Success Is the Only Option by John Calipari

Author:John Calipari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

Use the Numbers to Promote Certain Behaviors

Lots of fans bury themselves in statistics for fun, or as a hobby. A baseball box score tells a story with numbers, and people my age grew up poring over those things in the newspaper every morning. Now you’ve got fantasy sites with all kinds of newfangled numbers in all the major sports, and a lot of people are hung up on those. It probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that’s not my thing.

In our program, I’m interested in numbers that promote certain behaviors. There is a category of numbers that I’d call, broadly, effort statistics. Rebounds, deflections, steals, blocks—those are numbers that typically show energy. But we are able to go much deeper.

How many rebounds you grab in a given game can be a matter of how many missed shots bounced your way. But how many rebounds did you try for? Did you box out your man? Did you leave your area to chase a rebound? When your teammate took a shot, did you fight for position and crash the offensive boards or did you make just a passive effort?

Over the course of a season, the player who tries for a lot of rebounds will get a high percentage of them. But if I see a stat sheet after a game and one of the big guys I depend on grabbed just three rebounds in twenty-five minutes, I want to know about that. Was he making the proper effort and the ball just wasn’t coming in his direction—or was he letting down?

Again, I can probably see a lot of this stuff myself. But it’s useful for me as a conversation starter—or, I suppose, a conversation ender—to look at the statistics that we keep. I’m able to say to a player, “Here it is in black and white. You had seventeen chances to attempt an offensive rebound and you made an acceptable effort on less than half of those opportunities. You say you were trying, but this here shows that you weren’t.”

Steals are another thing that gets tracked in box scores, but we go beyond that. How many balls did you get your hands on? How many times did you cause an offensive player to change directions? How many times did you close out on a three-point shooter and prevent him from taking that shot, or make him alter it?

These kinds of metrics have a direct relation to what any business does—or should do. There are always going to be factors you can’t control—like the price of the goods that you must purchase, swings in the economy that have an impact on your customers, something unforeseen with one of the people who work under you. To me, the most important metrics focus relentlessly on those things you can control, and in our industry, that’s effort.

Part of basketball is just math, and we focus on the numbers that matter and how we can make them weigh in our favor. The three most efficient ways to

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