EuroLog #1: Cedi's Performance against Efes
And an introduction to the newsletter.
Hello everyone! Welcome to The Read Step, a biweekly newsletter about Euroleague (EL) from analytics perspective. I’m Yiğit, a full-time data scientist (hence the analytics). You can subscribe to the newsletter to receive emails.
Since we got that out of our way, let’s move on with Euroleague.
I hope you watched Efes - Panathinaikos (PAO) series because it was a competition feast. PAO came into the series as strong favorites but Efes brought a lot of problems even in the matches that they lost. Kendrick Nunn, current Euroleague MVP, was held to 0.27 points per possession (ppp), which is 0.10 points decrease compared to regular season with the same usage rate. When your star player struggles, you need some X factor(s) to compensate. PAO was lucky since Cedi took over that role.
During this series, Cedi’s usage increased to 26.5% which means Cedi used 26.5% of PAO’s offensive possessions while he was on the court. An increase of 7.3% compared to the regular season is actually huge. With this type of increase one may expect some amount of reduction in efficiency. Well, that doesn’t seem to be the case:
He produced around 10 more points per 75 possessions compared to the regular season. Each 1% increase in usage percentage is expected to produce 0.6 more points per 75 possessions (not controlling for any other factor here). This raises a question related to something called skill curve.
At some level of usage, a player’s efficiency gets hurt as usage increases. It seems like Cedi benefits from more usage regardless of the phase of the season (regular season or post season). With that being said, post season performances are better:
His effective FG% (eFG%), which accounts for extra value from 3s, increased by 2.2% compared to regular season.
True shooting % (TS%), which adds free throws to the calculation, increased by 1.9%.
What might explain such a difference? In the flow of this piece, Efes defense might have left some openings while trying to hold K. Nunn to such inefficiency. Unfortunately, accessible data does not provide us with the positions of other players so I can’t check for it. However, what about easy baskets? If you have watched the series, you may have recognized that Efes made a lot of simple turnovers and mistakes:
In the regular season, 28.2% of Cedi’s made field goals were from fast breaks. This is 29.6% against Efes in the post season.
In the regular season, 9% of Cedi’s made field goals were from second chance. This is 11.1% against Efes in the post season.
In the regular season, 14.1% of Cedi’s made field goals were off the turnovers. This is 22.2% against Efes in the post season.
Also, made corner 3 percentage was 33.3% during the season compared to 45.5% against Efes.
While Cedi had a phenomenal series, PAO struggled in aggregate. Looking at the Dean Oliver’s four factors:
eFG%: Reduction of 6.8% compared to regular season.
TOV%: Increase of 3% compared to regular season. Lower values are better for this one since it quantifies how often you turn the ball over per 100 possessions.
OREB%: Increase of 8.4% compared to regular season. This says more about Efes, which struggled to take defensive rebounds throughout the series against Lessortless PAO.
FT Rate: Not much of a difference → 0.236 - 0.232 = 0.04
At the start of the season, or into the mid-season, nobody could have imagined Efes being here. So, from that mental state, it is OK result. But also, nobody would expect PAO to be struggling this much so I think they missed a huge opportunity.
I don’t expect Panathinaikos to struggle this much against Fener but I am pretty sure there are some doubts in their heads after such a hard series against Efes. Maybe that results in waking up the beast, Kendrick Nunn, but we’ll see.