Executive
Summary
The
Basketball Japan League (BJL) is professional league and the purpose is to
provide entertaining basketball for fans, and earn money for the teams. It was
founded in 2005 with 6 teams; the league has expanded rapidly, and today there
are 21 teams. Due to rapid growth the game rules, league administration, and
head coaches are constantly changing. Following the end of the 2010-2011 season
13 of the then 16 head coaches lost their jobs, including the coach of the
championship team.
What does
it take to be successful as a coach? The NBA, which is the world authority on
professional basketball is moving increasingly toward analytics—the statistical
analysis of success drivers—in order to maximize winning. NBA Coaches that are
successful pay attention to analytics to guide decision making. NBA.com and
ESPN.com both list efficiency ratings (EFF) and performance evaluation ratings
(PER), in addition to clutch ratings and other important measures. The BJL
website contains nothing beyond basic player stats. Coaches in this league are
blind to analytics regarding their own team as well as their opponents.
What I
have built is an EFF ranking system for the BJL. This can be used by a coach to
see the most effective players on their own team as well other teams. This data
is useful in making decisions about playing time, line-up dynamics, and as a
starting point for studying other trends that go beyond data such as strategy
formulation.
The EFF
ranking system pulls cumulative season statistical data for every player in the
league, and then runs that data through a formula that adds positive
contributions and subtracts negative ones to produce a raw contribution number
or EFF. The EFF is then divided by minutes played to give the efficiency per
minute (EFF/MIN) rate, this rate can be used to compare players across the
board. The final step is to rank the players in order from highest EFF/MIN to
lowest.
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