Archive for the 'Non-Basketball' Category

Sporcle! And yes, I know, there are some non-basketballers on there, too. But feel free to focus just on NBA Live and NCAA Basketball if you're a stickler.

(By the way, was anyone else disappointed that they didn't trace NBA Live's lineage back through the original Lakers vs. Celtics game? Because around these parts, we consider it all to be part of one series...)

This isn't specifically basketball-related, though he did encounter his share of hoops memorabilia: Bill Russell's signed Converse All-Stars, a replica of Larry Bird's Wooden Award, this awesome collection of throwbacks, a copy of Dr. J. vs. Larry Bird in: One on One, old-school card sets like this and this, a 1969 Minnesota Pipers Schedule featuring Connie "The Hawk" Hawkins, a Robert Parish RC Cola can, and... a game-worn Keith Closs Clippers jersey. (Which one of these doesn't belong?) It was all part of ESPN's Bill Simmons' trip to the National Sports Collectors Convention in Cleveland, where he encountered what would be (for me) a bankruptcy-inducing amount of awesome items from years gone by. He wrote about the experience here, but the best part is this monstrous photo gallery chronicling all the cool stuff he saw during his visit. Is it just me, or is there something about old sports memorabilia that can turn even the most level-headed consumer into a crazed spendaholic?

John Brattain didn't write about basketball. Rather, baseball was his specialty, and few people brought as sharp a wit to the blogosphere as he did in his analysis of the American Pastime.

But now comes the terrible news that John passed away this week, at the age of 44.

As someone who recently experienced a loss on this level, I know that there are few words I can type to make things better for John's wife and children. Besides, plenty of writers better than me have written fine appreciations of John's life and his work.

So from all of us at Sports Reference, I simply wanted to offer our heartfelt condolences and prayers to his family during this time of grief. I hope his wife and daughters know that many people all over the world are thinking of and praying for them right now, and I hope knowing that gives them some small measure of comfort (just as it did for me several months ago).

R.I.P. John. He will be missed.

This is a basketball blog, as I'm sure you're aware of by now, but the plain truth is that much of the statistical analysis we do here is either derived from, inspired by, or at least tangentially connected to the pioneering work done in baseball's Sabermetrics, the older, more well-known sister field of APBRmetrics.

And for many of us, the epochal moment of our sabermetric lifetime came when Michael Lewis wrote a little book called Moneyball way back in 2003. The concepts were old hat to Bill James devotees, but never before had they been presented in such a mainstream way, with such a compelling test case as Billy Beane's Oakland A's. For all intents and purposes, statistical analysis in sports hit the big-time with the publishing of Moneyball.

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