Krossover Game Film Analysis, a game changer for Aussie Hoops

Thanks to my good mate Tony Casella (who also coaches with me at the Sturt Sabres) I have recently stumbled on a game changer for Aussie basketball. This product is for all the coaches and athletes dedicated to improvement and high performance. That game changer is Krossover. I recently used Krossover to breakdown gametape of our South Australian U20 men's team National Championship winning tournament.

This is all going to sound like massive plug. I have no commercial benefit (in fact nothing I do with this site is for commercial benefit) to plugging this product whatsoever. I am incredibly excited by what it is going to do for me and my teams and therefore potentially other coaches at all levels in Australia, right up to W\NBL. One goal of www.highperformancehoopsnetwork.com is to develop our sport by sharing information to support the development of other players, teams and coaches. As such, I had to blog on this product - having said that Ken (rep at Krossover) you need to give me discount for this PLEASE!!! haha

But seriously, the quality of the product, the relative low cost compared to the hours and hours of my own time I put into manually cutting means I simply cannot go without this product. There are so many cool and rich features which will help me improve my players, my coaching and efficiently help me get video highlights and information to college coaches. It will also provide our team's KPIs more comprehensively than we have access to now. The advanced stats features are just brilliant and to be able to link that to raw footage is powerful to show players how they are doing. I'll come back to the product features.

Been able to watch and breakdown, in detail, the U20 Men and their flow, floppy loop sets I am going to update some of my own playbook for my U18 South Australia team too. I aim to show the U18 Men some of the U20 sets so they can see this very successful team running the same, or similar, stuff.

The fact they cut ALL the tape up for me is going to be massive. After spending 30-40 hours per nationals cutting tape for the www.highperformancehoopsnetwork.com platform I have decided - NO MORE. Why would I when I can have it all outsourced for a much better final product? And now I can focus on what I do best which is coaching, developing, identifying and mentoring elite South Australian kids that I have coached. It will also free up more of my and my team's time to produce better information on kids and keep building relationships with all our college coach friends out there.

Unfortunately for one of the games the 20s men wore their alternate uniforms and a few incorrect player numbers were provided by me at the time the film was uploaded, so the completed tags by Krossover were not correct. Krossover noted this and notified me via email that players were incorrectly numbered. I was able to go and check the incorrect tags and quickly update them.

Once correctly, tagged I was able to click the "A Season To Remember" button and within minutes I was sent these highlights for all the guys in the U20s team:

In addition to making highlights for our Featured Athletes we are able to quickly setup queries on tags to see specific footage on athletes. The tags are numerous so you can see things like half court sets, steals, rebounds, dunks, missed shots, made shots, assists and numerous other items.

Pictured: query showing footage of all rebounds by featured athlete Ben Carter vs Western Australia.

You can then use these queries to add the footage returned from the query to a "reel".

Video Size- Video. Here is an example of a reel which I have shared on a few dunks by some of the 20s men during the tournament:

Stats were also provided on all the games and some of the advanced analytics took my breath away.

Pictured: A range of advanced team analytics on 1 table. Shows offensive and defensive rebounding rates, number of possessions in the game, effective field goal %, turnover %, free throw rates per possession etc.

Four factors of basketball success:

How do basketball teams win games? While searching for an answer to that question, Dean Oliver identified what he called the "Four Factors of Basketball Success":

Shooting (40%)Turnovers (25%)Rebounding (20%)Free Throws (15%)

The number in parentheses is the approximate weight Mr. Oliver assigned each factor. Shooting is the most important factor, followed by turnovers, rebounding, and free throws.[Editor's note: I agree with the order, but disagree with the weightings.] These factors can be applied to both a team's offense and defense, which in a sense gives us eight factors. Let's take a closer look at how these factors are measured, using the 2004-05 Phoenix Suns as an example.

Shooting

The shooting factor is measured using Effective Field Goal Percentage (eFG%). The formula for both offense and defense is (FG + 0.5 * 3P) / FGA. For the Suns offense this is (3351 + 0.5 * 796) / 7018 = .534, and for the defense it is (3328 + 0.5 * 494) / 7485 = .478.

Turnovers

The turnover factor is measured using Turnover Percentage (TOV%). The formula for both offense and defense is TOV / (FGA + 0.44 * FTA + TOV). On offense, the Suns turnover percentage was 1125 / (7018 + 0.44 * 2080 + 1125) = .124, while on defense it was 1131 / (7485 + 0.44 * 1775 + 1131) = .120.

Rebounding

The rebounding factor is measured using Offensive and Defensive Rebound Percentage (ORB% and DRB%, respectively). The formula for offense is ORB / (ORB + Opp DRB), while the formula for defense is DRB / (Opp ORB + DRB). In 2004-05, the Suns offensive rebound percentage was 967 / (967 + 2550) = .275, and their defensive rebound percentage was 2652 / (1233 + 2652) = .683.

Free Throws

The free throw factor is a measure of both how often a team gets to the line and how often they make them. The formula for both offense and defense is FT / FGA. The Suns free throw rate on offense was 1556 / 7018 = .222, and on defense it was 1320 / 7485 = .176.

Reference: http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/factors.html

Pictured: Stats showing the total count, number of points, FG%, Turnover % on each type of play.

There is another additional product avalable called insights. This product provides much more graphical information, consolidated on all games.

Pictured: Insights on Isaac White's shooting. Note the shooting %age spike in the 20 feet region in the graph above, showing that 3s or key principal tends to work for Isaac. The bottom left shows Isaac's growing ability and hard work at making contested shots as he becomes a guy that will be unguardable at the Pac-12 level. He found most of his shots off the bounce and it could be suggested that he can do a bit of work out of playing out of off ball screens.

This is just a very basic rundown of Krossover. I personally have found the use of video analysis and highlight clipping as a motivational for the great teams I have worked with. It gives the guys an appreciation of the culture and playing style for that particular team and gets everyone focussed on replicating the perfect play segments of play time and time again. I always try and personalise it to the team. Most of these are hidden but I thought I'd include brief one from my U18 State team last year (not made using Krossover but the next one will be) on their decision making and execution that I sent out to the team, with some great concepts as the voice over: