LAS VEGAS — Diving for loose balls, getting a hand in passing lanes for a deflection, being close enough to contest a shot, or sacrificing the body and taking a charge.
For years, they’ve been called intangibles.
The NBA is about to try to make them tangible.
All 67 games in the NBA summer league at Las Vegas will have so-called ‘‘hustle stats’’ officially tracked, a nod to the league’s evolving reliance on analytics and all the things besides scoring that help decide the outcome of games. A trained crew will chart 2-pointers contested, 3-pointers contested, deflections, loose balls recovered and charges taken.
Those numbers will all go into a formula to determine which players hustled most in any given game.
‘‘I think we’re all just scratching the surface,’’ said Kiki Vandeweghe, the NBA’s senior vice president for basketball operations. ‘‘We don’t know where the analytics is going to take us. The more data you have, the longer we do this, the better idea we’ll have of the direction. It’s really interesting because a lot of the basketball decisions are data-driven. The analytics are now affecting the way the game is played.’’
Much like referees using headsets to talk with one another — and in some cases, the NBA’s office in Secaucus, N.J. — in games this summer, the hustle-stat-tracking project is in its infancy and likely wouldn’t be added to the regular-season repertoire until at least the 2016-17 season.
But while teams use summer league to find a hidden gem or two, the league itself uses it as a laboratory of sorts to see how the game can get better for all involved.
Hence, the tinkering with refs and stats.
‘‘You’ve got to look at everything,’’ said Joe Borgia, the NBA’s senior vice president for replay and referee operations. ‘‘We’re always trying to look at things that possibly could help us.’’
Teams have been charting hustle numbers for years. Many will want a certain number of deflections per game, for example. But for the most part, fans haven’t been able to have access to that info.
Thumbnail photo via Bob DeChiara/USA TODAY Sports Images
