DESTROY THE DISNEYS!
No longer a Redickulous Thought...
No longer a Redickulous Thought...
-VS-
Game Time Start: 7:00 PM ET
Where: Amway Arena, Orlando, FL
Officials: E. Malloy, K. Fitzgerald, M. Kogut
Media Notes: Indiana Notes, Orlando Notes
Television: FOX Sports Indiana / FOX Sports Florida
Radio: WFNI 1070 AM / WDBO 96.5 FM
NBA Feeds:
*NBA Audio League Pass (available free to NBA All-Access members)
*NBA League Pass Broadband (subscription req'd)
*NBA League Pass Broadband (subscription req'd)
REMINDER: Per PD policy, please do not share a link to, describe how to search for, request a link to, or request a PM about streaming video of a NBA game that is not coming directly through the NBA. Not even in a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, know-what-I-mean" round-about sort of way. Thank you
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PACERS Danny Granger - sore knee (out) MAGIC Glen Davis – fractured left foot, (out) Hedo Turkoglu – NBA suspension (out) |
Jared Dubin: Celtics Use the Elbows to Take Out Pacers The Indiana Pacers have the league’s best defense. Between personnel and scheme, they make it extremely difficult for opposing offenses to score efficiently for any extended period of time. The Boston Celtics have one of the league’s worst offenses. Their 100.4 O-Rtg–per NBA.com–ranks just 21st in the league. It should come as no surprise, then, that the Celtics posted just a 93.3 O-Rtg in their game against the Pacers last night. Boston shot 41.0% from the field, which is right around the average for Indiana opponents this season, per NBA.com. The one area of the court they did have success is one they’ve been looking to exploit more often with Rajon Rondo out for the season, and also one where the Pacers are thought to be at least a little bit vulnerable: the mid-range area near the elbows, from which they shot 50%. Indiana’s defensive strategy when guarding pick-and-rolls involves having their bigs–Roy Hibbert, David West, Ian Mahinmi–hang back to meet guards in the lane either at or below the free throw line. In conjunction with this, they have their wing players stay home on three-point shooters; Indiana would prefer to give up a mid-range jumper off the dribble as opposed to a catch-and-shoot three. It’s a good strategy that has worked extremely well this season: the Pacers rate as the best team in the league in opponents’ field goal percentage in the restricted area and on corner threes–widely considered the two most important areas of the court to defend in today’s increasingly analytically- inclined NBA–and their opponents have attempted the fifth and third fewest shots from those locations, respectively. However, as ESPN The Magazine’s Jordan Brenner noted recently in an incredibly detailed piece on the Portland Trail Blazers analytics department, that strategy can sometimes leave holes in the Indiana defense for open mid-range jumpers. Though they aren’t normally high value shots for most teams, Boston is an exception to the rule. They take far too many mid-range shots, but the Celtics also connect on the second- highest percentage of any team in the league on those attempts, per NBA.com. Kevin Garnett and Brandon Bass aren’t huge threats diving to the rim on pick-and-rolls, but they can float to the space above the free throw line and nail jumpers with the best of them. And that’s exactly what they did last night. On each of the four plays above, a Celtic big man–whether it be Garnett or Bass–sets a screen, then just kind of floats in the area above the free throw line waiting for a pass. Each time, the Pacer guarding the screener –either Hibbert or West–sinks back into the lane to defend against the drive while the player being screened recovers, at which point Hibbert or West first makes a move to go back to his man. The result was four wide open jumpers, and four makes. Boston roll men went 5-for-7 from the field in the game, with Garnett also getting a dunk and missing two jumpers (one contested, one open) at the end of the shot clock. Pick-and-roll ball-handlers for the Celtics shot just 5-for-15 in the game, but 4 of those makes came near the elbows, to go with only 4 misses. Again, Indiana’s defensive system is designed to force those types of shots, but if a team gets hot from that area, it can make the Pacers pay. On the first play above, the ball eventually gets swung to Avery Bradley in the corner, where he kicks off a side pick-and-roll. The Pacers, as most NBA teams do these days, attempt to “down” it, forcing the ball-handler back toward the baseline and away from the middle. You can see West jump out on the high side of the ball-handler, looking to cut off his driving lane, but he gets there too late, and Bradley turns the corner and wind up with an elbow jumper. The second set is...CONTINUE READING AT HOOP CHALK |
Jared Wade: What's your NBA 'FICO' score? A caricature of how NBA teams use analytics could be an unshaven Daryl Morey sitting alone in a laboratory feeding statistics through some Rube Goldberg computer contraption programmed to calculate wins. But there is a whole other side to how franchises crunch data that has nothing to do with basketball statistics -- it’s strictly business. In 2013, teams use analytics to increase their bottom lines as much as they do to boost their win totals. The Orlando Magic, for example, knew that ticket demand would nose-dive after they traded Dwight Howard. But Orlando's gate revenue is down just 3.3 percent this season compared to 2010-11, according to team vice president of business strategy Anthony Perez, who spoke on a ticketing panel during the 2013 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in Boston. Compared to the related fall in the secondary resale market for tickets, which Perez said has dropped 28 percent, the sales team seems to be doing well. Although fewer people are coming to games (1,322 fewer fans per game from a franchise-high average of 18,972 two years ago), Orlando has gotten better at squeezing money out of its building. “Our goal is not to sell out games necessarily,” said Perez. “We're trying to maximize revenue.” To do this, the Magic and many other teams have adopted a sales practice commonly used by energy companies, hotels and airlines but relatively new in sports: dynamic pricing. For several years, NBA teams have charged different prices for tickets depending on the opponent or the day of the week. This season, the Magic have taken it a step further, using data-intensive software models to adjust prices in real time as market demand ebbs and flows. Just like gas prices. This is far from the only way teams are using analytics to drive revenue. Data has become vital to selling season tickets, which Amy Brooks, senior vice president of the NBA, called the “most critical part of our business” during an MIT Sloan panel session. To predict which customers are likely to purchase ticket packages, the NBA assigns each fan in its database what Brooks calls an "NBA FICO" score, a term coined for its similarity to consumer credit ratings. This number (from 1 to 100) can be determined by any number of factors: age, income, home ownership, season-ticket buying history, distance from the arena, games attended, purchases made on NBA.com, number of stadiums visited, League Pass subscription renewals. The goal is to gauge the revenue potential the league can expect from a fan buying full or partial season-ticket packages. If John Hollinger had devised the formula, it would be called the fan's BER (Buyer Efficiency Rating). Given that the average NBA team has 100,000 leads, according to Brooks, cold-calling is a daunting proposition. So the more teams know about each, the more they can sell. "We love behavioral data," Brooks said. "We want to automate this as much as possible." This more than anything is why teams are phasing out paper tickets in favor of digital entry passes that force fans to reveal so much information about themselves...CONTINUE READING AT TRUEHOOP |
Pacers Mike Wells @MikeWellsNBA Jared Wade @8pts9secs Tim Donahue @TimDonahue8p9s Tom Lewis @indycornrows |
Magic Brian K. S @MagicInsider Joshua Robbins @joshuabrobbins Eddie Rivera @erivera7 Evan Dunlap @BQRMagic |
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