You Should Be Using Statistics With Your Team

With the booming advancements in statistical analysis in all circles of the basketball world, more and more coaches, fans, commentators, and casual observers are throwing around numbers and statistics to prove their points, justify their opinions, and demonstrate their knowledge about the game. However, statistics have more value than being mere random facts or figures shared over a dinner conversation or ESPN analysis show. 

Strategically using statistics as a coach can help you improve decision-making, better understand your team, players, and opponents, and drive winning. If you aren’t using statistics to bring about more success with the team you coach, it's time to reconsider.

Three Reasons You Should be Using Stats with Your Team.

If you don’t know it’s broken, you can’t fix it.

Without recording statistics, it’s hard to know what your team is or is not doing well. For various reasons, it’s not wise to rely on your memory to analyze how well your team or players are performing in certain areas. 

That’s where statistics come in. 

If you can look at a stat sheet and see you have a player that is committing 4 turnovers per game, you can work to fix that. You can put them in different spots on the floor, or engage in practice situations to reverse that trend.

If you are guessing or going by feel alone, you run the risk of continued low performance.

Statistics make you a better decision maker. 

Having a strong grasp on how your team is performing in specific areas gives you data to back up decisions you make in the future. Let’s take a look at this scenario: 

Your team is scoring 1.2 points per three-pointer attempted, scoring .9 points per two-pointer attempted, and is shooting 35 two-pointers per game and 15 three-pointers per game 

With this information, you have the data to encourage your team to change their shot selection, the offense you are running, and your offensive game plan in general. 

If you consider your primary role as a coach is putting your team in the best position to win more basketball games, you can use statistics to guide decisions that encourage this. It just makes sense to have data in your corner when making decisions on offensive scheme, defensive strategy, shot selection, etc.

Stats can help change the way your players play. 

If your players are aware of their statistics and you emphasize the statistics that are important to you as a coach, they are much more likely to start doing those things. 

For example, if you share Assist/Turnover ratio with your players, emphasize its importance, and play the players who both share the ball on offense and don’t turn it over…your players will start working to do those things at a more efficient rate. 

Players want as much playing time as possible. If they’re aware of what a coach wants, they will start working to provide that for the coach. 

Statistics aren’t a magic pill to having better players and recording stats doesn’t guarantee success. Knowing what your teams strengths and weaknesses, and emphasizing statistics that are important to you will allow your team opportunities to improve, be more efficient, and, ultimately, puts them in a better position to both grow as players and to win more games. We all know that "what you measure will improve."

So what are you measuring?