Basketball season is winding down. The air is warming up, that groundhog came out for a bit and the field is beckoning. Yes everyone, lacrosse season is upon us and it’s got all of us at Krossover really amped up. What better way to transition to a new net than with some lacrosse analytics? Not sure you’re familiar with stats from lax? Well if you know basketball, you are already slightly ahead of the game.
Any true analytics guy has heard of Dean Oliver’s Four Factors of Basketball of Success. In it, Oliver states that there are four factors or statistics that are key to winning basketball games. Those stats are:
1.) Field Goal Attempts
2.) Turnovers
3.) Offensive Rebounds
4.) Free Throw Attempts
If you guys want to get behind the numbers a little bit, Basketball Reference has a great explanation on the significance of the calculations for the four factors.
Now what does this have to do with Lacrosse? Turns out, a whole lot. Krossover’s VP of analytics Dr. James Piette recently spoke at the Intercollegiate Men’s Coaching Lacrosse Association (IMCLA) Convention about “Bringing Moneyball to Lacrosse.” You can find his entire presentation right here. (Inside Lacrosse has a great rundown of Piette’s entire presentation as well.) In his talk, he identifies how the main ideas behind basketball’s four factors can be easily applied to Lacrosse as well. When you look at what each stat from the game accomplishes it breaks down to a more generalized goal. So the four factors then become shooting, controlling possession, maintaining possession and penalties.
Here is how it more specifically breaks down on defense:
But the similarities don’t end there. Athletes can even adopt similar moves like the crossover (the “c” just doens’t look right in that word anymore) for lacrosse. Kyle Harrison, of Major League Lacrosse fame, shows how to translate your basketball skills to the field in this video courtesy of Inside Lacrosse TV:
Krossover’s Founder and CEO Vasu Kulkarni recently sat down with Matt Forman Lacrosse Magazine for an interview where he discussed the future of lax analytics and it’s kinship with basketball. Here is an excerpt from that discussion:
Similar to basketball, what we’ve said is there’s something sort of like the four factors. In basketball we have this thing called the four factors. In lacrosse, we stress that shooting is important, that raw shooting percentage or total shooting attempts is often enough to look at and then also you want to look at your percentage of shots on goal. And the other things that we look at are things like controlling possession, so that’s turnovers plus your failed clears, maintaining possession — winning your offensive ground ball battles — and of course penalties.
And then you also talk about defensive stuff. So things like opponent shooting, how often can you force a loss of possession and then regaining those possessions on which you’ve forced the other team to lose possession and then of course defending penalties. Those are some of the things that we look at closely for teams. Last season we had probably about 20 or 30 Division I programs, and our data guy was kind of spending some time looking at the D-I stats that we collected, and trying to look for trends and see if we can find anything interesting.
My favorite example is one I give for basketball — again, I’m a hoops guy, so even though we’re talking lax, I always like to go back to hoops, and one of my favorite stats that I show people is we calculate for a point guard what percentage of his assists are coming near the rim, in the paint, in the mid-range and beyond the arc, so a lot of location-based stuff. And we’re doing some of this with lacrosse, as well.
Source:
http://www.krossover.com/blog/2013/03/the-four-factors-of-basketb-i-mean-lacrosse-success/
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