🏀 2025-26 Preseason Basketball Thread

Men's Basketball
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More ranking / preview content here. Top 15 guys in each of ten position archetypes. I see Malik and De Ridder
https://x.com/Isaac__Trotter/status/1952430633495728294

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That is fair.

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Maybe this was obvious to others, but this went a little under the radar for me: De Ridder will not be with Belgium for Eurobasket (I had assumed he’d be on the team): Les Belgian Lions disputent, Ă  Ostende, un tournoi de prĂ©paration en vue de l’EuroBasket 2025 | Basketball Belgium

Google Translate renders it as:

Thijs De Ridder will also not be able to participate in the Euro, due to academic obligations at the University of Virginia, in the United States.

Good for us, bad for Belgium (who has subsequently lost 2 players from that preliminary roster of 17 given in the announcement, and won’t get their 2 NBA guys either).

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Odom on midrange shots:

“I don’t want guarded midrange shots,” he said, “but if a guy can prove that he can make open shots that are inside [the 3-point arc] that are good for us, then we want him to shoot them. We’re not saying, ‘OK, you are only allowed to do this or only allowed to do that,’ because that limits you. And sometimes the defense dictates the quality of the shot that you can get. Sometimes it’s the best shot you can get at the end of a clock, and so they better be ready to take it. Sometimes it’s best for that individual player. Again, they need to be ready and encouraged to do what they do well, because it’s playing to your strengths.”

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good take from Odom imo

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Odom hinted recently at a OOC game in Charlotte – any hints who that may be? I’ve been gone and away for a while so apologies if I missed this

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I think Clemson is the most likely candidate, since we don’t play them in-conference.

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We already knew this, but now it’s officially official.

https://x.com/uvamenshoops/status/1953531590560428210?s=46&t=vkjgQUekzGC7z44tIfnIRQ

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Now those are the type of analytics I can get behind. Good read. Like he says, you have to know what analytics are useful and can help you win. A lot of analytics that I’ve seen used in media articles are BS.

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Pretty sure we are playing Clemson as they (Clemson) bagged a neutral site game vs VCU to play UVA instead.

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This is the most important quote IMO:

Stats are omnipresent today, Hart noted. His job is to determine “what’s actually useful, what actually helps you win, what translates to winning,” he said. “On our staff, the assistants do different things, so they require different [data], so I do different things for different coaches. And then for Coach Odom, he’s big on analytics. He still coaches with feel, on what he sees, but he wants to know the numbers. So the stuff I give him is more simplified and easy, just a couple action items that are important. With the rest of the staff, there’s some more in-depth things that we can go back and forth on.”

Analytics are only useful if there’s buy-in about using them, and they are communicated in a way tailored to what the coaches want to do.

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I also appreciated that he’s focused on analytics that translate to winning. It may seem like an obvious point, but there’s a ton of stuff that seems meaningful, but doesn’t add up to much in terms of on-court impact. Easy to miss the forest for the trees.

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Data is the false god of the modern age.

The general idea that data is good and more data is better, and that using data will somehow make everything more efficient is complete and utter bullshit, but it makes a lot of people a lot of money selling data analytics.

Sure, it’s useful if you’re Amazon and you’re swimming in actionable data, but it doesn’t translate to the vast majority of use cases, Billy Beane be damned.

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There are teams in all sports that know how to use it well where the analytics teams and the scouting teams are harmonized and you often find a lot of success there.

You are right that just having data and data people doesn’t inherently make you good but if you have people that are good at what they do and an organizational structure that makes sense, it often leads to better outcomes.

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Yeah, the way pundits often talk about data is a false god. The way analysts usually talk about it isn’t at all.

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Yeah like people trying to assign defensive efficiency metrics to individual basketball players is silly, imo. It’s bad data that heavily overweights more aggressive defenders who happen to get more steals, blocks, rebounds, etc.

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Hard disagree. In every sport, pro teams have become rigorously and markedly more efficient in their strategies because of data. The product is not always pleasing to watch, but it is much better for winning at said sports within the rules.

It started with a sport that is extremely easy to quantify with data–baseball–and has now conquered sports that are much, much, MUCH harder to quantify–soccer.

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Yeah.. Liverpool, Brentford, and Brighton are great examples from soccer.

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I think there’s a self-fulfilling prophecy aspect to the whole analytics movement too though. At this point, it’s been ingrained into the basketball culture for a while. Doesn’t matter if every coach fully embraces the philosophy, it’s shifted the style of play in that direction anyway. Along with that, it’s changed the way players develop, the skills they concentrate on. Essentially, they’ve adapted to meet the market demand.

The best example is with post players. None of these guys are good at playing with their bask to the basket anymore
it was deemed inefficient. And in general, I agree with that. But I also contend that today’s players aren’t good at defending it, no reason to be, and thus if someone does excel at it, they’re more valuable than ever.

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