http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/...cal-revolution
Quote:
Valanciunas, of course, has been the chief focus of Toronto's player development staff this season, and that has been another source of tension between the analytics team and the coaching staff. Valanciunas, like most rookies, misses rotations, overhelps, and commits other sins of positioning on defense. Coaches hate that stuff, and they've often nailed Valanciunas to the bench in crunch time in favor of Aaron Gray — a fundamentally sound player who lacks NBA athleticism.
The numbers in large part disagree with that tactic, at least as it relates to Valanciunas's defense. The Raptors' defense has been better with Valanciunas on the floor. More importantly, the visualization data shows that Valanciunas is active and athletic enough to make up for all his defensive mistakes, Rucker and his team say.
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Think this might be interesting as we also prefer a "fundamentally sound/veteran-esque/zero tolerance for error"-approach and I feel RC also tends to handle players the "Valanciunas"-way. Ever since I thought mistakes on the court are less to not important if the player is a net plus and nice to see that SportVU / the Raptors visualization analysis adds valid data to that assumption.
That said, Dallas also uses the cameras and it's up for speculation whether they use comparable analysis and therefore Ricks coaching decisions are already affected by it.