The act of a human making a suboptimal — or irrational — decision isn’t limited to just coaching. There are fields dedicated to studying the factors that lead to irrational decision making. So while sports aren’t necessarily unique, they do have a particular environment that has traditionally valued “gut” and experience.
In yesterday’s new episode of Solving Basketball, San Francisco head coach Todd Golden explained the process behind USF’s unconventional intentional fouling.
Prior to his coaching career, Todd was a three-year starter under Randy Bennett at Saint Mary’s before playing professionally in Israel for two seasons.
Just 10 years ago, the idea of a DI head basketball coach discussing the nuances of expected value and win probability would have probably been laughable — let alone a coach from a fairly conventional playing background. But here we are.
Reasonable minds can certainly disagree with the details of San Francisco’s strategy. There is a fair amount of nuance to in-game decisions and the math isn’t always straightforward. But the general framework — rooting the decision making process in math and probability — is harder to reasonably question.
Yet it’s not the framework that has been used by most coaches.
Some irrational decisions are only superficially irrational
If you have read some of our work this season, there’s been one constant theme: Trade-offs.
There are hundreds of different areas a basketball team would theoretically benefit from excelling in, but a coach’s job is to prioritize. It’s the reason we probably won’t see a Greg Gard team urgently push the ball or a Mick Cronin team take hyper-efficient shots anytime soon.
Perhaps the best example of a tangible trade-off — which has personally fascinated me for almost seven years now — comes from turnovers. At first glance, there is a particular type of coach that seems to act irrationally regarding turnover philosophy.
On the one hand, this (not so) hypothetical coach — let’s call him Dave Paulsen or Bo Ryan — values taking care of the basketball at an extreme level. Their teams are regularly towards the top of the national leaderboard in offensive turnover percentage.
On the other hand, this same coach doesn’t value aggressively getting into passing lanes and generating steals. Their teams are regularly towards the bottom of the national leaderboard in defensive turnover percentage — usually thanks to a pack-line style of defense.
This type of philosophy might seem irrational, but only on a surface level. Ultimately, turnover percentage only matters to the extent that it impacts overall efficiency. The goal isn’t necessarily to have a stylistically consistent attitude towards offense and defense, the goal is to maximize points per possession.
Some decisions are actually irrational. Why?
Trade-offs can’t be used as a cop out for every decision made by a coach.
One of the most interesting parts of the conversation with Todd Golden was how simple he made the execution of the intentional fouling strategy sound. In their win over BYU: Golden was alerted to Childs’ free throw percentage during a timeout, he considered the decision, he told his players to foul Childs when he touches the ball, and his players executed.
Devoting extra practice time to the execution of the foul would certainly wouldn’t hurt, but these decisions require a significantly lower allocation of resources than most.
So what — besides a potential disagreement in the math of particular decision — is holding coaches back?
[1] It’s the way it’s always been done
This one might seem cliche, but it’s undeniably a factor. In fact, the coaching industry has a way of promoting the status quo through the nature of the hiring process. Instead of using the hiring process to assemble a diverse staff with different perspectives and backgrounds, coaches typically tend to keep new hires limited to a very small network of (often like-minded) people.
[2] Coaches (humans?) are control freaks
Some of the “worst” habitual decisions being made by coaches stem from wanting to control their game, player, or team. One of the best examples here is the transition three-point attempt. For years and years, coaches were passing up efficient scoring opportunities early in the shot clock in favor of backing the ball out to micromanage the game.
[3] The best decision doesn’t always work…
As much as the basketball world touts the “process over results” mantra, the industry itself is very results-oriented. One of the reasons fouling up three has become an increasingly popular strategy (relative to others), is that it stems from a situation where the decision maker is likely to win regardless. When up three with seven seconds left, the defense has around a 93% chance of winning the game before a decision has even been made. The fact that the situation is advantageous to begin with allows for some immediate confirmation bias when a coach chooses a strategy.
[4] …So it requires a certain type of mindset
Not only is the “best” decision not always going to work, but sometimes the best decision is actually expected not to work. For example, imagine you are the resident numbers guy on an analytically-skeptical coaching staff. You have an unconventional end-of-game strategy that will increase win probability from 44% to 47%. Even though the strategy increases win probability, it’s still expected to result in a loss more often than a win. In order to feel comfortable making that suggestion, the staff must be committed to the overall mindset of finding edges — not necessarily the immediate result.