All Draft-and-Stash Players in NBA history

While 2013 NBA draft was very unpredictable at the top, it had a familiar strategy at the bottom of each round: draft-and-stash.

Drafting players with no chance of coming to the NBA right away – either because of player’s intentions or because team doesn’t want him there – seems weird at first glance but it became such a staple of recent NBA drafts I just had to investigate this topic futher to get to the bottom of it.

So here’s what I did:
1) based on draft recaps from basketball-reference.com since 1950 I created a list of draftees who either didn’t play a single game in the NBA or they debuted at least a year later than their draft class.
a) among players who didn’t play at all I focused only on those drafted in the first couple of rounds because for decades draft in the NBA was way too long [and let’s be frank – I wanted to save a lot of time chasing unknown 7th rounders who really had no chance of playing in the NBA because of limited number of spots available].
b) I included all players who played in the NBA but started career later than they should based on draft year.

2) for every player from list above I used wonders of Google to identify possible reasons behind the delay.
If a possible draft and stash players were simply cut before their first season or for some other reasons didn’t really qualify as draft-and-stash type I deleted them from the list.

3) “Probable reason(s) for delay” below is my best guess at what happened to the player after the draft but in most cases [especially before 2000!] I have no idea about the relationship between cause and effect.
In other words, did player sign somewhere else because he wanted to or because he was able to get better contract or because he didn’t receive any offer from the NBA? Either way he became a draft-and-stash type so he is on the list below but we just don’t know who made that decision.

Starting in 1989 in some cases I had to gave up searching so I used “????????” as an explanation which means I couldn’t find anything. On the other hand, in situations I found interesting or unique for some reason I included links to sources and more than one word description. If you have any questions, or maybe if you know what did happen to some unsolved by me situations, let me know in the comments.

In total final list includes over 600 players so that’s why this post is basically only about the data.
For more analysis on this topic, using list below, please visit blog later this week…

 

Close Games in NBA History, What Happened?

After I explored blowouts in NBA history I quickly jumped into the opposite spectrum – close games.
Because if we exclude obvious factors like style and quality for fans who watch games and don’t cheer for any of the team involved close games are the most exciting possible outcome, right? At least that’s my opinion so with that premise I started digging into the same data-set as used in a previous post to search for games which ended with point differential equal to 3 or less and the results were surprising if not shocking…

 

NBA History of Blowouts, New Record in 2011-12?

On December 28th in one of the e-mails my friend Leszczur mentioned “we are going to see a lot of random NBA scores this year” to which I automatically replied “every year there are blowouts” but it immediately got me thinking about them. Will this season actually lead to more blowouts than usual?
What exactly is the usual number? What happened in the previous shortened season?.
I’ve waited a week or so for more data and here we are…

I defined blowout as 15 or more point differential and using all scores in the NBA history from basketball-reference.com I compiled a historical perspective… note that 2012 includes only 125 games played so far.

 

Journey through Miles of NBA Travel History

In my last post about Distance Traveled by NBA Teams during a Season I offered an innocent curiosity… but quite typically for me it lead to more questions plus more serious questions… and man, I went big this time.

Instinctively I wrote about Portland’s loneliness on the US map with recent team’s relocations from Seattle and Vancouver and then I hit me… wait a second, I can check the influence of those changes!
Average journey for each NBA team in a single season? That’s nice… but how about the whole history?
I could finally settle the issue how amount of travel actually has changed through league’s history!

So while I was fired up I got my hands dirty, this time with schedules from basketball-reference.com
[but I still used latitude and longitude of U.S. and Canadian Cities from infoplease.com and an algorithm converting it into distance in miles from meridianworlddata.com] but before we look at the results a couple of technical notes which you should keep in mind:

– I totally ignored random games in temporary locations but I included changes which lasted at least a season. So for example, Nets spent one year in New York so I accounted for that in calculations but if the same Nets played a game in Kansas due to some difficulties I assumed they played at home. In recent decades this point probably doesn’t matter but in early days of the NBA it could have some impact.

– I totally ignored exhibition games like those in London or Tokyo and I assumed they were played in team’s arena. There were few of them and I prefered to save some time than play with such details.

– This batch of numbers in some cases is slightly different than in my previous post because there I used scheduled games and here I used games when they actually happened [so any postponed games made a tiny difference here].

OK, that’s enough, here’s what I dug out from that goldmine of information so far…

Let’s start with a graph of Total Journeys by NBA Teams Over 800 Miles per Season [which is easier to digest version of Total Miles Traveled per team because there’s a 0.99 correlation between those two]:

 

20-Year History of Missed Games in the NBA

Because of a lockout this year there will be an unusually packed schedule in the NBA which undoubtedly contributed to a theory that we are going to see more injuries this season. Don’t get me wrong, I think this idea sounds plausible because… well, I know how I feel after playing basketball too often in short period (muscle injury or ligament tear waiting to happen). But could it be also a reason why we overrate this issue? I’m not an athlete and I don’t usually play any back-to-backs so maybe that’s why I feel this way when I do…

Beside this point, have you ever wondered do players miss more games now than they used to?
Which teams’ players missed the most and least games in the last decade?

Well, I have so here’s how I tackled those topics:
I considered counting injuries at prosportstransactions.com but there’s one huge problem with this approach:
5 or even 10 day-to-day injuries are usually less significant than one semi-serious knee injury because of time needed for healing and rehabilitation. So why not try to measure the main effect of injuries which is missed games? That’s exactly what I’ve tried to accomplish. I downloaded data from last 20 seasons from dougstats.com, then in each season I sorted it by team’s name and then by players’ minutes per game.
I deleted all players who were 7th or lower on their own team and counted how many games such group played versus how many games they would have played given full 82 games schedule [or 50 in 1998-99].
My rationale here is “let’s count starters and 6th man, the rest doesn’t matter”.

In other words, for players considered the most important by their own teams what percentage of available regular season games did they miss?

Unfortunately it’s not a perfect tool, for example it totally ignores tanking or players who missed entire season because they were injured in the offseason, so if you have a better idea let me know in the comments.

With all that in mind here are the results:

 

Buying NBA Team, Ownership Timeline with Prices

With a lockout under way and it’s unusual focus on employers I wondered…
When and For How Much Money Owners acquired Teams in the first place?

So today’s post is simple in premise but I hope it will become very helpful data…
I compiled a History of Ownership for All Teams including Date and Cost of Transactions.

Please note and remember that:

• sources for this one were all over the map and I had to Google a lot for pretty much every case,
• most information came from [in a random order] prosportstransactions.com, Forbes, Rod’s Sports Economics, sportsecyclopedia.com, Wikipedia and local newspapers’ sites,
• All prices are in millions of dollars [first column means “original price listed” and second one was Adjusted for Inflation to Average for 2010 with data taken from inflationdata.com],
• I don’t have any inside information and I can’t guarantee accuracy any of those reports,
• If you know any information behind ??? please let me know in the comments or via e-mail, Thanks!
• List was sorted alphabetically by current team’s name and then descending by year of transaction.
• I’ll update this post as often as needed/possible – LAST EDIT: 09 November 2011, Sixers

Unfortunately not every team has listed previous owners as nicely as Rockets [MediaGuide.pdf, 8MB] and not every team had such clean and easy history as Pistons, quite the opposite, overall it was a mess and time-wise it was by far my least efficient post to date.

Anyway, enough of caveats, here’s the full table of all owners in the NBA history…
[if you are interested in different views of this table I sorted it by expansion fees and all known sales].

 

Premature End, 30 Years of Fired Coaches in NBA

With inevitable early departure of Kurt Rambis from Timberwolves I wondered…
Which NBA Team have Fired Most Coaches in the Last 30 Years?
And How many of them Left Early on Their Own Terms?

So I visited Professional Basketball Transactions Archive and here’s what I’ve found…
Starting with curiosities…

Did you know there were three trades involving coaches in that period?
On 1983-06-07 Nets traded rights to Fred Roberts, 1983 second round pick (#46-Kevin Williams) to Spurs who agreed to release head coach Stan Albeck from his contract, thus allowing Nets to sign him.
On 2003-06-11 Rockets sent to Knicks second round pick (2005 #54-Dijon Thompson) as compensation for agreeing to release head coach Jeff Van Gundy from his contract and on 2007-06-06 Magic sent 2008 second round pick (#52-Darnell Jackson) to Heat as a compensation for head coach Stan Van Gundy.
Wow, those Van Gundy brothers were a valuable commodity ;-)

Back to the point, with another fired head coach, how will Timberwolves look historically?