Euro Fouls in the NBA
This is part 2 of my Fouls analysis. You can find the 1st part, which is on Frustration fouls here.
Fastbreaks in basketball are fun, right? They produce highlight-reel dunks, posters, alley-oops, special passes, and more. It is breathtaking to see tall humans flying up the court with the ball and pulling out spectacular moves. Fastbreaks or transition basketball are also the most efficient way to score the basketball. On average, teams score more than 1.1 PPP (points per possession) in transition. So, what are defenses doing to counter this super-efficient type of offense? They are fouling intentionally early in the possession to stop the fastbreaks from even happening, i.e., nipping them in the bud.
This intentional foul is called a Euro-foul. They are named that way because the Euro-foul originated from the European game. Alvin Almazov defines the Euro-foul as:
Euro foul is a technical term used in basketball to describe an intentional foul where the defensive player reaches out to their opponent and grabs the ball.
The NBA tried to curb Euro-fouls by making changes to the clear-path rule in 2018, but it didn’t fix the issue. This article is not about solving the issue of Euro-fouls but is about quantifying the number of Euro-fouls committed over the past 3 seasons in the NBA from 2017–2020 and identify which teams or players commit them the most. Further observations can also be made about the general trends, whether the Euro-fouls are increasing year-by-year or if the same player and teams show up every year.
The Euro-Foul Algorithm
Let’s first get the nitty-gritty stuff out of the way. I define the Euro-foul as:
A Euro-foul is one committed by a player within 5 seconds of his team committing a turnover or missing a shot.
If you’ve read my article on frustration fouls, you will immediately point out the facts both my definition and my algorithm logic for calculating frustration fouls and Euro-fouls are similar. Yes, that is true. For frustration fouls, I’d considered possession where both the missed shot/turnover and the foul are committed by the same player. But, for Euro-fouls, the missed shot/ turnover can be by any player on the team but the foul will be attributed to the player who commits the foul. To do these calculations, I used Darryl Blackport’s pbpstats API. It allows getting details of what happens in each possession for all the games in an NBA season. A more detailed explanation is given in my article on frustration fouls. I will first present my results by showing the team leaderboards, analyze them and then look at the player leaderboards.
Euro-Foul Team Leaderboards for the 2017–20 Seasons
The first thing that jumps out there is that the Utah Jazz lead the league in Euro-fouls by a large margin for 2017–18 and 2018–19 seasons, and were 2nd in 2019–20 season. Their propensity for Euro-fouling was especially evident in their playoff series against the Thunder in 2018, where they ground down the Thunder offense by repeatedly Euro-fouling Russell Westbrook to prevent him from doing his devastating forays in transition. You can read an excellent article on this by Fred Katz. Also, the Utah Jazz consistently ranked in the top 5 in limiting transition opportunities over the past three seasons. Three other teams that pop up frequently on this list are the Clippers, the Suns, and the Hawks who each appear two times. From this data, I can infer that Euro-fouling is a coaching decision made by certain coaches to prevent fastbreaks. This is because the same teams show up in these lists multiple times. These coaches are willing to trade-off fouls with stopping fastbreak attacks, particularly when the other team has a superb transition attack or if they have a player who excels in transition.
Euro-Foul Player Leaderboards for the 2017–20 Seasons
Now, let us transition from the team leaderboards to player leaderboards. I would expect the players from the Jazz, the Clippers, the Suns, and the Hawks to show up here.
So, it seems that this list isn’t completely populated by the players from the above 4 teams. The Jazz players show up 5 times and a Clippers player shows up once. Donovan Mitchell is among the league leaders in Euro-fouls consistently for the past three years. This explains why he showed up on the Frustration foul leaderboard for the 2020–21 season. He is likely committing Euro-fouls instead of frustration fouls. Also, only two players from the above leaderboards are big men: Marc Gasol and Nikola Jokic. These two also showed up in my frustration foul leaderboards. I think the fouls committed by these two are mostly frustration fouls instead of Euro-fouls. Big men are unlikely to commit Euro-fouls as these are committed on ball-handlers who start the transition attack and big men rarely dribble the ball up the court during a fastbreak. Hence Marc Gasol and Nikola Jokic, who are matched up against these big men should almost never commit Euro-fouls.
Comparing the leaders in Frustration Fouls and Euro Fouls
From my definition of Frustration fouls and Euro-fouls, you can see that Euro-fouls are a subset of frustration fouls. We will now see which players show up in both.
We have already talked about our favorite big men Marc Gasol and Nikola Jokic (who are European by the way) in the previous section. Only 3 other players are in the top 5 in Frustration fouls and Euro-fouls over the past three seasons. They are James Harden and Bradley Beal who are both stars who carry a disproportionate amount of their team’s offensive load. I would assume that the fouls they commit are out of pure exhaustion. The same can be said of Devonte’ Graham who was the engine of the Hornet offense as a rookie in the 2019–20 season. Notably, both Harden and Beal have been criticized by many for their lack of effort on the defensive end.
Thank you for reading and any feedback is appreciated. You can reach me on Twitter at @SravanNBA.
