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

Rick Barry’s Pro Basketball Bible, and has spent much of his writing career trying to make advanced statistics more accessible to mainstream readership. At one point he was a moderator of the APBR forum, he wrote for 82Games.com , and he worked as a consultant for the Indiana Pacers. He also created the WARP (wins above replacement player) quantitative model.
    Before all of that, though, he was just trying to find some people like him who wanted to talk about basketball in new, mathematical ways.
    “I went looking [around] and found Dean’s stuff on the Internet—obviously, far and away the most advanced and most prominent work at that point—and then I think sometime around 2001, [I] stumbled into the APBR analysis discussion group,” Pelton said of his initiation into the world of advanced basketball thinking. “At that point, [that] is where Dean was posting. Hollinger, I think, showed up at some point that year, in 2001–02, because that’s when he startedback writing about the NBA after he was at The Oregonian. Roland Beech was in the next couple of years, Justin Kubatko (founder of Basketball-Reference.com ), people like that. That’s sort of when the stuff started to take its modern shape around that point.
    “That was the only place where you could have these kinds of discussions, with people who were on the same page, that had the same level of interest. Now that’s pretty easy on Twitter to find that kind of community because there’s enough people, but back then, it really was a small group. A lot of it was kinda trying to figure stuff out as you went. Around that time is when you had the first version of adjusted plus-minus from Wayne Winston and Jeff Sagarin. And what does this mean? Does this actually tell us something useful? There was no data or background at that point. We just had to use our intuition and discuss it amongst several of us and figure it out as we went.”
    Digging through the old posts on the Yahoo! ABPR group, it’s striking how many concepts being discussed back in 2001 are topics that are still being explored today. Just in Oliver’s posts alone, he broaches the concepts of individual player defensive value, defense effects on shooting percentages, why the Charlotte Hornets tended to play better without star forward Derrick Coleman, how to translate college statistics to the pros, and whether teams can actually win championships based on specific personnel strategies—in this case, a “twin towers”approach with two centers.
    Today, thanks to modern technology and a couple of decades of thinking about these types of questions, we’re moving closer to legitimate answers. In 2001, though, things really boiled down to a handful of really smart people bouncing numbers and ideas and theories off each other; given the much more limited data available at the time, there was no real way to test accuracy. In one of Oliver’s posts, he wrote about tracking a specific game for defensive stats analysis purposes, and “hoping TNT doesn’t cut away” from the game so he wouldn’t loseany of his data.
    So, whenever a new stat or approach came along, there was significant exploration—and disagreement—about its meaning, especially when it came to outlier cases.
    “One of the memorable discussions that I’ve talked about in the past was the Timberwolves PR crew—the person who does their game notes was a friend of mine—they started including Kevin Garnett’s net plus-minus in their game notes,” Pelton said. “This was around his MVP season, and it was preposterous. It was like a plus-20 differential when he was on the court versus off the court. And people were like ‘No, this is preposterous. There’s no way one player can be that valuable,’ so it was kind of difficult to wrap your mind around that at the time because there was no context for it. There was no history to compare it to. Obviously, there is now, and [it] quickly became [available] when Roland Beech