Archive for the 'Layups' Category

I confess that I've been accidentally overlooking something important over the past month and a half -- I haven't linked to Roland Beech's ongoing player development study over at 82games yet. And that was wrong, because it's very informative stuff. Luckily, you can catch up on the entire series at the link above, and he's only a little bit more than halfway finished with it, so there's a lot more cool data coming up (including a piece on coaches and player development).

Here at BBR, we love the basketball-themed quizzes they have at Sporcle, so it should come as no surprise that we were digging this one -- can you name the schools with the most NCAA Tournament appearances?

TrueHoop's Henry Abbott was recently watching a Blazer game -- I know, so what else is new? -- and noticed that Rudy Fernandez has a special tendency to score in the final seconds of quarters, so he e-mailed NBA bettor extraordinaire Bob Voulgaris (who tracks an incredible amount of data about every game in a database) and asked him which players do the best in the closing sequences of a quarter. And this is what he came back with... It's a list of the guys who have scored the most in the final 24 seconds of any quarter this season.

In his latest post, Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus evaluates the state of statistical analysis in basketball today -- where we've come from, where we are, and where we're headed.

The other day, ESPN.com's John Hollinger rolled out a method for converting his famous Player Efficiency Rating to a "wins over replacement"-type stat. Now Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus, who developed a similar metric (WARP), takes a look at the two methods side by side. Spoiler: mostly they agree (LeBron James owns everyone), but there are some subtle differences in the replacement level and the way defense is incorporated.

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.

SLAM Online has a great interview with 82games.com head honcho Roland Beech about the past, present, and future of statistical analysis in basketball. And I can say I don't find a single thing to disagree with in Roland's responses.

Courtesy of Ryan Schwan over at Hornets247.com, here's an interesting concept: how do we rank the best "penetrators", the best players in basketball when it comes to both creating their own shot and making those shots? To answer the question, Ryan uses FG% and 82games' % assisted stat. And the result? People always bring up the "Holy Trinity" of Kobe, LeBron, and D-Wade as the guys you'd most like to have handling the ball in a must-score situation, but perhaps we should think about stud PGs like Chris Paul, Steve Nash, and Jameer Nelson in the same way...

In honor of March Madness kicking off this week, Sporcle's latest quiz asks you to dig deep into your memory banks and name all of the Naismith College Players of the Year... In an added bonus, this quiz also serves as a good reminder that college stardom is hardly a guarantee of success in the NBA.

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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