The Lakers are off to a rough start this year – through 9 games they are 1-8, good enough for last place in the Western Conference. In this spreadsheet problem solving example, we’ll use spreadsheets to answer a pertinent question – if the legendary Kobe Bryant played like an average shooting guard, how would the Lakers have fared this year?
While many long time watchers of the NBA might think the Lakers would be even worse (if that were possible), our spreadsheet will show that things would probably be better if Kobe improved to the league average.
We look at points per shot as our key statistic. This is somewhat simplistic as it ignores defense and defensive attention and creation of shots for other players, but it does capture the heart of basketball – every team has about 80-85 shots over the course of a game, and some player/teams are better at converting those limited shots into points than other players/teams.
Here are the rankings for points per shot, Kobe is currently generating 1.09 points per shot, good enough for 24th out of 26 qualifying shooting guards. The data can be found on the ESPN website here.
As we do with all of our spreadsheets, we go through our process of defining inputs, defining the output we are after, and then building the logic that gets us from inputs to outputs.
Inputs
1) The average points per shot for NBA shooting guards so far this season
2) The scores of all the Lakers games so far.
2) The number of shots Kobe Bryant took, as well as the points scored
Output
We recalculate how many points the Lakers would have had in the game if an average shooting guard took Kobe Bryant’s shots. Then we see how the Lakers would have done in that revised game.
Process
First we highlight the ESPN page and paste it into our spreadsheet and calculate the average shooting guard points per shot – 1.29:
Then we enter in each of the Lakers game scores, how many shots Kobe Bryant took, and how many points he scored:
We then recalculate how many points the Lakers would have scored if they had an average shooting guard, and then see if they would have won or lost the game. We take the 1.29 average and multiply it by Kobe’s shots, add it to the Lakers score and subtract Kobe’s actual points. The formulas for H35 and I35 are found in cells H32 and I32:
The Lakers would improve from 1-7 to 3-6! Not great, but still better…
Links to the spreadsheet can be found here: