I was excited to see the topic of fouls receive some attention at last week’s Sloan Conference in Boston. Although I’m not sure how I feel about the methodology (confusing) and conclusions (potentially confounded) of that paper. Nonetheless, fouls are a small part of the game that are often overlooked in analysis.
Turns out that drawing fouls is a really good thing. And committing fouls — specifically, shooting fouls — is really bad. Nothing revolutionary there.
On offense, drawing a foul has two effects:
- Brings a team closer to the penalty
- Causes foul trouble for opposing starters
When a player is in foul trouble, he loses minutes he would otherwise be on the floor (unless he plays for Don Nelson, apparently). Usually, this is on order of 5-10 minutes, as a player sits for a period before he is no longer in “foul trouble.” Occasionally, extreme cases render a player inactive for longer, like Dwight Howard in last year’s first round against Charlotte. Howard averaged around 26 minutes a game when he otherwise would have been playing closer to 40. When starters sit, they are replaced by bench players, who (theoretically) represent a downgrade.
The penalty represents a larger advantage for teams. Every foul before the penalty is 25% of the way to the automatic bonus for a team. Once in the penalty, any foul on the court produces two free throws for a team, which is the most efficient form of offense: The value of an average possession in the NBA is about 1.07 points. The value of two free throws is about 1.52 points.
On the team level, the correlation between fouls drawn per 100 possessions and ORtg is quite strong: 0.56 for last year’s playoffs. For this metric, a “foul drawn” (FD) is only counted when a player is fouled on offense. Setting screens and intentional fouls are excluded.
Here are the leaders from the 2010 playoffs in fouls drawn per 100 possessions, with free throw attempts/100 included as reference:
Clearly, there is a strong correlation between free throw attempts and fouls drawn. This allows a fairly accurate estimate of FD using FTA. However, as is the case with Opportunities Created and assists, it is the outliers who are often the most interesting. Someone like Dwight Howard shoots far less free throws than expected based on the number of fouls he draws because he’s constantly being banged around before the act of shooting, to prevent lobs or on offensive rebounding situations. Here is the full list of players ranked by FD from the 2010 playoffs who played at least 150 possessions.
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On defense, committing personal fouls isn’t terribly detrimental to the team. For one, there’s a limit of six per game, and as discussed above, players will simply head to the bench if they foul too much. There is almost no correlation between personal fouls and team defensive rating.
However, there is a correlation between Shooting Free Throws (SF) and defensive rating (0.44 after 104 team games of tracking this year.) This information can be extracted from the play-by-play for comprehensive analysis by noting how many free throws a player gave to the other team by fouling. (eg 3 SF result from fouling on a 3-pointer.)
Again, free throws are the most efficient mode of scoring, so sending a player to the line is spiking the opponent’s offensive efficiency as described above. In short, shooting fouls are bad.* Using the 150 possession qualifier, here is the complete list of players from last year’s playoffs who caused the most free throws for the opposition (SF per 100 possessions).
*The obvious exception is “intentional” fouls to prevent layups or easy attempts around the goal from horribly inefficient free throw shooters.
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