Basketball Execution

First and foremost, I want to thank “The Athletic” for showing this great graphic in their recent article about “basketball grandmasters.” Secondly, it is hard for me to say anyone is a grandmaster without winning a championship. That is what a grandmaster is. Brand Stevens won on the college level but not on the professional level.

The professional level is the most elite level because it is the best league with the world’s best players. I would like to say that Nick Nurse can be named that for what he did last year and also winning coach of the year, but it is still premature for Brad.

We are moving on from the appetizer, and now we can get to the article’s meat and potatoes.

The Athletic article talks about the Raptors vs. Celtics series saying, “In Game 1, shooting luck fell in Boston’s favor, but its offensive execution seemed to earn it. But just look at the distribution of assisted field goals in Game 4, courtesy of NBAViz. The Raptors find ways to create good 3-point looks for each other or hit their rolling bigs in ways the Celtics can’t even compare.”

After reading the article, offensive execution is shown throughout this graph. It shows that the Raptors are getting looking off the pick and roll at will while the Boston Celtics look to get their shots off drives and ball movement. I have a question for the person writing the article that said that the Raptors execution was better in game four than the Celtics.

In my eyes, I feel like the three pointer can be fools gold for teams. So, I am not sure that this graph shows the full story. I do think it was good to ascertain how many shots that the Raptors were making. However, it does not show how many they missed or how many their opponents missed. I am careful not to believe that a particular team executes better merely because they are making shots. We must look at the quality misses or the tough shots for each to access this outcome. I think that the writer may be correct in this context, but I think we need another scatter plot that shows more information to make a more informed decision.