I would posit that the most beneficial instrument you could have in order to improve team performance is one which allows you to answer the question of predicting how a novel combination of players will work as a team.Crow wrote: ↑Tue Mar 11, 2025 1:56 pm "And I have such a model, it is very edifying, it's a strong predictor of team performance."
You are most interested in predicting team performance. I am most interested in improving it.
We have different priorities so we may not overlap that much or that well in conversation.
But others can read and use what is made available according to their own interests and perspectives.
I've been very rude and sharp elbowed here, and the dullest of wits is often combined with the sharpest of elbows, so it is not a flattering look. I do regret being quite so forthright.
My personal failings aside, you quoted me form another thread regarding how lineup analysis is useful-ish to me, but what the data has said to me, and what it I believe would say to others who look at it, is that lineup analysis lends itself to playoff basketball, in which you are trying to find the key (lineup) for the lock (opponent lineup). This is why a seven game series ends up feeling so game theoretical, at least when you are coached competently, which I do agree is not always.
In the regular season I would suggest most coaches optimise who is on the court to match a general play style, with little concern as to the opponent. I would also suggest this is a very logical approach, and that obsession over lineup performance is less so. Granted you can disregard that statement out of hand, as I have not corroborated it. You can do that with every word I say, if you like.
On that point, of why I don't share my numbers? Not only because they are proprietary to me and valuable to me, but because I think the cultivation of progress in any discipline is in the work of doing it for yourself, with a little encouragement and education along the way. Sometimes that encouragement gives you a direction to take, sometimes it brings about in a person the desire to prove that encouragement foolish, malformed, misdirecting.
I do not find it edifying, and do not think it is edifying, to sit in front of a set of numbers in the abstract, without having a very strong understanding of how those numbers have arrived.
Lastly, you asked about what I mean by teammate-marginal production. It's a simple thing. Within each game, a player's teammate marginal production of each counting stat (and indeed of raw +/-) is their count of that statistic, minus the average production of their teammates in that same statistic, within that same game, over an equal number of possessions.
What this fulfils is to ensure that teams who have a glut of production in one area do not overly bias the situation. If every one of your players is the same player, who produces the same box score on average, and whose plus minus matches the others, then there is no way to prefer any of them, beyond perhaps age or injury history, but let's imagine we do simply have twelve of the same player - we want the model to trivially be able to say they all get the same number of minutes, and that because each has zero marginal production compared to the other, they each tell the model nothing (this is a good thing), and get allocated by the model 5/12ths of the available court time merely by that being the case.
Another way to think about it, is if you are small squad, then a mediocre center is likely to find more court time on your squad than on one with other, potentially superior centers. This calculation allows for that implicitly, and the fact that two statistically similar players on different teams might be allocated very different minutes does not then inherently cause the model any great problems.
To put it another way, if you are the only player on TerribleTeam who ever scores any significant points, you are going to get minutes, even if you are dreadful at everything else.