Does Having a Beard Give Basketball Players an Advantage?

[00:00] to impact the modern NBA. Which means it's time to ask yourself: [Music: "Y'all ready for maths?"] They've all got beards!

[00:17] [Music pauses] [Interviewer: "Nickola, one thing that has changed on media day, you have a very strong beard!] [Music resumes] So I made a previous video looking into the idea that in the modern NBA, people were taking way more three-point shots, and that's true;

[00:31] because even though it's less likely to hit a three-point shot, the extra 50% points you get more than makes up for that. And when coaches cottoned on to this bit of sports analytics it changed the way the NBA was played.

[00:46] Well I spotted another correlation: I think more players, now, have beards! And some people have argued, "No, just the superstars have more beards, it's not across the entire league." Well I don't buy that, I'm going to get to the bottom of this!

[01:02] before he went on to change the face of the NBA. Because the other superstar here at Davidson College, as well as Steph Curry: my friend Tim! [Music fades out]

[01:17] Tim is an expert in sports analytics and so he used the official NBA API to access their database the current season, we got every headshot we could find going back to the 1991 season.

[01:31] I then wrote some terrible, terrible code that would flash each headshot up on the screen We had four different categories: Category number zero, zero facial hair pretty straightforward;

[01:47] then Category one was some facial hair but not an actual beard; and Category three, the fourth category, is full beard - absolute beard.

[02:02] in every single season of the NBA going back to 1991. This is the percentage of players for each season that had a full beard:

[02:17] then in 2001, something changes, it starts going up. we are clearly in the era of the beard: peak beard is in 2016,

[02:31] That's one beard shared between every two-and-a-half NBA players. It's obviously way, way more beards in the modern game than there were previously

[02:44] so people who are completely clean shaven starts quite high, up near 40%, drops off as you'd expect to match the rise of the beard that's got some drop off but not as much as you might expect.

[03:02] So I think the drop off from that one is people who had some facial hair and were afraid to commit to the full beard, And people with the goatee, surprisingly flat - and you're not going to change it no matter what era it may be.

[03:20] clean shaven is coming back up again - I'm going to ignore that because my thesis is it was the rise of the beard that led us to the modern NBA. And so my quest is simple, if I want to become the ultimate modern basketballer

[03:36] I have to grow a beard. And frankly that is great news: it is way easier to grow some facial hair than learning to shoot accurately.

[03:49] Well, I'm going to attempt a halfcourt shot. But Beard Matt, check this out!

[04:05] And you saw how long my piece to camera was before that, I've obviously not just been here all day, doing that same shot over and over... but Beard Matt, check this out.

[04:26] Fun fact, I'm actually working with Vincent Reynolds, at Davidson College, to write up our study about this. We're actually writing a paper about longitudinal NBA performance with a focus on facial hair.

[04:40] but once it's out I will link to it below. Right, I do have two discoveries I made about the NBA, I'm very excited. I'm making this video because I want more people to appreciate how wonderful sports analytics are,

[04:59] and I want to make a video with my maths professor mate, Tim. [Tim] So, the wonderful part about sports analytics is: one, the data is clean; two, that you grow up, many of us, being around sports (even if we don't play sports) and

[05:13] And you can jump right in and study the game. [Tim] Yeah, at Davidson we have a hundred students, some of them play sports some of them don't,

[05:25] But they all get in the game with data in sports. [Matt] Amazing! Also, Tim's got a book: "Get In The Game" I'll be at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, please come and see me there.

[05:40] or here are the first nine dates around the UK, the London one, that's going to be the big one, on the same stage as Matilda. Oh! And I'm doing a different show, in New York, in July links in the description.

[05:54] There's an idea in sport called the hot hand, [Commentator] "He's on fire!" Nailing shot after shot, I mean, three of them in a row.

[06:12] In that regard, I think I'm a lot like when Steph Curry's on fire. [Tim] So, in 2013, Stephen played in Madison Square Garden and he scored 54 points.

[06:24] is he shot 11 out of 13 three-pointers. [Matt] That's just an outrageous level of of of accuracy. from the free throw line for most... [Matt] Okay, let's not rub it in.

[06:40] And actually our camera person, Trent, was there at that game; [Matt] It was ridiculous, there you go.

[06:52] But you then decided to work out, is it technically impressive or is it just impressive as a spectacle? kind of, how you're asking the question... when Trent, the cameraman, went into the game, and if Trent had said: "I think Stephen's going to make 11 or more out of 13."

[07:12] [Tim] Yeah, and then it happened because that is less than a 1% you can shoot better than Stefan and just flip a coin, [Matt] What's his normal shooting percentage? [Tim] That year it was about 0.43, so it's about 43%.

[07:31] [Matt] Oh, okay, so a coin flip is better odds of getting let's say heads... [Tim] Yeah. [Matt] And you'd have to flip for a while, like getting 11 out of 13 is impressive. [Tim] Yeah. One way is just to have a bunch of people in a room, and if you have over a hundred people

[07:48] you know you have a chance that somebody someone will actually pull it off. [Matt] Right shoots around 600 to 700 three-point shots that year, And a question becomes, well if you just look at the

[08:05] how often will there be 11 out of 13? [Matt] Right. And so that's why sometimes people will say, "maybe there isn't a hot hand,"

[08:20] and on the other side people will say, "well yeah because he was hot that night." [Matt] It's all well and good comparing Steph Curry to a coin, but basketball players are humans, and humans have emotions.

[08:35] it's being clever and analysing stats, knowing they're coming from humans. [Tim] Part of the idea of a hot hand is the fact that people can believe

[08:49] and that they're more likely to hit the next shot. [Tim] Yeah, and what's interesting is that, rather than trying to decide I've done research here at Davidson, with honour students,

[09:04] Because a lot of the research just acts like every shot's the same, And we found that, no, when there is a player

[09:16] but without coming out of the game and things like that, that the time between shots of the whole team went down. the usage of that player went up.

[09:29] So the game did not stay the same when there was a sense of a hot hand. With a coin flip it's independent, which means the coin doesn't remember, But when we as humans play we, often, are not independent.

[09:43] [Matt] Which brings me to my run of three shots in a row. I did not take just three shots, I actually took 100 shots. was logging, like, every single shot I took.

[09:59] [Tim] So your accuracy was 37%. So just a little lower than Stephen Curry, when Stephan's shooting from the three-point line. [Matt] That's, I've got a worse free throw percentage than Shaquille O'Neal.

[10:15] [Matt] So if I have, let's just take that as my official, I'm a 37% shot taker. um, would you expect me to hit a run of three at some point?

[10:32] And and then my best run, my best run was three, right? [Tim] Yeah. If somebody were to shoot 37% and took 100 shots on average, [Matt] What was it exactly? [Tim] It was, on average, was 4.2.

[10:50] [Matt] And not all shots were equal, 'cos I knew in my head... [Tim] Yeah. [Matt] And then I got three in a row and I was like "Oh amazing!" But from, but then I was like "This is it this is like my one chance to do four in a row."

[11:05] So humans... [Tim] It's applied math. But I don't want to apply myself, unless it's to the data.

[11:17] I still had the over four million shots Tim gave me from the previous video, I have the coordinates, on the court, of every single shot So I had a dig through and I found some interesting shots.

[11:35] First of all, I found the longest successful shot, it was the year 2001, which is where we are, well we're just outside Charlotte.

[11:50] With a little bit of help from Tim and Vincent, we measured out the exact location this shot occurred at in 2001, So, in 2001, someone in a game shot from here.

[12:08] And which, uh, Vincent's going to demonstrate how hard that is. [Matt] You can now... Vincent is just wearing socks for the record, it's in? No...

[12:26] This is the record that's up for grabs: there is a shot which is a greater distance from the hoop, but they missed. So I think you could break the record

[12:39] for longest attempted shot, that one was 161 tenths of a foot that way. After a bit more measuring and dealing with feet and inches,

[12:52] That shot, that was in the 2010-2011 season; Steve Blake, of the Los Angeles Lakers,

[13:05] attempted a shot from there and missed. But oh my goodness, it hit! I did not know it was that close until we dug up the footage in the edit

[13:17] And it seems, in Davidson, we came in from the baseline not from the ring; 'cos there's a little bit more room and, technically, this is an easy to break record. you just have to take a shot from further away than that.

[13:34] So you're anywhere in, like, the loci like around anywhere in here. It's you know... Okay let me demonstrate how that would look.

[13:50] Okay, okay... This is going to go in on the second bounce. But no, but I can't even get a run up, right, 'cos I need to be in, that's the worst!

[14:10] Aww... It's just 'attempted shot'.

[14:22] But it didn't, so I've got a second plan 'Would you Believe I and my Beard Have Made a Three-Point Shot in the NBA Data-set?'

[14:41] In the 2008-2009 season, a player for the LA Clippers, Eric Gordon, took a shot, okay. the coordinates are: -17.4 feet this way. But then it's 57 foot, exactly, up from the baseline.

[14:56] so it's not like a significant data point. But in the official data this was labelled, So someone, I don't know why they were shooting from here,

[15:14] but they took this shot (beard's temporarily not working) and, and, and they had that put down as a two-pointer. [Commentator] "Curry again!" [Crowd cheers]

[15:29] I spoke to the NBA and they're having a look to see if they're going to update the data set. because I spotted, albeit a trivial, miscalculation;

[15:42] a three-point shot into the NBA data. I will have made a three-point shot in the NBA data set, Now I suspect a lot of people might be wondering,

[15:57] "how on earth is the NBA logging such incredibly detailed data about what every player is, doing in every game?" And while we weren't allowed to, officially, go in and do any formal filming;

[16:13] it turns out Tim knew the Head of Quantitative Analysis and Development for the Charlotte Hornets, the local NBA team; So we're able to pop in; say, 'hi!' Talk some nerdy sports analytics.

[16:27] that the Hornets use; some of their facilities and Now a lot of sports fans would be very excited for all sorts of reasons,

[16:40] Me; however, I wanted to see the optical tracking system. so live during every game they can track,

[16:52] automatically, every movement of every player. That's just how important the data is. and that box is linked to up there,

[17:06] is an Xbox Kinect. and shooting and what sort of shots they're taking. I mean, that can tell you while you're practicing.

[17:21] So that's how you use mathematics to have a big impact on the modern world of basketball.... Data! (doesn't matter, I got there)

[17:35] And huge thanks to the Davidson basketball program, The Head Coach, Matt, signed off on this and Assistant Coach, Will, was here with us. Hugely helpful, let's play some basketball.

[17:51] the math and computer science department; crunching the data beforehand, key beard data, of sports analytics and helping us, uh, with the filming.

[18:09] ["Be like /Maths/" song plays, parody of Bernie Pitzel - Be Like Mike] And that's it, that's how, that's how you play basketball using mathematics.

[18:23] partly because it looks ridiculous And that's, uh, that's how that joke works. Although, before I do, one last shot: here we go, ready!

[18:40] that hurt how close that was, ow, ["Be Like /Maths/" continues to play]