Fans of all sports appreciate when players give their maximum effort during games, and now the NBA will help teams and fans quantify this hard work. The league debuted their “Hustle Stats” this past weekend, as the 2016 NBA Playoffs began.
The NBA will track a number of statistics with the help of SportVU, that qualify as hustle stats, and post them online for the fans just a few hours after every playoff game.
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These hustle stats debuted last summer in Las Vegas, for NBA Summer League. The NBA tracked: contested 2-pt field goal attempts, contested 3-pt field goal attempts, deflections, charges drawn, and loose balls recovered. After their successful trial run this past summer, the league will once again track all of these statics, as well as screen assists, during the 2016 playoffs.
SportVU works with the NBA to create advanced player tracking for every game. Now the NBA is hoping to add to the tracking of these hustle numbers as well. However, this tracking will be conducted in the old fashion way, by people. The league’s replay center in Secaucus, New Jersey has highly trained personnel tabulating these hustle stats; since the computer based tracking data that SportVU provides will not track these hustle plays. The league used this same method last summer in Las Vegas.
The NBA has become a relatively data heavy league, and they want this trend to continue. Evan Wasch, the NBA’s senior vice president of basketball strategy and analytics, wants to keep pushing the envelope when it comes to statistics. He told ESPN, “We decided to take this to the next level…It’s another way for us to engage fans.”
Some of these hustle statics are hard to truly quantify, and only time will tell if they help teams improve. However, Wasch wants to be transparent and provide fans with more engaging statics, as soon as possible. “The more data we collect…the more we want to disseminate.”
These advanced hustle stats did coincide with winning in a small sample size, when they debuted last summer in Las Vegas. Over the course of the 67 games played at Summer League, the teams who had the most “hustle points” during a game won at a high percentage, 40-27.
Looking at a box score alone does not always paint a clear picture of how a team was able to win. And that is why the NBA’s new hustle stats could prove to be some of the most important and unique in all of sports.
The 2016 NBA Playoffs will be a small sample size, but they should provide a glimpse into the validity of these hustle stats going forward as they equate to winning. If nothing else, it will be fun for fans to finally have data on what many love so much about sports, hustle.