Play Faster, Or Slower: Measuring Which Players Affect Pace
Controlling the pace of play can be key to winning more games. Some teams like to play fast, others like to play slow. And some games the desired pace of play depends upon your opponent.
Hoopsalytics has a few handy metrics that can help you determine which players have the most control over the speed of play: Pace, Offensive Pace, and Defensive Pace. You can add this data to your box scores, or see it in the Player Impact tool.
Pace measures all possessions, both offensive and defensive, in seconds-per-possession. In general, if you feel your team is better than your opponent, you want a faster game with more possessions. Lower numbers indicate a faster pace-of-play.
Offensive Pace just measures how fast your team plays when on offense. It’s calculated by time on offense divided by number of offensive possessions. So if you emphasize transition play, you should aim for lower numbers.
Defensive Pace is the opposite of offensive pace. In some cases, you want a slower number here, which indicates your opponent has to work harder to complete a possession because you are playing great defense.
Pace in Player Impact
The screen shot at the top of his article shows the Player Impact tool, and the highlighted part shows how each player affects pace of play: ON the floor versus OFF the floor. Green values show a faster pace, and red values a slower pace. The Offensive Pace and Defensive Pace also appear here.
Pace in Player Box Scores
You can also add Pace data to any of your box scores, or create a new view with just pace-oriented data. In this example, we’ve created a new view that shows Pace and PPP (points-per-possession) stats for each player:
Summary
If you’re looking to see which players most affect the pace of play, the Pace data (found only in Hoopsalytics) can help you pick the best lineups to help you control pace-of-play to your liking.
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