On 82games.com, Ed Peterson writes a very interesting article trying to quantify how the 2004-2005 Sacramento Kings do as a team and as individuals with specific play types. Plays range from fouls, offensive rebounds, and driving into the paint, to cutting and pick and rolls. The usefulness of such analysis assuming it is all accurate and appropriately calculated is very high because it would allow coaches to run certain plays for certain players and even run specific offenses or defenses depending on which 5 players were on the court at any given time. Knowing that a player has had more success off a pick and roll jumper over a catch and shoot play would be very applicable, especially considering that it might be easier to get a shot after a pick and roll rather of a set shot.

Unfortunately, quantifying such plays is not easy. Realizing that Peterson’s study is a good start to play type analysis, I hope that it eventually lists more than about 10 plays, out of which several are a combination of several plays. It may be more helpful if a shot off the dribble was categorized differently from a pick and roll jumper. Also, I feel that it would be very interesting to include offensive styles as a category. For example, how does the triangle offense, or the princeton offense work for certain individuals and specific teams? In addition, it may be interesting to study different defenses with respect to plays run by the offense. For example, for different zone defenses, such as a 2-3, 3-2, 1-3-1, etc, how well do individual plays work against them?

One other comment I had regarding Peterson’s study is about the RTG category (a rough “points per 100 possessions” number). For a category such as “Away from ball / intentional fouls”, how is possible to have a RTG number greater than 200. It seems that if a player was fouled away from the ball or not shooting the ball, that player should maximally be able to earn 2 free throws per possession and therefore 200 points in 100 possessions.

Measuring production by play type is very challenging because there are so many variations of plays within a basketball game, excluding how many different plays may occur within one possession. That being said, such analysis could be very helpful to players and coaches at any level.