10 Questions with Seth Partnow
Α Special QnA, with the Analytic-Guy, Seth Partnow
Ιf you want to read the article in Greek, click here
It has been over a year since our last meeting with Seth Partnow! So it is time to repeat it this year.
For those who do not know Mr. Partnow:
He currently works as an analyst at The Athletic, writing about NBA and basketball analytics in his articles. He is also the creator of the Seth's Nerd Nosh column at Dunc'd on Prime, a podcast and newsletter subscription platform that features top NBA analysts such as Nate Duncan, John Hollinger, Danny Leroux and Dan Feldman. He previously served as Basketball Research Director for the Milwaukee Bucks from the 2016 off-season through the end of the 2019 season, and before that was the lead writer and editor of The Nylon Calculus, a leading basketball analysis website.
If all this parchment has not gotten to you yet, Seth is the author of "The Midrange Theory," a book about the practicality and impact of analytics on the NBA. To learn more about the book, you'll just have to read the in-depth QNA we wrote here last year.
It is my great pleasure and honor that Seth has accepted my invitation to do another QNA, and at the same time I have the opportunity to share with you the thoughts of such a renowned person in space.
You will understand that the things I would like to ask him go to infinity. So I have come up with a dozen questions that I think are interesting to me and to the readership.
My first questions are about some of the transactions that have taken place at the Trade Deadline and how they affect the development of the sport
1.As a Dallas Mavericks fan, I always ask myself what would fit better next to Luka Doncic!
A good ball distributor or a versatile shooting big?
We've seen the example of Brunson, but I'd be interested in what you think of a player like Porzingis, who I don't think has done that much mainly due to injuries
I would say the latter. Relative to Luka’s strengths and weaknesses, there is always going to be more need for defense than additional shot creation. This isn’t to say that another creator wouldn’t be useful. I think Dallas has done him something of a disservice (at least prior to the Irving trade) by essentially operating as if adding players who might “take the ball out of Luka’s hands” would be a negative despite the degree to which Doncic’s ball-dominance causes him to wear down and the Mavs to become predictable later in games and especially playoff series.
2.In your book The Midrange theory, you say very beautifully and clearly:
"The three-point revolution didn't kill the game from midrange game? Ιt hardened it and shaped it into a sparkling diamond."
Now the Phoenix Suns have 3 players who are considered elite in that area. Do you think this will help bring back that style of play, but also the makeup of the teams roster if the Suns project is finally crowned with success?
The KD era Warriors took a ton of midrange shots too. If you have enough talent that the midrange is a viable style, you probably have enough talent that style doesn’t matter.
To more broadly answer your question, no I don’t think “it’s coming back.” Because the old way of using the midrange involved a lot of having role players stand in spots where their catch-and-shoot attempts would be from that midrange. That’s pretty obviously dumb both as a matter of shooting efficiency, but also floor spacing, and I don’t think the existence with a team or three with enough players with the talent to self-create at decent efficiency will do much to change that.
3.The trade of Jakob Poeltl to the Raptors strikes me as an admission that the big-wings-only scheme can not work at the championship level. Kind of like Daryl Morey's small-ball with the Rockets. Do you think there's any chance a team with that kind of roster-only structure could reach the championship?
I don’t think it’s an indictment of the strategy as a whole, more that the collection of players with whom Toronto attempted it aren’t good enough. Take a collection of players at similar levels but distributed across a more standard positional and skill spectrum and who do you have? Maybe the Kings?
The Raps’ best player, Pascal Siakam, is probably around the 30th best player in in the league, give or take. Contending teams have a top 5ish player or perhaps 2 top 15ish guys.
Funnily enough, the Rockets had the opposite problem - to the extent they had a problem, they also had the misfortune of peaking during the height of Golden State’s dynasty, so a team good enough to win in most eras was overshadowed, and still almost knocked the Dubs off.
Still, the gap between Harden and the second best guy on most of those Rockets teams was quite large. Even Chris Paul was in a somewhat down period relative to his OKC and Phoenix tenures when he got moved to Houston.
My answer to questions like this is sort of like the hold adage that when you hear hooves, think horses not zebras. When a team is not good enough think the size of the pieces well before the shape if that makes sense.
Now we come to the more general questions
On the one hand, there's this statement from Rick Carlisle:
"The post up is just not a good play anymore. It's just not a good play. It's not a good play for a 7'3 guy. It's a low value situation."
On the other hand, Dean Oliver and the Wizzards coaching staff believe there should be more post-up opportunities for Porzingis
What's your opinion on the effectiveness of post-ups (i.e., including guards-forwards) and whether we'll see them become a big part of how teams attack again?
I think there are many good ways to utilize post play. I do not think we’re going to see a return to much in the way of the old school, big guy saunters to the block and sticks his hand up in the air static post up. Defenses are too good at disrupting passing lanes and shrinking the floor for that to be effective for most in the non-Embiid/Jokic division. Getting quick post ups as options out of regular playsets however can still be very effective.
I love a good duck in, as this situation often allows a cleaner passing angle to enter the ball, gives the big more space to work, and can allow them to catch the ball closer to the basket. The last factor is the main reason Porzingis hasn’t generally been a great post player as his relatively light frame and high base have made it unlikely for him to every be able to back his way close enough to the basket for the resulting shot to be anything but a contested midrange jumper, which doesn’t become magically more efficient just because the shooter started with his back to the basket.
2.Recently we have seen various players scoring 40 and 50 points with ease. Do you think this has to do with the amount of talent in the league, or is it more related to the proliferation of the three point and "lax" defense in the regular season?
It’s a combination of all of those. Sure there’s a lot of talent. Offenses have tended to concentrate their usage more heavily in the hands of top players. We’re in a period with an extremely pro-offense environment while at the same time operating at the highest pace of play in decades. Add in the variance inherent in more three-point shooting and yeah, you’re going to get more nights with huge individual totals.
3.There are many proponents of the theory that regular season games should be reduced. We know that this is difficult to do, primarily because of economic factors. However, if this were the case, do you believe that the quality of the product would increase, or do you believe that it should remain the same so that there is a standard of comparison for the different Eras of the league and also for the performance of the players?
There are too many games. From a competitive standpoint, the purpose of the regular season is to sort and seed teams for the playoffs, and historically this would have been accomplished just as well if the season ended after about 65 games than playing out all 82. I don’t really care about cross-era comparison that much because the vast changes in rules and styles of play make them hopeless anyway!
4.When I saw The James Wiseman’s Trade, the Quote from your book immediately came to mind:
"To play basketball well, you not only have to have the right tools in the box, but you also have to pick the right one quickly and use it correctly."
I think that typifies it.
My question is this: Since you have worked in a team's front office, what are the tools for making the right draft choices?
I don’t know if I have a good answer for that. I think just about the best you can strive for long term is to remove the more egregious mistakes in evaluation you might make to perhaps weight the coin from 50-50 to 60-40 and then cross your fingers and hope it lands heads.
5.A month ago, Greg Popovich said:
"I have said before that I just hope the league ends up with a 4-pointer or a 5-pointer so we can make a real circus out of it.' It's going to be a different sport. It would not even be basketball, it would just be a bunch of crap."
What do you think of that statement, but also generally of people who think basketball is "broken" with the development of spacing and the 3-point shot?
Let’s break that statement down into three parts:
“It’s going to be a different sport” - absolutely true. Just as the game of the 80s was different from the game of 60s was different than the game of the 40s.
“It would not even be basketball,” - according to? What is basketball if not the collection of rules governing the game. Which have changed before and will change again. At some point you do run into the Ship of Theseus problem
, but I’m not sure adding an extra line or two to the court gets us there.
“[I]t would just be a bunch of crap” - Hey, that’s an aesthetic judgement and to each their own. I don’t know why, but I’m suddenly thinking about my dad’s reaction the first time I played Public Enemy with him in the car - look them up if you’re too young to know - or even the way I react to a lot of today’s pop music as a dude in his 40s. We all idealize the game of a certain formative era for our individual selves, and I’m certainly not going to tell Pop his preference is wrong. It’s just not mine, and we’ll have to agree to disagree at that point.
6.A few days ago, LeBron James broke the record of the first ever scorer after almost 40 years! Do you think there is a player who has the right qualities to crack it?
I wrote about this for Dunc’d On the other week, and I came up with about 6 guys who have some chance: Luka, Trae, KD, Tatum, Booker and Anthony Edwards. Of course, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely any of the actually will because even if they have the requisite skill level and good luck to stay healthy for a long prime, other factors such as a more defense-friendly environment or a reduction in games per season could put the mark well beyond the horizon.
7.Recently, the NBA introduced a new award: NBA Clutch Player of the Year Award. What qualities do you think the winner should have, but also what advanced analytics will you consider when making your choice?
I think it’s kind of a silly award to honest. The best way to make a lot of clutch shots is to take a lot of clutch shots, but the best way for a team to not lose a lot of clutch games is to be winning by enough that we never get to crunch time to begin with. “Best player on a team not quite good enough to avoid playing a bunch of close games” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, does it?
If we are giving out the award, something like Inpredictable’s clutch win probability added is a great place to start. But that’s as often as not a reflection of “ball go in” more often than usual on shots that few if any players have shown persistent skill in terms of outperforming long term league average. For as far back as we have sufficient play-by-play data to look, the NBA as a whole shoots just over 30% on shots to tie or take the lead in the last 30 seconds of games, and the players who have “overperformed” that number are either big guys whose shots are likely weighted more towards put backs than pull ups, or players who haven’t taken that many. As attempts increase, that 30% number has a somewhat inexorable pull on even the greatest of players - both LeBron (last I looked which was a year or so ago) and Kobe are within a make or two of league average accuracy on over 100 attempts each in this situation for example.
If this Q'n'A captures your imagination you can purchase Mr. Seth's book from both Amazon and the official book publisher. Here are the links
You can also follow him on Twitter to easily find the interesting content he uploads !!!!
https://twitter.com/SethPartnow
The artwork on the cover of the article is created by 𝒞𝑒𝓁𝑒𝓈𝓉𝒾𝑒