Home Court Conundrum

Plus an interview with an NBA craftsman

Dec 18, 2024

Hello, readers. In today’s refreshing installment of The F5 you’ll find:

A look at why the Lakers and Knicks have a home court disadvantage of their own making
Charting how unusual this Grizzlies team is
A Q&A with the creator of CraftedNBA

As a reminder, The F5 exists because of the support I receive from readers like you. I’m between jobs at the moment and each additional subscription makes this period that much more tolerable. If you find the contents of this newsletter interesting, consider a paid subscription for the cost of a single beer at happy hour ($5/month). Paying subscribers receive an additional email each week with more charts and analysis, plus tutorials on how to recreate the visuals from each week’s newsletter.

Josh Robbins wrote a piece in The Athletic recently about the arms race among NBA teams to build bigger and more extravagant practice facilites.

Since 2014, with basketball operations departments and team payrolls expanding, 20 of the league’s 30 franchises have opened new practice facilities. It has been an unrelenting contest of innovation and one-upmanship, with most of the participating clubs claiming new advantages in athlete care, roster retention and free-agency recruitment. In recent years, the price tag to build a standalone training center has typically ranged from $70 million to $90 million, according to figures cited by the teams, usually paid for by the franchises themselves.

These facilities are expensive and require lots of space to build them. To give you an example, the Houston Rockets’ new practice facility is 75,000-square-feet — or about half the size of a Walmart Supercenter.

In order to accommodate the size of these facilites, teams build them where land and real estate is cheap. That usually ends up being somewhere away from the center of town and the team’s home arena.

The animated chart below shows just how far each team’s practice facility is from their home arena, toggling between the distance (in miles) and driving time (in minutes).

About a third of the league practices inside their home arena or no more than a short walk away. The rest of the league is getting in the car. That’s relevant because ten miles by car in some cities takes longer than ten miles by car in other cities.

For example, the Lakers’ practice in El Segundo, California, about 15 miles from Crypto.com Arena. That could take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour, depending on LA traffic, according to Google Maps.

Similarly, the Knicks play their home games in Midtown Manhattan but their practice facility is located north of the city in Tarrytown. For those unfamiliar with the geography of New York City, that’s just across the border from Canada.

Why does any of this matter? Because most players are going to choose to live closer to where they practice, not where they play. After all, they spend more time in their practice facilities than they do their home arenas.

This can result in something of a home court disadvantage for teams like the Lakers and Knicks who are regularly scheduled for early afternoon games on national television. While their opponents are sleeping in because they’re staying at hotels near the arenas, players on the Knicks and Lakers are waking up early to drive (or be driven) to the game. That can be detrimental to player performance for guys who are accustomed to going to bed late and sleeping in even later.

That might explain why the Lakers and Knicks are a combined 42-52 (44.6%) in early afternoon home games since 2015-16 while the rest of the league is 493-407 (54.7%). Meanwhile, in all other home games, the Lakers and Knicks are 332-313 (51.5%) since 2015-16.

These results run counter to the idea that teams on the road in New York and Los Angeles are at a disadvantage because players are tempted by the city nightlife. But in this case, it’s the home team that’s playing with the deck stacked against them.

Total Basketball

Next time you hear someone repeat the tired talking point that all teams play the same, send them this video from Ben Taylor of Thinking Basketball.

I highly recommend watching the whole video. If you don’t have time, the big takeaway is that this year’s Grizzlies team is rarely running pick and rolls (PnRs) or dribble handoffs (DHOs) and opposing teams have no idea how to defend it.

To give you a sense of just how unique this strategy is, take a look at the chart below:

This chart show the percentage of a team’s possessions that feature a PnR or DHO. Publicly available play type data only goes back to 2015-16, but it’s clear from the chart that what Memphis is doing is unusual.

Instead of spamming an endless series of pick and rolls, Memphis has their players move around the court in sync with one another to stay as spaced out as possible. The result is that all five Grizzlies players have wider driving lanes to attack, which is why the Grizzlies see help defenders on their drives least often among all 30 teams, according to Second Spectrum tracking data.

The idea that all five players are empowered to attack the basket and that each player can fill the role of someone else reminds me of a concept from a different sport known as Total Football. Instead of giving players pre-defined roles, each player is afforded the freedom to attack, defend, and fill in for someone else at any given time. In basketball, that means no one player is left to stand in the corner possession after possession and no one player is dribbling the air out of the ball. This can confuse defenses that are used to seeing the same thing night after night in the regular season.

It’ll be interesting to see how well this strategy works in the playoffs when their opponents have time to develop a game plan against it. In the regular season, there’s simply not enough time for coaches and players to scheme against something so different from what the rest of the league is doing on a nightly basis.

A Refreshing Interview with Daniel Kavanaugh, creator of CraftedNBA

It’s helpful to remember that basketball is a game and being a fan should be fun and entertaining. Clicking around on CraftedNBA helps me remember that.

Daniel Kavanaugh launched CraftedNBA in 2018 after leaving behind a culinary career and rediscovering his love for tracking stats and Microsoft Excel. Kavanaugh is a software developer from Indianapolis, Indiana

One of my favorite things on CraftedNBA is CraftedPM, which is a composite score based on some of the most popular all-in-one metrics that are publicly available.

I asked Kavanaugh about the backstory behind CraftedNBA, what else he has in store for his website, and why he thinks his hometown Pacers have underperformed this season.

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

The F5: What's the origin story for CraftedNBA?

DK: I grew up in Indianapolis in the 1990's, where the Pacers were a threat every single season, and lived for those weekend NBA on NBC showdowns between the Bulls, Rockets, Suns, Sonics, etc. When I was about 10 years old I was given The NBA Encyclopedia, which I would scour through as I watched the games, and then a year or two later I received the book The NBA at 50, which I read front-to-back no less than 100 times. I also had a CHS tape of the movie.

Fast forward to 2010 or so and I had just gotten out of a culinary career when I took a desk job and rediscovered Microsoft Excel. I began tracking my own stats, very basic things, and then after a few years I figured I now know how to write code, I might as well transition from Excel to a website. It began with a few of the simple Player Traits pages, as a way to sort players who were the best at certain things.

I still remember the first day I got 20 visitors and being completely blown away. These days we are looking at between 1,500 and 3,000 visitors per day.

What's something you can find on CraftedNBA that you can't find elsewhere?

I have a few niche things that I have tried to quantify, like "who are the most consistent players in the NBA", and an attempt to quantify "Basketball IQ". My favorite tool is the Player Similarity Finder, where you can run a query to find the most similar players to the player in question.

Take someone like Jalen Johnson. He's still young, and you may want to know what players he is most similar to from NBA History. Well, you can run that query and it will spit out players like Chris Webber, Lamar Odom, and Kevin Garnett.

But the main thing that you will find on CraftedNBA is that we try to data-backed insights, but also remember that sports are about fun. This is entertainment. Rankings are fun, lists are fun, basketball is fun.

Tell me a little bit more about the Crafted Plus Minus. How did you decide which all-in-on metrics to include and the weights themselves?

CraftedPM was also something I had in Excel, kind of like Zach Lowe and his VORPS and SCHNORPS spreadsheet where I just averaged them all out. Once I added those to the site, Nathan Walker (now with the Golden State Warriors) was kind enough to help me out and really helped to make the stat something more than just the average of a few catch-all metrics.

As for the metrics themselves, I really just use anything publicly available unless the author has said that they do not want us to use it, which has happened on occasion. Some people will say "why would you use such and such metric, it stinks" but really I think of outlier values as more of a feature than a bug. Maybe they really are catching something the other metrics are not, but if not, they will be brought back to the mean by the rest of the metrics.

Are there any there any upcoming features to CraftedNBA you can talk about?

We are just going to continue to build out the membership platform. I am currently working on bringing a NYT Style Gaming section to the site. I've got 2-3 game ideas that I am working on, and hope to come up with 1-2 more. Look for those to drop sometime in the Spring.

I'd also like to build out a daily, updating projection system. I won the APBR Metrics Projection Contest two seasons ago, and generally have fared very well, so I know I have something. I am a little leery of creating outright betting products due to the nature of that business, but I think there is a place for something like this. I know I used to check 538s projections on an almost daily basis before they folded their sports content.

I was obsessed with Sports Illustrated for Kids as a child, so I am also working on building out a "Kid's Corner" section of the website. We can have little stat explainers, printable coloring pages, crossword puzzles, printable posters, and my son (11) is going to write some blog posts.

Transitioning now to your hometown Pacers. Do you have any thoughts on why they’ve struggled so much this season compared to last?

I don't think it can be overstated just how much of an impact being without Andrew Nembhard and Aaron Nesmith is, given the state of the rest of our perimeter defenders. It's difficult to get out in transition when you can't get stops, and of course Tyrese Halliburton not being himself for the first month or so didn't help. Losing your 2nd and 3rd string centers to achilles injuries the first week of the season certainly isn't going to help your defense either. The schedule is a little tough here coming up, but they will find their way.

If the Halliburton trade was considered a slam dunk, what does that make the Siakam trade?

I think the Siakam trade can be seen as a success as well, being that they made the Conference Finals. He seems to fit well with the rest of the roster, he can do so many things at a good to high level. I'm not sure there's a team in the league that Siakam wouldn't be a great fit with. That said, the team still has the same issues they have had for years, in that they can't get defensive rebounds, and they lack size at the wing position. I'm not sure the Pacers have had a guy in that 6'7" - 6'9" range that could reasonably defend on the wing since Paul George left town in 2017! There's hope for Jarace Walker and Johnny Furphy to develop into that role, but they aren't quite there yet.

What's one thing you can't live without during the NBA season?

The NBA websites video box scores. I've got four kids, another on the way, and obviously can't watch as many games as I would like these days. So to be able to check in every morning and watch all of Wembanyama’s shots from the night before is extremely valuable.

The F5 is taking next week off for the holidays. Talk to y’all in 2025.