Basketball Assist Charting
This week in our off-season has been “assist week”. We recently added “assist maps“, and now to complement that we now have the option to create “Assist Charts” – much like shot charts. This chart is a part of the Assists tool now.
An example is in the image above, which shows every assist came from in a full season for my Girls High School Varsity team. Red dots are 3 point scores, and orange dots are twos. You can filter the charts in various ways, including selecting an area of the court to see who is generating assists from that area. For example, I’d like to have more paint touches, but we didn’t get a lot of those as you can see.
When scoring a game, you have the option to add a location to every assist – either at a later date, or during the initial scoring session. Some assist locations are more interesting than others – for us, we like to see where assists came from in a set offense. Specifically when evaluating our defense.
We went through the three games we had against the top two teams in our league, and mapped the assist locations by our opponents. The had a lot of transition baskets and putbacks (ugh!), but the more interesting assist locations were when they ran from a set offense. Using the Assist Chart, we can show just Set Offense assists for our opponents, like so:
This isn’t a huge sample size, but it’s interesting to see how these teams use the high post and the middle of the floor to generate baskets. This is another reason why a no-middle scheme may help us do better against the top teams in our league.
Adding Assist Locations
If you’re going back through a game, you can add or update a location when editing the assist event from the box score:
On the first scoring-pass through, you can also enable assist location tracking, using this option when scoring:
As with the other analytics you can get with Hoopsalytics, it does take some time to add this level of detail. But if you’re looking to illustrate the value of attacking offenses, or pressure defenses, this can be a useful tool.
Let us know if you like this addition, or if you have any comments or suggestions on how to make this better!