DePaul women’s basketball head coach Doug Bruno sat at his desk scattered with materials and examined the stat-sheets of DePaul’s next opponent, starting with the basics. 

One afternoon, he noted that one of the team’s players scores a lot of points but only has a small number of assists. To Bruno, this means that she has the tendency of not sharing the ball.

For the coach in his 28th year as DePaul’s head coach, this is only the beginning.

When it comes to preparing, Bruno spends the next two hours to go beyond simple observations. Bruno crunches a variety of basketball statistics to help with player evaluation, including using a system that produces how efficient a player is overall.

Amazingly, Bruno still does this by hand.

“I realize that we can program, that we can use the computer to spit out the numbers,” Bruno said. “However, by doing the numbers longhand, I can understand the specifics about every player.”

Bruno’s preparation heavily involves the use of advanced analytics, in which detailed numbers can help coaches and players further understand the game of basketball. Advanced analytics have revolutionized the way basketball has been thought of in the last decade, even now becoming a mainstream focus due to the movie “Moneyball.”

However, studying the numbers is something Bruno says he has been quietly doing since the 1980s.

“I tried to look at the stat-sheet and not just look at it, but I tried to figure out what it meant for each player,” Bruno said. “After a game, there’s a line. Players, when they don’t know what they’re doing, often run and look at how many points they scored. There’s so much more to it than that.”

Bruno emphasized that much of playing basketball is without the actual basketball. The players who don’t have the ball can be just as effective as those who do. He uses the numbers to calculate areas such as offensive rebound percentage, the amount of offensive rebounds a player gets when on the floor.

Bruno often analyzes the numbers by himself. He delegates scouting reports to his staff, but those rely upon more traditional basketball methods like noticing what type of plays are run. Digging into the numbers, Bruno uses formulas to help him evaluate.

One of those formulas is the system Tendex. Tendex, which was invented by Dave Heeran in the 1960s, gives evaluators a solid rating on a player’s performance based on adding, subtracting and then dividing a plethora of stats. The exact formula is adding together points made, total rebounds, assists, blocks, steals and then subtracting turnovers, missed field goals and free throws and then divided by minutes played. It’s a lengthy process that takes time.

To evaluate offense, Bruno says it takes him about two hours to crunch the numbers and study them. Defense, on the other hand, takes him as many as three or five. Studying defense takes longer, he says, because there’s a lot more ways to examine what makes an effective defensive player.

“You can sign and delegate that, but you know what?” Bruno asked. “When you watch it yourself, you know your team better.”

Other coaches have started to play the numbers game as well. In men’s basketball, Brad Stevens and Jim Larranaga are two coaches who pride themselves into being number-based guys. The NBA’s landscape has shifted to where management positions often use analytics when constructing a team.

Synergy Sports, a technology company that specializes in sports technology, makes preparation for coaches easier. Synergy has cameras that track player movement and can then produce what tendencies players have, as well as cutting specific plays into clips. Many schools, DePaul included, use the program.

“I don’t want to stop what I’ve always done because of Synergy,” Bruno said. “I still want to watch things from front to back … I think what Synergy has done is make coaches that were formerly kind of lazy, now they can get from Synergy what some of us were doing with a lot of effort. “

So has the emergence of all these numbers and technologies overcrowded the game of basketball?

“I think the game has gotten better,” Bruno said. “I think there’s more guard play. There’s better guard play. There’s more comprehension from player one to five.”

It’s all about finding the balance, Bruno said. Bruno rarely shares the numbers with his players. Bruno records and then watches each practice twice, but when he’s on the practice court at McGrath-Phillips Arena, players don’t hear about what percentage they make from inside the arc or out.

“I want my players playing freely,” Bruno said. “You can’t be sitting there thinking about numbers when playing basketball. There’s certain times in a year when a player is trending poorly, and if I’m trying to get my point across, I’ll share it with them. But I try to keep it out of their heads.

“When coaching with guts, the guts is created by knowledge that is instinctive,” Bruno added. “A coach has got to be instinctive, but your instincts are developed through preparation.”