Inside the box score: Analyzing five-man rotations (part I)

IU coach Tom Crean has used 186 five-man rotations this season. Of those, 46 have spent at least three minutes on the court together, and nine have been on the court for at least ten minutes.

The important part, then, is to find out which lineups are working, which players are playing in the most effective lineups, and which players and lineups are struggling.

Easier said than done. If there was some magic formula, basketball coaches across the globe would have latched onto it already. However, there are several imperfect ways to analyze five-man rotations. And that's what I tried to do.

I started by using the +/- stat. The main criticism for the popular statistic at an individual level is that it doesn't account for the other four players on the court. But the +/- stat for a five-man rotation helps in that area, since it accounts for everyone (although still not perfect...no statistic is).

Let's dive in with some numbers. And then some brief analysis.

Crean has used 23 lineups that have seen more than five minutes of court time together. For the best and worst lineups on pure +/- standpoint, I will only consider those top 23 rotations for now (23 rotations is 12 percent of the total rotations used, but accounts for 52.1 percent of court time).

The top 10

The bottom 10

(In reverse order...i.e. the worst rotation +/- is last on the list - Creek-Hulls-Jones-Pritchard-Rivers at -3. There was some confusion when I posted a similar statistic earlier in the season.)

Of course, when there's 8-9 key players used on a roster, there will be plenty of overlap in lineups between lists.

Two stats that jump out:

First, one player - Verdell Jones - appeared significantly more in the bottom 10 than in the top 10.

Consider, Jones is in all 10 of the least effective rotations on a +/- standpoint. He is in six of the most effective lineups. All other players in the list appear approximately the same amount of times (within two) on both lists. No player besides Jones appears in the bottom 10 more than 7 times.

So, why? A quick observation: of those bottom 10 lineups, Jones is most likely the preferred point guard in four of them. He is the preferred point guard in only two of the top 10 lineups.

Second, five of the bottom 10 lineups are "small" lineups that only feature one big man (Watford, Elston, Capobianco or Pritchard). Only one "small" lineup (Creek-Jones-Oladipo-Pritchard-Rivers) cracked the top 10.

So even if the frontcourt is struggling statistically, it may be advantageous to stick with a bigger lineup (one qualification on that: size worked fairly well in IU's nine wins against inferior opponents, so the numbers may favor height at this point in the season.)

So there's a start. I've decided I want to do these posts in bits instead of one massive comprehensive post - maybe 3-4 blog posts throughout the rest of the week. I will get to all 186 lineups and begin piecing together trends.

There's a few things I will work through, and I've recruited my brother (a better statistician than myself) to work with the numbers as well to see what he comes up with.

Another reason I've decided to do it in bits is I want to know what you want to know. Now that I have the numbers, it's just piecing them together and finding specific trends.

And it won't all be +/-. That's just a foundation. And it doesn't have to be the entire season. One of the posts for sure will focus on IU's games against Ken Pomeroy's top 100 (i.e. all five losses) vs. games outside KenPom top 100 (i.e. all nine wins).