Why Franchise Players Stayed with Original Team

I reviewed a couple of recent situations when top NBA stars left team which had drafted them so it was a natural follow-up to take a look at the other side of this coin: what GMs had to do to keep their franchise players?
Rules are the same as in previous post so I won’t repeat them.

Let’s start with probably the most popular and the most often cited case…

 

Review Why Top NBA Stars Left Their Teams

Have you heard recently about Top NBA Stars which left their hard-working and poor teams?
OK, that was a joke, if you follow NBA in any capacity you couldn’t have missed that memo ;-)
But there was always one thing which bothered me about this topic: reason for their actions.
Was it big market glamour? Was it a chase for fame or rings? Was it money/greed? Is it some kind of a trend? A lot of articles were written about this so I finally sat down and spent far too many hours to figure out why… but I think I found an satisfying answer [at least for me].

There were some rules for this exercise, thanks to prosportstransactions.com I reviewed every team’s move from the time franchise player was drafted or signed huge extension to the dreaded day given star was out with following assumptions:

• All decisions are in a chronological order,
• I included every contract worth more than 5 million dollars [total],
• I ignored every minimum contracts and all other small ones unless they were important in some way,
• I included every significant trade – meaning either good or expensive players were involved,
• I ignored every trade with marginal assets involved like 2nd round draft pick for future 2nd rounder or bench guy for bench guy with low salaries etc unless they were important in some way,
• I tried very hard NOT to use hindsight in my judgements but obviously in some cases [especially with rookies and injuries] it was inevitable,
• Obviously some if not all grades are subjective and probably arguable but I doubt you can move them up or down significantly,
• I measured predictability of each outcome in a very simple way: “what if said GM had used advanced boxscore statistics like Win Shares, PER, Wins Produced to support his decisions?”,
• It was a quite long list so if I missed anything important please let me know in the comments,
• If you are not interested in gory details, just scroll down to the end of this post for conclusions.

Let’s start with a case which not only couldn’t be more clearer but also had some impact on others…

 

Distance Traveled by NBA Teams during a Season

Have you ever wondered how many miles teams/players travel during typical NBA season?
If you have… well, you can join this one-member club! ;-)

Because even though it probably doesn’t matter now (with private jets and great service provided to the players can it have any effect on their performance?) it’s a trivia which has made me curious for some time…

So to calculate average distance traveled by NBA teams during a typical season I used schedule from insidehoops.com, latitude and longitude of U.S. and Canadian Cities from infoplease.com and an algorithm converting it into distance in miles from meridianworlddata.com. Additionally, I wanted to include some information about long-ish journeys so based on distribution I set a bar at 800 miles.

Results for the last 2 years are…
1.344.475 miles traveled by all NBA Teams in 2010/11 [44816 miles per team] and
1.360.641 miles traveled by all NBA Teams in 2009/10 [45355 miles per team].
To put it in context, every team travels around the world 11,5 times per season… and it’s without playoffs!

Here’s a more detailed breakdown for each team [numbers are rounded to the integer]…

 

3-Year Data of Team’s Point Differential by Quarters

Every discussion about Points Counting More in 4th Quarters in my opinion should at least mention data “how teams actually played in every quarters”. Right now you can find it on 82games.com but it’s only for one season and kind of old one [2007-2008]. So I’ve digged into play-by-play data from ESPN to present supplementary breakdown of Every Team’s Point Margin by Quarters in the Last 3 Seasons [including Playoffs!].

Because data itself is long enough I’ll leave curiosities for tomorrow’s post but let’s start with…
League-Wide Correlation Coefficient between Each Quarter Differential and Final Total Differential
[with a total of 2460 data points for every season and 498 data points for playoffs in the last 3 years].

Season	1Q Diff vs Total Diff	2Q Diff vs Total Diff	3Q Diff vs Total Diff	4Q Diff vs Total Diff	1OT Diff vs Total Diff	2OT Diff vs Total Diff	3OT Diff vs Total Diff
2010/11	0,448	0,447	0,477	0,379	0,927	0,976	1
2009/10	0,440	0,453	0,507	0,335	0,878	0,968	1
2008/09	0,511	0,392	0,475	0,378	0,895	0,858	1
Playoffs	0,533	0,493	0,493	0,425	0,887	0,286	1

IMHO it tells us simply that the results in 1st and 3rd quarters are most indicative of final score [probably because that’s when starters play most often]. Also blowouts really affect overall 4th quarters’ importance…

Interestingly, in the last 3 playoffs games with two overtimes happened less often than those with three overtimes.

EDIT: Thanks to a tip from sportskeptic I had an “eureka!” moment that I’ve missed one interesting table… League-Wide Correlation Coefficient between Point Margin After Each Quarter and Final Margin.

Season	Total Margin after 1Q vs Final Game Margin	Total Margin after 2Q vs Final Game Margin	Total Margin after 3Q vs Final Game Margin	Total Margin after 4Q vs Final Game Margin	Total Margin after 1OT vs Final Game Margin	Total Margin after 2OT vs Final Game Margin	Total Margin after 3OT vs Final Game Margin
2010-11	0,448	0,659	0,836	0,995	0,999	1,000	1,000
Difference	0,448	0,212	0,176	0,159	0,004	0,001	0,000
2009-10	0,440	0,645	0,846	0,995	0,999	1,000	1,000
Difference	0,440	0,205	0,202	0,148	0,004	0,001	0,000
2008-09	0,511	0,676	0,837	0,995	0,999	1,000	1,000
Difference	0,511	0,164	0,161	0,158	0,004	0,001	0,000
Playoffs	0,533	0,748	0,861	0,995	0,999	0,999	1,000
Difference	0,533	0,216	0,113	0,134	0,004	0,000	0,001

So if you want to point out importance of one quarter… shouldn’t you start with the first one?

For those interested in detailed information about each team…
Here’s Full Data for Every Team’s Point Margin by Quarters in the Last 3 Seasons.

 

Should Team’s Prices Become a Factor in Next CBA?

I can’t discuss matters with the NBA or research financial health of the league better than Nate Silver but what I can do is… present some more tables and ask questions ;-) Because when you collect a lot of data about one topic like ownership history… you really should have some fun with it, right?

If you prefer picture than tables… well, that’s your lucky day because it will be the first one on this blog! ;-)

Known Team's Prices in the NBA Since 1962

This graph and table below have basically the same content as yesterday’s data but it’s focus is on a different piece of the puzzle… Here’s detailed version of League-Wide Picture of Team’s Prices.

 

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].