Kirk Goldsberry - SprawlBall: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA

Copyright 2019 by Kirk Goldsberry

Illustrations copyright 2019 by Aaron Dana

Infographics copyright 2019 by Kirk Goldsberry

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goldsberry, Kirk Patrick, author.

Title: Sprawlball : a visual tour of the new era of the NBA / Kirk Goldsberry.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. | Includes index. | Identifiers: lccn 2018042565 (print) | LCCN 2019004552 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328765031 (ebook) | ISBN 9781328767516 (paper over board)

Subjects: LCSH : Basketball playersUnited StatesStatistics. | BasketballUnited StatesStatistics. | BasketballShooting. | BasketballUnited States. | National Basketball Association.

Classification: LCC GV 885.55 (ebook) | LCC GV 885.55 . G 65 2019 (print) | DDC 796.323/64dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018042565

Page composition by Kelly Dubeau Smydra

Illustration on is based on an underlying work used with permission from John Costacos, Inc. Copyright 1990 by Costacos Brothers, Inc. Photo by Bill Smith, Art Wolfe / Allstock, Greg Probst / Allstock. All rights reserved.

Cover design Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Author photograph Abbey Grimes

Excerpt on is from Is It Time to Move the NBA 3-Point Line Back? by Kirk Goldsberry, first published online in Grantland, June 23, 2014. Copyright 2014 by ESPN. Text reprinted by permission of ESPN. All rights reserved.

v1.0419

For Adrienne, Rosie, Daisy; Mom, Dad, and
the rest of my wonderful family

GEOGRAPHY IS DESTINY. Ever since Sun Tzu talked about terrain in The Art of War, soldiers and generals alike have been hyper-aware of the vital interactions between spaces and strategies. The worlds chess masters are not only aware of these interactions, but engineer them and relentlessly leverage them all the way to checkmate. As soon as team sports began to emerge in the late 19th century, coaches began to strategize around the playing surfaces of baseball fields, soccer pitches, and basketball courts. Vince Lombardi and John Wooden chalked out xs and os on their chalkboards. Spatial descriptors like power alleys, the trenches, and the low post crept into the languages of these new games and eventually came to organically dominate the discourses around strategy. It took a little while, but sports observers started to understand what Sun Tzu had been saying for centuries: space matters, terrain matters.

A regulation basketball court is 94 feet long and 50 feet wide. Thats 4,700 square feet, the equivalent size of a nice McMansion in Orlando. It features two goals and a bunch of painted lines and circles. The goal of the game has always been simple: put the biscuit in the basket. For a century or so, the best strategies involved big dudes getting close to the peach basket and attempting to shoot and score from as close as possible.

But only recently, with the convergence of computing, spatially referenced game data, and our cultures increasingly manic urges for quantification and efficiency, have sports truly begun to adopt analytical spatial reasoning as a strategic ally. This new ally, along with a generation of players, coaches, and executives who grew up with three-pointers and Michael Lewis books, has changed the entire aesthetic of basketball.

This is the new efficiency landscape of the NBA.

This smoothed map visualizes the new terrain of the NBA. By running a smoothing algorithm, we can estimate the average point value for shots taken anywhere on the court. The areas in green are zones where average NBA shots yield at least 1.00 points on average. The purple areas are worth less than that. As you can see, the only green on the map is located either very close to the basket or beyond the arc. Aside from that, the color purple is everywhere.

This points-per-shot map transformed my view of the NBA. Sure, I was long aware that three-point shots were relatively good investments for players and teams, but something about seeing it laid out on this image made that point impossible to ignore. I thought about it every time I watched basketball. And I wasnt alonea growing analytical movement in the sport was leading to an increasingly obsessive embrace of three-point shooting. The three-ball was quickly becoming associated with analytically aware basketball reasoning.

The soldiers and generals of pro basketball are charged with competing on this terrain, and the emerging aesthetic of the NBA, marked by an intensifying love affair with three-point shooting and growing distaste for midrange scoring, is simply a reflection of the topography we see in that map.

On March 21, 2016, the San Antonio Spurs were in Charlotte taking on the Hornets. With approximately three minutes remaining in the first quarter, the Hornets had the ball and Kemba Walker dumped an entry pass down to Al Jefferson, who received the ball in his favorite spotdown near the left block. Jefferson loves the left block; hes a throwback big man in that sense. In an era when more and more bigs stretch the floor and shoot more and more long jumpers, he loves to post up and hates to shoot threes.

After gathering the pass, Jefferson went to work. He was closely guarded by Tim Duncan, one of the best interior defenders ever to set foot on a basketball court. After backing into Duncan, Jefferson quickly spun over his left shoulder and released a hook shot from just about eight feet away from the rim.

It was vintage NBA. This could have been Mikan versus Schayes, Russell versus Chamberlain, McHale versus Abdul-Jabbar, or Shaq versus Mutombo. Weve seen this dance for generations. It is quintessential NBA basketball.

But Duncan won this battle. Jefferson missed, and LaMarcus Aldridge quickly grabbed the rebound for the Spurs.

For years, the nerdy folks familiar with the geography of an NBA basketball court claimed that the worst shot on the floor was the long two-point jump shot. This assertion was based on simple logic. After all, shooting a basketball generally becomes more difficult as distance to the hoop increases, so shooting the longest two-point shot on the floor must be the worst shot possible. High risk, low reward. If youre going to shoot that far out, you may as well shoot a three!

However, this simple line of reasoning neglects one important thing: the effect of defense. Looking at years of raw, nonsmoothed shooting data, one can discern small pockets in the two-point area that are actually more inefficient. Across the league, NBA players sink just about 38 percent of those long twos, but there is a spot near the left blockjust eight feet away from the bucketwhere players make just 31 percent of their shots. Lets call this mysterious zone Area 31.