I am fortunate to receive a lot of messages from people throughout the world who are involved in basketball at different levels. Occasionally, I get some very interesting information. I will pass on some of that this week.
A coach in Texas sent me the statistics for his high school girls team. No one ever knows where the next Sheryl Swoopes will come from; given the lack of experience most people have in watching girls' basketball, she very well could come from this team.
So what can we tell about this team, having not seen them at all?
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Clearly, Martin is the most advanced of the players, perhaps not a star in the league, but the best player on the team. Maybe she's a senior, but seniors usually lead their teams in minutes played and she did not. Maybe she is a freshman on her way to much better things.
The team played a lot of people, as many high school teams do in order to give an opportunity to most of the kids. The team's taller players are either not very good or the team just doesn't have many taller players because they didn't block many shots. They got rebounds, which is often associated as much with athleticism as height at this age.
One of the distinguishing characteristics of lower levels of basketball is that the offense tends not to be as good. Here, the girls are scoring on about 35% of their possessions. The WNBA scores on about 43% of their possessions, from early indications. There are definitely some high school girls teams that score at or above 43% of the time, but that doesn't mean that they are WNBA quality, of course.
The team played better offense when the pace was faster. It also played worse defense when the pace was faster. The team was probably involved in a lot of blowouts even though it had a record near 0.500.
Finally, in a shameless bit of self-promotion, I will mention that the 1997 PRO version of Assistant Basketball Coach software, which is used to take statistics at games, will produce reports containing several of my statistical methods for evaluating players and teams.
Jose Marinho Marques Dias Neto of Brazil passed along an abstract of some work he did to determine which basketball position (guard, forward, center) did the most running in a game. What he found was that forwards covered the most ground. Strangely, the forwards tended to go backward the most, too:
| Distance Traveled (meters/minute) | ||||||
| Position |
|
Walking | Jogging | Sprinting |
Going Backwards |
Total |
| Forwards |
 |
28.6 | 35.4 | 34.8 | 4.9 | 103.6 |
| Guards |
|
28.5 | 35.1 | 28.6 | 3.6 | 95.9 |
| Centers |
|
23.5 | 30.9 | 28.9 | 1.5 | 84.9 |
Toronto coach Darrell Walker is probably thinking that he should move overweight center Oliver Miller to forward.
Neto also did a comparison of some statistics in the Brazil National League to the NBA. In this comparison, he found that defense is more important in the NBA than in his native league. In a related finding, he concluded that the center is the most important position in the NBA, whereas the forward is the most important position in the Brazilian League.
One of the most common questions I get is "What is the most important statistic?" I actually received a study on this from M. Janeira, Ph.D., and J. Sampaio of Portugal, using numbers put up in the Portuguese Professional League. Since, as noted above, there is some difference between the NBA and the Brazilian League, I thought it would be interesting to compare the results of Janeira and Sampaio to those STATS obtained when they did a similar study for their 1994-95 Basketball Scoreboard:
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Even though the two studies did not look at the same statistics, there is remarkable similarity between the two lists. Both essentially say that shooting and defensive rebounds are important (which are related statistics) and that offensive rebounds and turnovers are not important.
Finishing up with the international contributions, I was notified that one can get statistics from the Argentinian National League by emailing either adc@ssdnet.com.ar or show-sports@si.cordoba.com.ar.
I want to thank Jose Marinho Marques Dias Neto, M. Janeira, Ph.D., J. Sampaio, and the coach from Texas for their contributions. I should also apologize to J. Sampaio and M. Janeira for taking as long as I did to print the information they passed along.