Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion Read Online Free PDF Page A

Oliver called the four factors of basketball success: effective field goal percentage, turnover percentage, offensive rebounding percentage, and free throw rate, as well as adjusting player and team analyses for possession-based game tempo, and assigning varying fractional credit for team wins and losses to individual players.
                     Oliver also was a pioneer in bringing basketball analysis to the digital world, first as a leader on the Usenet group rec.sport.basketball in the text-heavy Internet era of the mid-1990s, and then on the APBR analysis group on Yahoo! groups in the early 2000s. Oliver posted the initial message in that forum, which saw a total of twenty-seven posts that February, and the first question he talked about exploring was whether “Hack-a-Shaq,” the strategy to intentionally foul poor free throwshooters, actually worked. (Fourteen years later, this discussion became a frenzy during the Western Conference semifinal series between the Los Angeles Clippers and Houston Rockets, with both teams using the strategy so much that a rule change was discussed, but not enacted, in the summer of 2015.)
                     Oliver subsequently served front-office roles with the Seattle SuperSonics (where he was the first full-time NBA analytics hire), the Denver Nuggets and, after a stint as director of production analytics at ESPN, the Sacramento Kings.
            •     John Hollinger is another of the APBRmetricians who moved on to high-profile roles. After first founding a basketball writing site called AlleyOop.com in 1996, Hollinger spent three years working at The Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Oregon. In 2002, he was hired by SI.com and also started publishing Pro Basketball Prospectus, which later changed its name to Pro Basketball Forecast. In the mid-2000s, Hollinger started writing for ESPN.com , eventually moving all of his annual print publication work to ESPN’s Insider premium online product.
                     He is the creator of the player efficiency rating (PER) statistical metric that attempts to quantify everything a basketball player does in one composite number, and calibrates it against the rest of the league every season. It’s considered to include an incomplete valuation of a player’s defensive contributions, but remains one of the most widely known tools, thanks to Hollinger’s writing platforms and subsequent success. In late 2012, Hollinger was hired by the Memphis Grizzlies to be their vice president of basketball operations.
            •     Roland Beech launched the impactful website 82Games.com during the 2002–03 NBA season, making advanced NBA stats easily available and consumable for the public. In 2009, Beech was hired by the Dallas Mavericks as their director of basketball analytics, with a pioneering role as part of the team’s coaching staff, not the front office. Beech traveled with the team on the road, sat behind the bench during games, and liaised with cerebral and stats-friendly head coach RickCarlisle. Beech played a crucial role in the 2011 NBA Finals, where his lineup analysis allowed Carlisle and his staff to make crucial adjustments against the Miami Heat that helped the Mavericks win the title. In August 2015, Beech moved to the Sacramento Kings to lead their analytics department, replacing Oliver, who was pushed out in the aftermath of a team management shakeup.
    As renowned as they were (and some still are), these men were not the only ones playing around with advanced basketball statistics in the early 2000s. Another prominent member of the APBR community during that formative era was Kevin Pelton, who as of August 2015 was an NBA writer for ESPN Insider. He also was the lead writer on ESPN.com ’s February 2015 ranking of all thirty NBA teams in terms of their analytics commitment and implementation.
    Pelton traces his own statistical leanings back to his childhood reading of