Archive for the 'Layups' Category

Some of our readers who are also college football fans will be familar with Wes Colley's system for ranking teams, which is one of the best unbiased methods out there and is actually included in the BCS rankings (although I'm not sure if that boosts the method's credibility or not). Anyway, our friend Ryan Parker of the up-and-coming stats site BasketballGeek.com has applied Colley's methodology to NBA teams' 3-point shooting numbers. The results? The Spurs are good at making the trey; the Hawks do a nice job of defending against it.

Another Sporcle quiz (I love that site!)... Can you name the NBA's top 25 all-time rebounders in 7 minutes?

From Sporcle, here's a fun quiz that's right up our alley here at Basketball-Reference... Can you name all of the NBA's 50 Greatest Players in 8 minutes?

Despite their historic start, ESPN.com statistical analyst John Hollinger ranks the Boston Celtics as the 2nd-best team in the league, behind the Cleveland Cavaliers. Why? Hollinger explains that the Cavs have actually had the better average margin of victory, and that Boston's unbeaten record in games decided by 5 points or less makes them ripe for some regression to the mean.

ESPN.com's John Hollinger has a fun piece on Shaquille O'Neal's "pursuit" of 5,000 missed free throws, since the Big Aristotle needs just 8 charity-stripe bricks to reach the milestone. Of course, there is good news for Shaq: even if (when) he does pull off the feat, he'll still trail Wilt Chamberlain's all-time record by 805 misses.

This is one of my favorite articles ever... Written by Sports Illustrated's Chris Ballard, it ran in SI's annual NBA Preview issue and was one of APBRmetrics' first high-profile national media appearances. Read and learn about the origins of statistical analysis in hoops.

Kevin Pelton of Basketball Prospectus has a good read here about the recent rash of early-season coaching changes. Among other things, he looks at past seasons to determine whether firings are contagious (one team sees another team make a change, so they're more willing to pull the trigger themselves), which types of teams benefit most from a change, and when the best time for a change is.

In case you didn't know about his site, Aaron Barzilai is doing great work over at Basketball-Value.com, which tracks in-season adjusted plus-minus scores for every player in the league. Yesterday, Aaron debuted a new ranking which incorporates not only this season's data, but also last year's regular-season and playoff numbers. The result? Chris Paul is really, really good. Which, if you've been reading this blog, you kind of knew already... but it's still cool to get confirmation.

This is a great piece by Harlan Schreiber of HoopsAnalyst, regarding Jerry Sloan's remarkable tenure as head coach of the Utah Jazz. This past week, Sloan celebrated his 20th anniversary in Utah, and as you can imagine he's used a wide variety of strategies (defense-oriented, offense-oriented, slow pace, moderate pace, etc.) during that time. Which brought him the most success, though?

Here is an article from the New York Times Magazine this past May, in which Freakonomics authors Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt discuss Mike Zarren and the use of advanced statistics in the Celtics' front office. Just a little more than a month later, Boston won its first NBA championship since 1986... Coincidence? I think not!