For Woodson, numbers just part of the equation

By Ken Sugiura

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

As he prepared the Hawks to play Utah Friday night, coach Mike Woodson had no shortage of statistical data available to him to break down the Jazz.

In recent years, basketball fans have been introduced to numbers and metrics never seen in box scores. Player efficiency rating, plus/minus rating, productivity value and won-lost profiles are among an array of statistics that measure players and teams.

In the way that Oakland Athletics general manager Billy Beane's use of statistical analysis to evaluate talent has changed baseball scouting, the NBA is seeing a similar trend.

Woodson, though, goes with the basics. After all, the guy played for Bob Knight.

"I look at defensive field goal (percentage), I look at offensive field goal (percentage)," he said. "Are they a terrible free-throw shooting team? Do they turn it over? Are they a good rebounding team?"

He looks with some skepticism at statistics like plus/minus, which rates a player based on the number of points scored for and against his team while he is on the floor.

"Sometimes, the guy that's getting the bad marks is the guy that's making plays to help them win," he said. "It can go against you sometimes. I don't feed into that."

Woodson has some old-school company. Houston coach Rick Adelman, whose team is part of the vanguard of statistics-based player evaluation, acknowledged that the reams of data he receives can back him up when he makes a point to a player.

However, Adelman said, "I like the old box score, where I can just look at it."

Denver coach George Karl joked that he doesn't understand the information that the Nuggets' director of quantitative analysis gives him.

"I'm going, ‘Somebody interpret this for me,' " Karl said. "I don't know what it says."

Sometimes, the findings contradict. Karl said the Denver statistics maven told him that the 3-pointer from the wing is "the pivotal play in basketball." The Rockets actively defend the corner 3-pointer, Adelman said, because "It's a really high volume shot that changes things."

There is a misconception that this method of analysis is new, Hawks general manager Rick Sund said.

Sund said that when he worked for Milwaukee in the mid- to late-70's, then-coach Larry Costello advocated plus/minus rating as a tool to evaluate players. When he was GM of the then-Seattle Sonics from 2001 to 2007, Sund used a software program developed by Rich Cho – now the assistant GM for Oklahoma City --  that measured players using metrics that weighted statistics differently for each position.

"Statistics and analysis and plus/minuses and efficiency ratings and formulas have always been a part of the process," said Sund, who has worked in the NBA since 1974. "It's just now with the Internet and computers, the accessibility is a lot easier, so it's getting a lot more attention."

Sund said he considers the various numbers when evaluating players for acquisition. For instance, he said guard Jamal Crawford's statistics in the final five minutes of games helped sway him to trade for him over the summer. But he calls the data "just one other tool that goes in the hopper" to judge talent and is not the final arbiter.

On that, he is in concert with his coach.

"There's a lot of things you look at," Woodson said. "That's why we have scouts."