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Importance of fatigue / Ways of getting your opponents tired

Posted: Sun Dec 08, 2013 4:06 pm
by siedemnastka
i've started reading this board just recently and i've only gone through 8 pages of archival subjects, so please correct me if i'm wrong.

but the way i feel right now is that there's not enough (not only on this board) attention paid to the fact that (all?) players do get tired during games. and that this fact does impact their play on both ends of the floor and it does so in many ways. which makes it a players' flaw - potentially exploitable by smart opponents' tactics.

one of the issues is lack of right available data (?). nonetheless, i think it should be a meaningful part of most sports-related discussion, even though it's not very easy to quantify.

some quick, related, unstructured thoughts. it is obviously a broad subject:
1. playing which side of the floor is more energy-consuming: defending or rebounding? (it must have already been answered, right?)
a) i see it as a nice potential use of SportVU data. effort on defense/offense. i'm not overly ecstatic about those average speed stats though. would probably be more interested in frequency of decelerating and accelerating.
b) how does it differ depending on type of offenses being run? but also on type of defensive schemes being in use? popular guess would probably be that iso-ball is pretty easy on defenses, while facing a passing team means a lot of running, closing in on shooters, start-stopping etc. my guess is that it's considerably harder (in terms of physical effort) to defend than to attack in those circumstances. how about constantly-moving/off-the-ball-screen-setting/cutting offenses? doubling on opponents' post-ups etc.
- impact of playing high-tempo transition-offense teams seems easy to predict.
2. targeting particular players on opposing teams
3. importance of using bench players, and using them effectively
4. ages of players.
5. impact of being tired on shooting percentages.
6. some teams like to turn on their defensive intensity for stretches in games. how about somehow exploting these changes in attitude?
7. using altitude as your advantage
8. this one is a stretch, but: making other teams' best defenders, but only so-so offensive players, work extra hard on offense.
9. do the refs get tired? how does it impact their decision-making? aren't we getting any of "Let's watch this replay one more time. <breathes heavily> Just to be sure."s ? New definition of superstar-calls: "I'm seeing stars, man. Had to call this one."

Re: Importance of fatigue / Ways of getting your opponents t

Posted: Sun Dec 08, 2013 10:57 pm
by Crow
To gauge the importance of fatigue of players and teams on average and specifically, I did earlier suggest in another thread that it would be good to look at player performance over a season grouped by activity occurring in first 6 minutes on the court for al stints on the court vs. activity from the 6th-12th consecutive minutes of those stint, 13th minute and beyond (or howecer one wants to divide it up). I suggested doing a RAPM split that way to gauge overall performance but any play by play boxscore data could be grouped that way too. One could do this for all minutes or in more targeted fashion to get at some of the issues you raised.

Re: Importance of fatigue / Ways of getting your opponents t

Posted: Mon Dec 09, 2013 12:15 am
by steveshea
I'd also like to see a study on if guarding particular players can be exceptionally taxing. Here, I'm thinking about the effort necessary to keep a big man like Love or Howard off the boards, or to chase a shooter as he continuously loops around screens.