have an 8-10 record, but compared to their past teams, they are
basically the Golden State Warriors.
It’s fitting that a team of fantastically quantitative geeks is more successful than ever.
Basketball has become a sport that’s more a function of math than art. And so of course
Caltech is good now. They’re winning because of math.
What makes Caltech such a fascinating team for this moment is how it became the
latest front in the 3-point revolution. In the last five years, the entire sport has been
transformed, and it’s already clear the game will never be the same. The normalization
of the 3-pointer trickled down to a generation of youth basketball players, and now
those kids are teenagers in high school and college. If the Warriors were the
earthquake, they are the aftershocks. Some of them are good enough to make it to the
NBA. And some of them are brilliant enough to get admitted to Caltech.
That select group of supremely analytic college students who happen to play basketball
didn’t need to be convinced that it was smart to shoot more of the shots that get you
three points instead of two. They don’t need to be convinced of much concerning the
almighty power of math.
“There’s no one on our team who can’t shoot,” said sophomore Spencer Schneider. “We
definitely know there’s an advantage, and we try to exploit that advantage.”
Before he was hired, when the school was in the middle of its first losing streak,
Eslinger already had experience diving into the shallow pool of players who could hack
it at Caltech. He was coming from MIT. While school officials are reluctant to discuss
admissions standards, it doesn’t take a genius to recognize that the number of highschool
basketball players Eslinger can recruit is infinitesimal. Their average test
scores? “It’s pretty off the charts,” Eslinger said. “Well, not pretty. It’s off the charts.”
Caltech doesn’t have the luxury of recruiting players to fit a certain style of play.
Eslinger has to adapt every season. The way that Caltech plays is dictated entirely by
Caltech’s players.
It wasn’t like he wanted his team to shoot threes and then went looking for highschoolers
with 800s on the math portion of the SAT. What actually happened was the
Caltech coach Dr. Oliver Eslinger has turned around the school’s basketball team, which once had a 310-game exact opposite. There were more 3-point shooters with perfect test scores simply
because there are more 3-point shooters period.
“It’s hard to quantify that,” Eslinger said. “I don’t have the data.”
But the most convincing anecdotal evidence for the theory that explains the Caltech
basketball team comes from the players themselves.
Everyone on the team is a freshman, sophomore or junior, which means they were in
high school when the Warriors started winning and the Houston Rockets began the
peculiar series of analytic experiments they call basketball. The kids of the 1990s
wanted to be like Michael Jordan. The kids in college now wanted to be like Stephen
Curry.
The 3-point revolution will go down as the formative event in the basketball lives of
college students. It’s about as hard to sell them on the virtues of shooting 3-pointers as
it is to sell them free beer.
It’s a happy coincidence for Caltech that everyone can shoot these days because
there are many important parts of basketball where the Beavers are lacking:
height, athleticism, skill. And it’s not like any team that shoots threes is suddenly the
Warriors. Caltech is still Caltech. They only have nine players on the entire roster. “We
don’t do a lot of scrimmaging,” Eslinger said.
But it’s oddly appropriate that half of Caltech’s shots are threes and that it has
embraced the 3-pointer more than almost every school in the country. Eslinger makes a
habit of burying himself in basketball data to find inefficiencies that might work in
Caltech’s favor. “We talk about data all the time,” said Caltech political scientist
Michael Alvarez, the team’s faculty liaison. “I’m constantly asking how he’s collecting
information and using it in decision-making.”
Just because an idea makes sense doesn’t mean that it will be widely adopted. But in
this case it was.
“We all know about the analytic revolution and the principles behind it,” Schneider
said.
It turns out that Schneider was raised in Houston as the Rockets were pushing the
limits of 3-pointers. They are his favorite team, and James Harden is his favorite player.
He doesn’t even mind the monotony of watching Harden dribble, dribble, dribble, sip a
piña colada, dribble some more and then shoot a stepback three on what seems like
Caltech’s Rocket Science: Shoot More 3-Pointers - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/caltech-shooting-more-3-pointers-115 every possession.
“I know a lot of people don’t like it,” he said, “but I think it’s cool to do the right thing
analytically.”"
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
"The basketball gym is right next to the astrophysics building on the campus of the
California Institute of Technology. The basketball coach has three computer screens on
his desk and a ball signed by the school’s Nobel Prize winners on one of his
bookshelves, and the basketball players are computer science majors whose stats are
listed next to their STEM research projects on the team’s website. It’s all very Caltech.
But the most Caltech thing about Caltech’s basketball team is how they actually play
basketball. On this campus synonymous with scientific innovation, a place known for
its expertise in theoretical physics and complex engineering, the basketball team is
exploiting a profound mathematical breakthrough.
It’s the simple arithmetic that 3-pointers are worth more than 2-pointers.
The Caltech Beavers have become excellent in one statistical category: how many
3-pointers they shoot. There are more than 400 schools that play Division-III men’s
basketball, and Caltech is flirting with the top-10 in terms of the percentage of its shots
SPORTS COLLEGE BASKETBALL
Caltech’s Rocket Science: Shoot More
3-Pointers
The school known for scientific innovation and embracing technology has its most successful basketball
team in decades. Why? Because the 3-point revolution has come to Caltech.
|
Jan. 28, 2019 9:48 a.m. ET
By Ben Cohen
Caltech’s Rocket Science: Shoot More 3-Pointers - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/caltech-shooting-more-3-pointers-115...
1 of 5 1/29/19, 6:35 AM
that come from behind the line. It was only three years ago when threes accounted for
30% of their field-goal attempts. Now it’s 50%.
“We want to shoot as many threes as we can,” said coach Oliver Eslinger. “The more
threes you take and the more threes you make, the math works out.”
If you happen to know anything about Caltech’s basketball team, it’s probably that
Caltech’s basketball team was very bad for a very long time. There was no
mathematical formula that could make them better. The school lost 310 straight
conference games in a streak that lasted for longer than today’s players have been
alive. They finally ended it by winning one game in 2011. And then they proceeded to
lose 55 games in a row.
The epic amount of losing from 1985 until 2015 seems almost statistically impossible
because of what’s happening now: Caltech is having its best season in more than a halfcentury.
The Beavers have an 8-10 record, but compared to their past teams, they are
basically the Golden State Warriors.
It’s fitting that a team of fantastically quantitative geeks is more successful than ever.
Basketball has become a sport that’s more a function of math than art. And so of course
Caltech is good now. They’re winning because of math.
What makes Caltech such a fascinating team for this moment is how it became the
latest front in the 3-point revolution. In the last five years, the entire sport has been
transformed, and it’s already clear the game will never be the same. The normalization
of the 3-pointer trickled down to a generation of youth basketball players, and now
those kids are teenagers in high school and college. If the Warriors were the
earthquake, they are the aftershocks. Some of them are good enough to make it to the
NBA. And some of them are brilliant enough to get admitted to Caltech.
That select group of supremely analytic college students who happen to play basketball
didn’t need to be convinced that it was smart to shoot more of the shots that get you
three points instead of two. They don’t need to be convinced of much concerning the
almighty power of math.
“There’s no one on our team who can’t shoot,” said sophomore Spencer Schneider. “We
definitely know there’s an advantage, and we try to exploit that advantage.”
Before he was hired, when the school was in the middle of its first losing streak,
Eslinger already had experience diving into the shallow pool of players who could hack
it at Caltech. He was coming from MIT. While school officials are reluctant to discuss
admissions standards, it doesn’t take a genius to recognize that the number of highschool
basketball players Eslinger can recruit is infinitesimal. Their average test
scores? “It’s pretty off the charts,” Eslinger said. “Well, not pretty. It’s off the charts.”
Caltech doesn’t have the luxury of recruiting players to fit a certain style of play.
Eslinger has to adapt every season. The way that Caltech plays is dictated entirely by
Caltech’s players.
It wasn’t like he wanted his team to shoot threes and then went looking for highschoolers
with 800s on the math portion of the SAT. What actually happened was the
Caltech coach Dr. Oliver Eslinger has turned around the school’s basketball team, which once had a 310-game exact opposite. There were more 3-point shooters with perfect test scores simply
because there are more 3-point shooters period.
“It’s hard to quantify that,” Eslinger said. “I don’t have the data.”
But the most convincing anecdotal evidence for the theory that explains the Caltech
basketball team comes from the players themselves.
Everyone on the team is a freshman, sophomore or junior, which means they were in
high school when the Warriors started winning and the Houston Rockets began the
peculiar series of analytic experiments they call basketball. The kids of the 1990s
wanted to be like Michael Jordan. The kids in college now wanted to be like Stephen
Curry.
The 3-point revolution will go down as the formative event in the basketball lives of
college students. It’s about as hard to sell them on the virtues of shooting 3-pointers as
it is to sell them free beer.
It’s a happy coincidence for Caltech that everyone can shoot these days because
there are many important parts of basketball where the Beavers are lacking:
height, athleticism, skill. And it’s not like any team that shoots threes is suddenly the
Warriors. Caltech is still Caltech. They only have nine players on the entire roster. “We
don’t do a lot of scrimmaging,” Eslinger said.
But it’s oddly appropriate that half of Caltech’s shots are threes and that it has
embraced the 3-pointer more than almost every school in the country. Eslinger makes a
habit of burying himself in basketball data to find inefficiencies that might work in
Caltech’s favor. “We talk about data all the time,” said Caltech political scientist
Michael Alvarez, the team’s faculty liaison. “I’m constantly asking how he’s collecting
information and using it in decision-making.”
Just because an idea makes sense doesn’t mean that it will be widely adopted. But in
this case it was.
“We all know about the analytic revolution and the principles behind it,” Schneider
said.
It turns out that Schneider was raised in Houston as the Rockets were pushing the
limits of 3-pointers. They are his favorite team, and James Harden is his favorite player.
He doesn’t even mind the monotony of watching Harden dribble, dribble, dribble, sip a
piña colada, dribble some more and then shoot a stepback three on what seems like
Caltech’s Rocket Science: Shoot More 3-Pointers - WSJ https://www.wsj.com/articles/caltech-shooting-more-3-pointers-115 every possession.
“I know a lot of people don’t like it,” he said, “but I think it’s cool to do the right thing
analytically.”"
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
