Breaking Down Teams’ Offenses using Nylon Calculus’ 23 Offensive Player Roles
A hypothetical:
Let’s take some of the elite talent from the last decade of basketball and put them all on one team. Hmm. We can put Carmelo Anthony in there… Amare Stoudemire was amazing for a few years…Oh! And Dwight Howard! Can’t forget about him. Joakim Noah was a top 5 MVP candidate, so it’s not outrageous to say he deserves to be here. Let’s round it out with DeMar Derozan, a killer, and now, a Spur.
So that puts our lineup at:
DeMar DeRozan
Carmelo Anthony
Amare Stoudemire
Joakim Noah
Dwight Howard
Wait, no. Nononononononono.
You can take a team of All-NBA players from the last decade and create a team that, even if each player was at their peak, wouldn’t win very many games. That’s because more than raw talent matters. How the talents play off each other and what roles players have also matter.
Todd Whitehead (a.k.a “The Crumpled Jumper” on Twitter) used nba play-type data from Synergy to group players based on the ways they tried to score. He was able to find 23 distinct offensive roles for NBA players.
A list of the roles and examples of players in that role are below.
Players’ roles do depend somewhat on the team and system in which they exist. While it places players in the right roles within their systems, there are a few instances where they wouldn’t be playing that role on a different team. One laughable example (and outlier) was, as twitter user @SportsTribution pointed out, Zaza Pachulia.
One interesting note: The role of “Mobile Bigs Who Cut” was a role unique to the Golden State Warriors last season. There were 5 players who fit this role: Omri Casspi, Zaza Pachulia, Kevon Looney, and Jordan Bell, all Warriors. The Warriors’ unique offense and the space it created led to a new-ish type of offensive role, or at least the increased use of an existing type.
I took each team’s most used lineup (according to stats.nba.com), and ranked them by offensive rating. From there, I wrote down each of the offensive roles (and assigned each a number, 1–23) of players in this lineup. This is not to say these were the best offensive lineups in the NBA, but asks taking each team’s most used lineup, which were the best offensively? Here it is, visualized:
Well, that’s impossible to read.
Here were the best to worst offensive roles, in a vacuum (sorted by a mixture of ORTG and number of players in that role):
But this can’t be used in a vacuum. Offenses depend on five players.
The most common pairing was Primary Ball Handlers with Tall Wings With Handle, sported by the with-Porzingis Knicks, The Suns (their offense wasn’t the problem, it was their defense), and The Raptors.
Bigs With Skills Everywhere were more common on better offenses. Given the modern shift away from playing multiple bigs at once, it was surprising that they often shared the floor with bigs in other roles, whether those were ones that cut or ones that post up at the rim.
There were also more Stationary Spot-Up Wings, who fit in in all different types of lineups.
Primary Ball Handlers were often paired with Ball Handlers Who Share the Load, Tall Wings With Handle, and/or Stationary Spot-Up Wings. Usually just one or two ball handlers are needed on successful teams, with shooting or rolling roles falling to other players.
In the league’s worst offensive lineups, there are multiple instances of having two players in the same role on the court at once. This didn’t occur at all for the top 11 offenses in the league.
There were significantly fewer Bigs With Skills Everywhere. The only instance of players in this role was the Kings, who had two players (Zach Randolph and Willie Cauley-Stein) in this role. Having more than one player fill the same has some obvious downsides. Unless you have a genius coach who knows how to make it work (like Mike D’Antoni with Chris Paul and James Harden), there’s less to gain from two players doing the same thing, when one other offensive role might not be utilized.
There were fewer Stationary Spot-Up Wings and more instances of having multiple (up to 3, even) players at the 3rd, 4th, and 5th roles (Ball Handlers Who Share the Load, Ball Handlers With Off-Ball Duties, Tall Wings With Handle).
There are many more wings with ball handling duties. This can perhaps be attributed to the inability of these teams’ guards to run the offense. Many of these lineups have multiple players all with ball handling or distributing duties.
The graphs above are available for any other conclusions you want to draw (How will the Warriors, with the addition of Cousins, a Ball-Stopping Mobile Big fare? Will he end up filling more of the Mobile Bigs Who Cut role?).
In addition, if you want to look at the giant mishmash of datatables and graphs used, including some not present in the article, click this link.
