

Numbers can improve fans' knowledge of the game

6:12 PM, Jan. 6, 2014  |  Comments
Utah center Enes Kanter puts up a shot as Los Angeles Lakers guard Wesley Johnson defends during the second half on Friday in Los Angeles.
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Shortly after Dr. James Naismith first nailed up a peach basket in 1891, people started keeping basketball statistics - and it's been an advancing field ever since.

The first stat was to keep track of which team put the ball in the peach basket more than the others. Next came figuring out which particular players on a team were putting the ball in the peach basket the most.

Then somebody noticed that it was also important to have players who could get the ball when it fell from the peach basket after the other team missed a shot, or having somebody who could pass the ball to a teammate who had an unobstructed path to the peach basket, and rebounds and assists were born.

From there, things stayed pretty static through much of the 20th Century. The NBA didn't even start keeping track of blocks and steals until 1971. However, at the dawn of the 21st Century, thanks to computers, algorithms and some really smart people, the concept of analytics and advanced statistics made the jump from baseball over to basketball. So for the past few years we've had access to stats with names like usage rate, estimated wins added and effective shooting percentage.

Just when you think things can't get any more measured and/or complicated, the NBA has upped the ante as the 2013-14 season marks the first time in history the league has used what it's calling "Player Tracking." Six cameras have been installed above the court in every NBA arena, including EnergySolutions. The cameras are linked to software that tracks the ball and player movement 25 times per second.

Now we can measure things like the distance a player travels during a game, how many times a player touched the ball during a game, how many times he grabbed a rebound that was within a 3.5-foot-vicinity of him, or how many times he drove the lane. All of the numbers are available at in the stats section, and there are a number of different ways you can slice them up as you search through.

The numbers can be interesting on a variety of levels; one of them is to take note of where Jazz players stand out as being league or team leaders in certain categories. (All figures cited here are through games of Dec. 31.)

For example, who has covered more distance on the court than anyone in the entire league this season? Utah's Gordon Hayward was at 87.53 miles through 34 games, or about 2.6 miles per game.

When it comes to number of times touching the ball per game, point guards like Charlotte's Kemba Walker and the Clippers' Chris Paul get the rock nearly 100 times a night, and possess the ball for over seven minutes in a game. Not surprisingly, Trey Burke leads the Jazz in this category and is 20th in the league at 78.5 touches per game. When it comes to who touches the ball within 12 feet of the basket as part of the offense, Derrick Favors is in the top 15 in the league at 6.1 per game, in the same neighborhood with Kevin Love, Carlos Boozer and Tim Duncan.

What about converting those touches into points? The one and only Jazz player to crack the top 100 in points-per-touch is Enes Kanter. His 0.30 points per touch is the same as players like Kawhi Leonard, Paul Millsap, Dwight Howard and Kevin Love. Kanter's numbers look even better when you consider points per half-court touch. Kanter's 0.49 points per half-court touch vault him into the top 75 ahead of the likes of big men such as Roy Hibbert and DeAndre Jordan.

Any stat someone can come up with is also always at war with what our eyes seem to tell us by watching the games as well as the way our human brains work in the ways we tend to categorize information. Therefore, no stat is perfect, and there's always room for debate. I can imagine that back in the 1890s people were arguing about whether a guy who put the ball in the peach basket the most times was a better player than a guy who seemed to be really good at keeping the other team from putting the ball in the peach basket. Still, wouldn't you want all the info you can get before making a decision?

Whatever stats we come up with to try to help us understand the game better, they still can't explain the beauty that comes with watching a great point guard whip a behind-the-back pass to a guy cutting in for a slam dunk. Basketball doesn't need numbers to be a wonderful game, but the numbers can help us understand the game better, and that makes it all the more fun.

Geoff Griffin welcomes comments from Jazz fans at

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