Bucks are eager to get ahead of the game with analytics

It’s hard to watch the game of basketball without bias, emotion, judgment or opinion, and it’s impossible to see everything anyway.

So the Milwaukee Bucks rely on their director of basketball research, Seth Partnow, to simply provide the facts.

And those analytics – the gathering and interpretation of situational statistics - have in turn changed the way the Bucks look at the game.

The Bucks use this data - some of it available to the public, some proprietary to the team - to evaluate talent, scout opponents, devise game strategies and self-scout. General manager Jon Horst embraces analytics so much, in fact, that he expanded his staff of math geniuses in the hopes that the Bucks can find the next stat that changes the game.

“There’s not like this 400-page book of stats that the Milwaukee Bucks use to make decisions,” said Horst. “The goal is not that. Analytics is one of the filters we use to make decisions.

“We run everything through analytics; we run through medical, we run through our scouting, our eyes test, from a cap strategy standpoint, and then we’re going to make a holistic 360 view decision on everything we do. Analytics is a piece of that.”

That means Partnow has become an influential member of the organization behind the scenes. The native of Anchorage, Alaska, who wears running shoes with his jeans and sports jacket and plays pick-up ball with the rest of the front office staff, has a healthy appreciation for the beauty of this 125-year old game.

He just watches the game very differently than most of us.

“The best analogy I would use is sampling music,” said Partnow. “If you take a piece of this and a piece of that, are you creating something new or not? Yes and no.

“It’s not just coming up with the right answers; it’s asking the right questions.”

Partnow and the Bucks start their evaluations with the Four Factors, written by analytics expert Dean Oliver, which are:

Effective field-goal percentage – an important statistic to the Bucks; turnover percentage; free-throw rate; rebound rate.

Looking at these and other numbers, the Bucks knew that, even during a losing stretch a few weeks ago, that their “offensive rating is extremely high,” said Horst. “Like top 10.”

That was encouraging for a team looking to make a jump this season in both total wins and playoff advancement. The stats also tell the Bucks they don’t turn the ball over and they get to the foul line at a decent rate.

The analytics can give more details on performance than the final box score.

“We’ve been a top-10 offensive team for basically the entire season,” said Partnow.

After that, Partnow goes much deeper into the numbers but is careful to present only the relevant information, which is appreciated by the coach.

“Sometimes you can inundate people with too much information,” said interim coach Joe Prunty. “You can overload them. As a player – you also want them to be instinctual.”

You can thank Oliver for this hoops math. He wrote "Basketball on Paper" in 2002 to explain how a team’s performance offensively and defensively can be measured.

Partnow, who got his economics degree from Carleton (Minn.) College (where he also played a year of basketball), was in law school at the University of Minnesota in 2005 when he read the book.

“I had sort of been approaching basketball from a numeric standpoint, semi-seriously, for a long time,” said Partnow. “It kind of confirmed, and crystallized, a lot of intuitions I had.”

Said Horst: “It’s definitely one of the things that brought analytics to the forefront in basketball. Sabermetrics was a thing in baseball, and leagues are copycats of each other.”

The NBA teams that really started to pick up on analytics 5-10 years ago had a competitive advantage. But now teams have caught up, said Horst.

Horst, in his first season as GM, wants to get ahead of the rest of the league now. He values analytics so much that he and Partnow spent months sifting through 300 qualified candidates and 40 preliminary interviews before expanding their staff to include two more in the research department last year.

Analytics aren’t used during games. They serve their greatest purpose to Prunty in pregame preparation. The numbers can show trends of teams and players. They can tell the Bucks what should be the priority – to offensive rebound or get back on transition defense? They usually choose the latter.

Prunty said the analytics chart the offensive plays that are successful against certain opponents, or of late.

“The numbers certainly help us prepare,” said Prunty. “You understand things that are coming, but you still have to make adjustments.”

Horst and Partnow said one of the values of analytics is that their scouts will see only 40-50% of a player’s games.

“No one person is going to watch all 1,230 NBA games of the season,” said Partnow. “Certainly not to the level of detail to know all of these things about all of these players.

“But deep diving into the numbers, I can watch – at a different level – every game (with analytics). And I can do it for every game the last five to 20 years.”

And then Partnow, who started writing deep, detailed analytics blogs at Nylon Calculus, gives his interpretation of the numbers and what they mean - rather than just throwing a bunch of stats at the coaches and players.

Partnow looks for certain numbers to tell if a player did something as a habit or a fluke. If a player is on the rise or on the decline.

“I’ll go and watch an hour of film on a guy,” said Horst. “I like to take that and support with the analytics because I watched an hour (of film); the analytics has the last five years of his career.

“Hopefully you’re making really well-informed decisions. That’s the overall philosophy of analytics. I know I have a healthy appreciation for analytics and I utilize it. I totally trust science and numbers and believe in it.”

But even the interpretation of the data can be debated.

“He doesn’t always agree with everything I say,” said Partnow, “but there’s never been a time (Horst) hasn’t given me a chance to explain why I think something.”

Jason Kidd was interviewed for this story four days before he was fired as the Bucks’ coach. Kidd never played with these kinds of analytical stats, but he had tried to accept their place in the game.

Kidd said he found analytics to be useful to determine if his team was in the right position on defense, for example.

“Where guys are guarding,” said Kidd. “Are we closer than we should be? Are we in the right positions? When you see it on film, you can say, ‘We’re not in the right position.’ And then you ask Seth and analytics, and that validates that we’re not in the right spots.

“It goes hand in hand, but I’ve always been one to first look with my eyes and film. And then come back and ask analytics to give validation on, ‘Am I seeing this the right way?’ ”

But sometimes it is hard to match up what we see on the court and what we see on paper.

Take the three-point shot vs. the open lane to the basket. Maybe you’ve wondered why the Bucks - and so many other NBA teams - bypass the easy drive to the lane and instead pull up for a deep three. The reason: analytics.

“Everyone says ‘drive the ball,’ ” said Kidd. “The game has changed. A three-point shot is better than the mid-range for sure. And it’s almost better than the layup.

“The game has changed from when I played, when the goal was to get as close as you could (to the basket). And you had designated guys who could shoot the three.

“Now, four out of five guys can shoot threes. And the team that can shoot the better percentage of the three-point shot has a better chance of winning.”

Kidd pointed to Golden State as an example of a team that extends its leads by the three-pointer, which is why the three has become so prevalent.

“If you’re shooting twos, it’s hard to beat teams that are shooting threes,” said Kidd.

Whoever coaches the Bucks next season and beyond under Horst surely will need to embrace analytics.

“Every decision we try to make, every direction we try to go, we’re going to involve analytics in it,” said Horst. “I truly believe, when it comes to data, and the combination of data and personnel, that we’re near the top or at the top of the league in analytics. We’re also an organization that is extremely hungry to blow past it. Just keep going.

“I always tell these guys, ‘Three and D’ is the thing. San Antonio, Houston created the three and D guy. The three-point shot is a thing.

“What’s the next thing? I want to find the next thing – so we can be three years ahead of everyone else on the next thing.”

Matt Velazquez of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.