Stats have always been a part of sports. They’ve always been a part of coaching. They verify your success and give your struggles a tangible value.
But too many numbers, facts and figures can get in the way of just playing the game. Some stats even run the risk of telling you something that isn’t true. The total number of interceptions a quarterback threw is a number, how many of those passes should have been caught is the context.
X doesn’t always mean Y. Sometimes X is just happens because sports are unpredictable.
So as Penn State men’s basketball coach Pat Chambers looks to string together consistency with his team, it’s a balance between giving his players information but not too much. In a world jam packed with advanced analytics and insight, staying true to your own metrics can often be the biggest key and the biggest challenge to success.
“Here’s that one thing that those numbers and the KenPom and all those things can’t tell you,” Chambers said on Tuesday. “These kids are human beings. They might have girl problems, they might have problems at home, they might struggling in a class, they might be upset with their brother, they might be upset with me or a teammate. We don’t account for the human nature aspect of it. So that goes into some of the decision making that we make as well.”
“We have great numbers, that’s not the problem. Now you have to couple that with everything else.”
On some level Chambers is right. KenPom, the now widely famous stat guru website, unloads a lot of context free information. The flip side is obviously that stats are stats.
It doesn’t matter why a team might struggle to grab offensive rebounds, KenPom simply tells you like it is. Because at the end of the day in the middle of a game all that matters is what happens, not why it happens. And as the season goes along the sample size continues to grow, weeding out outliers and unusual occurrences.
Ultimately this paints an accurate picture of a team’s strengths and weaknesses.
Chambers though, is painting with different set of colors.
“We use them for coaching situations,” Chambers said of Penn State’s own numbers and stats. “We maybe don’t always share them individually because it may not shed a good light on one of the players, but I’ll always, we’ll always show them what the team does as a whole instead of the pieces. I think they have a good understanding of what that means. It’s very clear when we’re playing good basketball and when we’re not. The numbers back it up as well.”
“I like the way we do our analytics, I like our Attitude Club (effort based grading system), I like our graphics that we’re doing, I like the plus/minus that we have, and obviously we know our players.”
Penn State will get a chance to improve those in-house numbers tonight as the Nittany Lions face a up and down Minnesota squad at the Bryce Jordan Center. Both teams are looking to string together consecutive wins as both have struggled to close out close conference games in the first half of Big Ten play.
And when it comes down to closing out games there is really only one stat that matters.
Making shots.
That helps a lot.
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