RealGM

Assessing Team Chemistry

I found an interesting blog entry as I was doing some reading tonight. Jamie Merchant has an entry at his blog titled Numeranda where he takes a look at a team’s adjusted plus/minus stats and compares it with the sum of the individual players on each unit’s adjusted plus/minus stats. Here is his entry. The hypothesis here is that 5 man units that outperformed collectively the sum of their individual APMs have good chemistry, whereas 5 man units that underperformed collectively the sum of their individual APMs may not have great chemistry. Note that this is a study on team chemistry, using APM as a means of evaluating this and putting a numerical value on it, rather than the quality of the team. This can be seen in the fact that some of the higher rated teams relative to chemistry, using this model, are actually terrible teams that didn’t win a lot of games.

In looking at the numbers to relate this to the Hawks, the three units the Hawks used the most this past season have negative chemistry ratings. Note that the chemistry rating is the difference between the team’s APM vs the sum of the individual players’ APM. The Hawks’ three most used 5 man units are:

1. Mike Bibby/Joe Johnson/Marvin Williams/Josh Smith/Al Horford
2. Mike Bibby/Jamal Crawford/Joe Johnson/Josh Smith/Al Horford
3. Jamal Crawford/Joe Johnson/Marvin Williams/Josh Smith/Al Horford

This is how these units rated relative to the chemistry rating, with team APM and sum APM included:

1. Bibby/Crawford/Johnson/Smith/Horford – “chemistry” -2.51 (APM of 7.22 – sum APM of 9.73)
2. Bibby/Johnson/Williams/Smith/Horford – “chemistry” -3.05 (APM of 3.76 – sum APM of 6.81)
3. Crawford/Johnson/Williams/Smith/Horford – “chemistry” -4.25 (APM of 7.85 – sum APM of 12.1)

It is difficult to make any conclusions on this date at this point because the sample sizes are too small. For discussion purposes though, where does the source of the relative lack of chemistry lie?