I just got back from working the MVC (Missouri Valley Conference) basketball tournament. (Btw, for you Ime idolaters out there who love success stories, Adam Emmenecker who was a walk-on is a hell of a great point guard and won MVP of the tournament... take note readers of KnickFan's excellent diary below.)

Watching these college kids play their hearts out for four straight days, playing heavy minutes, and beating each other up got me thinking. We are always, always, always complaining that our team doesn't drive to the basket enough. Barkley has been quoted so often about "dying by the shot" it's becoming cliche. I've seen Dave (rightly!) pull together stats showing our trend of jump shooting instead of driving and it regularly features in the "things to look for." Brandon Roy is constantly being praised for his ability to "get to the rim."

We love it when they take it to the basket.

Well, surely players aren't deaf to this. So why don't they drive more? The anwer is so simple--so simple and easy--that I think it escapes our notice more often than not. Driving to the basket often hurts!

I saw that first-hand from press row at the MVC tourney. Seeing guys collide from a few feet away is a lot different from seeing them collide on even a 74" plasma TV in high definition. I saw a guy chip his tooth. I saw a guy throw up after a blow to the stomach (and some poor guy took a Joel-like blow to the groin and had to be taken out). Another guy charged the basket, hit a defender in the mouth with his elbow/upper arm, ensuring that the defender is going to have surgery on his upper jaw bone and the guy driving had a large chunk taken out of his arm and had to be bandaged up to return.

So take this as the hypothesis: players tend to resist driving to the basket because it hurts.

Now, let's consider the practical ramifications of this:

1. Durability. Does driving to the basket result in durability concerns? Just like using up an NFL RB in "three yards and cloud of dust," continually asking, say, Brandon Roy to drive to the basket constantly results in a corresponding incureased injury risk (we can assume). This is data we might reasonably tease out. Can we run stats showing missed layup/dunk attempts (the majority of these, we can assume, were contested and involved contact; shooting fouls drawn (even better if we can get it on layup/dunk attempts but I'm not aware those stats are kept); and charges committed (certainly, this hurts). Pulling these together we could probably come up with a "harm per minute" stat or something that can be cross-referenced against games missed or perhaps even length of career. I presume that behavior probably changes with tenure, age, and prior injuries, which we might also be able to track.
2. Standard Operating Procedure. We generally assume that NBA players can "turn it on" when they want to and "get to the rim." I think this points to a subconscious acceptance of durability concerns that I tried to list out above. Players know that there is an injury risk on every drive to the bucket and behave accordingly to mitigate that risk. Well, what does that mean in terms of game play? If one doesn't constantly practice driving to the hoop (that is, attempting to "get to the rim" in a game), does one lose effectiveness in being able to do it? (I remember just knowing Darius Miles was going to get a charging call on offense sometimes pre-injury.) Do we find players who don't constantly drive ending up in a "use it or lose it" problem? This, I think, would be difficult to identify statistically. But here's my best try at it. I think one might be able to show effectiveness in being able to drive in comparing made layups/dunks against misses (and adjusting for fouls, which I think should be regarded as a "made" layup/dunk for these purposes). I speculate that players who constantly drive will have higher rates of effectiveness than those that do not. Similarly, I suppose that players with high volatility in attempts-per-minute in different games are likely to be "out-of-practice" and will exhibit lower overall efficiency in this sense.
3. Point Guard Gravity. We all like to talk about point guards and wish we had a fast-breaking team. Everyone wants a fast-breaking team. I theorize that there are point guards who, because they run, end up forcing the rest of their teammates into driving situations just as if they exert gravitational forces on the game and draw players in their wake. Ah... but here's the rub! (Thank you, Hamlet) I don't think we mean fast-break points when we talk about "getting to the rim." What we mean is, in a half-court set, someone who's going to do a wicked cross-over, dare the contact, and flat-out jump over someone on their way to a basket. So the point-guard gravity I want to try and measure for are those point guards who operate in the half-court and make leading passes that create the layups/dunks. Oddly, the first guy I think of--because I'm old-school Blazer fan--is Sabonis. Dude made passes to cutting players all the time. So I wonder if we can measure for layup/dunk attempts that were assisted (the measurement for that special kind of gravity) versus unassisted (indicating a thirst for contact that the NBA will probably beat out of a player over time). If we believe in rim attempts, than we want those players who bring that sort of gravity with them.
4. Wins. Finally, the only reason to go through with this, is to test the Barkley axiom: "you don't live by the jump shot, you die by the jump shot." If that's true, we should see teams expressing high levels of these sorts of statistics at the top of the standings. More importantly, we should notice them being at the top and staying there! If there truly are durability concerns, then we might expect to see teams "getting to the rim" and rising in the standings, only to later fall as those statistics fall off. Or perhaps, as the games intensify (that is, become more important), we'll see these statistics suddenly shoot up. Perhaps in the playoffs (or big rivalry games) players are more willing to take the risk of contact.

In the end, I puzzle over how smart it is to ask our players to constantly drive to the basket. I don't think we're masochists--we don't want them to hurt and suffer. But I think we don't fully appreciate how hard it is or what the risk is to the player to do this constantly. Part of the art of coaching, I think, must include an understanding of when it is appropriate and desirable to take on that extra risk to get those extra wins and when to allow your team to back off. Furthermore, I think it's equally important for teams to develop offenses that create points (and wins!) from plays that specifically don't look for contact with the defense. This is the only sensible way to preserve your lineup.

I'm happy to hear debate on this. I know there is some feeling out there because I remember people hoping Roy wouldn't play or would press to hard with his ankle (recently) and his heel (very early in the season). I'd love to see if we could statistically quantify this.