Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

I have written a collection of pieces about basketball analytics. There is a good chance that you have no idea what that means. I am here to inform you and to help you out. As you start to dive into my pieces, you should start with my expository essay on the topic. I go through and explain the birth of analytics and how they have affected the way that many people look at the game. Technically, analytics is the process of using numbers to better our understanding of the game, and what leads you to success. I hope this becomes clear as you start to read my pieces and realize the use of these complicated statistics.

Let me walk you through my pieces, one by one. The topic of all of these pieces is clearly basketball analytics, but the golden thread is the tension between the older views on analytics and how they often come into conflict. This is a very interest phenomenon that happens with every revolutionary idea. I first tried to capture this with haiku’s. My first Haiku is about how nobody was able to break out of the mold of Michael Jordan and Kobe. There were many important people, and the pace and space revolutionized how people run plays. Next I took Charles Barkley’s famous rant about analytics (which is linked into my piece) and responded to it with a rant of my own. This piece is fairly self explanatory. The third piece that I wrote is the character of analytics, and its relationship with intuition. This relationship, characterizes how analytics is viewed by the world. My final piece is a drawing of a basketball court. On one half, is the legendary 96-7 Bulls team that ran very traditional sets. On the other side is the modern Bulls team, who uses analytics to determine how to play defense and who should take which shots. I put those statistics that govern each move on the page. It highlights the tension and the contrast between teams.

My process for this forced me to think a lot about how analytics relates to the media. I followed a lot of writers on twitter, ESPN, Grantland and Fivethirtyeight who talk a lot about the relationship with analytics. Hopefully I was able to convey my ideas. Thanks for reading.

Benedict Brady

Expository Essay

Basketball Analytics

Since the 1950’s, Basketball has revolved around three statistics: points, rebounds and assists. This is the basis for the beloved triple-double, one of the most highly acclaimed achievements in basketball. In 1973-74, the NBA started to track steals, to measure how often a player was able to steal the ball from the person he was guarding. It also added blocks, which was a measure of the number of shots blocked by a specific player. These statistics added a new dimension to measuring the strength of players. During the 1978-79 season, the NBA announced an additional tool for measuring player strength, turnovers (Wikipedia). These six statistics became the staple of basketball knowledge. The are the stat lines in the newspaper, and the way that many measured who should win the MVP at the end of the season. But, as time went on, many started to realize that these did not tell the whole story. Players such as Tim Duncan or Scottie Pippen seemed to be contributing more to their team than these statistics accounted for. These players dominated defensively by forcing poor shots, without racking up steals and blocks. They were excellent at setting screens and moving off ball on offense. It was becoming clear that the world of Basketball needed a new measure of success.

Analytics are defined as the systematic computational analysis of data or statistics. In terms of basketball, this is the process of crunching play by play data from a basketball to give a more comprehensive view of which players contribute to a team’s victory. The main idea behind basketball analytics in specific is the idea that players skill on a per possession basis is much more useful than a player’s skill per game in terms of determining his merit going forward. Consider Nikola Mirotic, a Power Forward for the Chicago Bulls. He scores 10.2 points per game. At an early look, he seems to be an average auxiliary scorer on a decent team. But look a little deeper at his advanced stats. He only plays 20.2 minutes per game. A more flattering and useful statistic says that he scores 26.1 points per 100 possessions (http://www.basketball-reference.com). With the development of these more encompassing statistics, NBA General Managers have an easier time comparing the relative strengths of players, and fans can better understand the skill level of their players.

Another variable that classical statistics fail to reconcile are the impact of the strength of teammates and opponents on the performance of the player. Andrew Wiggins can score 16.9 points per game on the Minnesota Timberwolves, but they are the worst team in the NBA. Now think about Kawhi Leonard, the starting small forward for the San Antonio Spurs. He scores 16.5 points per game. Traditional statistics would tell us that these players are of approximately equal value. This is not true though. Almost everyone would agree that Leonard is a top ten player in the NBA, and that Wiggins has barely developed into a top 50 player (http://www.basketball-reference.com). These two are drastically different because of the workload that their team makes them carry. This is the motivation for the creation of the Real Plus Minus statistic (RPM). RPM is important because it measures the difference when the player is on and off the court, and uses that to attempt to extract the value of the player (ESPN). The also measure field goal percentage and true shooting percentage to decide whether or not a player is efficient as opposed to that player scoring with a high volume. Basketball analytics have provided a more accurate measure of players strength.

The final frontier is defense. Defense is something that is almost entirely qualitatively measured and it is very hard to determine the value of a player’s defensive skills. While RPM does a decent job, the field is still yet to be developed fully. The primary researcher on this topic is Kirk Goldsberry, a writer that has started to do simulations of defense in order to generate defensive shot charts. This allows him to measure how players shoot against a specific defender. Because of this, player’s skills on defense can be measured in a much better way (Goldsberry).

In conclusion, basketball analytics ave progressed to the point where we, as a basketball community, have a much better idea of which players are good and which players are not as good. We can choose players that shoot more efficiently and players that are much better on defense through a numbers based approach. Over the next couple of decades this will approach the point where we fully understand how good each player is at every position. Players are still human though, and there will always be moody things that we cannot measure. Analytics will trudge on, and give it their best shot.

Works Cited

"Basketball Statistics." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 22 May 2015.

"Department of Defense." Grantland. N.p., 24 Feb. 2015. Web. 22 May 2015.

ESPN. ESPN Internet Ventures, n.d. Web. 22 May 2015.

"Nikola Mirotic." Basketball-Reference.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 22 May 2015.

The Generational Gap

Creative Pieces

Haiku's

Michael and Kobe

Could you disagree with them?

Greatness sets the rules

Then came D’Antoni

Nash let him speed the game up

Pace and space was set

Thibs came to rescue

Dropping back the pick and roll

The game changed for good

My Response to Charles Barkley

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZf9NFaCQHQ

My Dearest Charles Barkley,

Thank you for insulting me and my way of life. Let me ask you a few questions in return. Have you ever heard of the San Antonio Spurs? According to ESPN’s research, the Spurs have one of the top five analytics departments in the league. On a side note, they have also won 5 NBA championships over the past two decades. They do have a lot of talent, but Tim Duncan playing at age 39 is not a fluke. The Spurs have sat him out and limited his minutes based on what the data tells them about injuries. They are consistently one of the healthiest teams in the NBA. They also get Tony Parker in the second round and Manu Ginobili with a pick in the 60s. This is a team that consistently finds talent where many people thought it did not exist. Danny Green’s career has been recreated by coming to San Antonio. Same with Patty Mills and Tiago Splitter. The Spurs offensive system allows players to not carry too much of the workload, and consequently stay healthier for long.

Enough about the Spurs though, you went on this rant because of a game that the Houston Rockets were playing in. This is the team with one of the most famous analytics departments in the game of Basketball. Daryl Morey has helped to pioneer the field and has pushed analytics forward light years. The idea that he just got lucky in his free agent acquisitions is absurd. Think about Josh Smith for a minute. He was WAIVED by the Pistons this year, they cut him and they didn’t save a dime. Nobody in the league wanted him. Daryl Morey though, with the help of his analytics department, decided that Josh Smith was a good enough defensive player to keep around. I’m not sure if you’ve watched the playoffs this year? He has been incredible.

Charles Barkley, it is clear that great players and great talent win championships. The problem is that every year five times have great players. The analytics are what gives teams an edge over their competition. It is what allows organizations to make moves that help them acquire better trade assets. They store up value until the right opportunity presents. Analytics is all about maximizing the probability of success. And interestingly enough, analytics favor your basketball career over traditional statistics, by a pretty wide margin.

Yours Truly,

Benedict Brady

The Character of Analytics

Analytics is teenage boy. There is a semblance of sense to what he says. It is not nearly defendable at this point though. He lives in the shadow of his parents who are stuck to their old ways. “Move on!” he yells, “You are stuck in a dying generation.” They will never listen though. People rarely change from the first way that they learn something. Instead, Analytics spends his free time with his younger friends, developing the ideas that will someday change the way that people think. Someday, but not today.

Analytics has a tough relationship with his best friend, Intuition. He creates many of his ideas around what makes sense. The only way that people will believe him is if he gets support from his friend. There is one problem with this. Analytics often time contradicts his friend. He thinks that his new ideas will revolutionize how people think. Instead, he is quickly dismissed, falling back into the shadows. Every night he goes to bed, dreaming of the day when he comes out of the shadows.

Still, despite constant criticism from the world, he holds his head high. Everything is calculated, trying to maximize every opportunity. If this means hurting someone else, so be it. All that matters is the math. All that matters in the end is winning.

My Picture

I will bring it to class

Ballin Blog Post #2

I’m basically finished with my book and it is time for me to delve deeper into the topic that I want to write about for my expository essay and start to think about my creative piece. For the expository essay, I want to do a “How We Got Here” in terms of analytics. “How We Got Here” is a chapter of The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons where he traces the history of the league and the development of all the great players. I would like to mirror that style with my essay about Basketball Analytics. This essay would be over a shorter time span because Analytics have come to the forefront of Basketball over the last decade, not the last half century.

I have started to do some serious research on the foundational concepts of Basketball Analytics, which are often referred to as APBRmetrics (Association for Professional Basketball Research Metrics). The basis for basketball analytics comes from the idea that it is much more useful to analyze a player’s impact per possession or per minute as opposed to a player’s impact per game. While there is use in knowing that JJ Redick scores 16.4 points per game, it is much more useful to know that he scores 26.9 points per 100 possessions. Points scored are more often an indication of the time that a player plays, while points per 100 possessions is an indication of how good the player scores points. This general idea has been expanded into many more useful statistics of this sort. Some of them measure the relative strength of a team with that player on or off the court. I am interested in how these statistics have shaped how we view the NBA and how players are drafted/traded. A lot of this has to do with the size of the analytics departments on specific teams.

I also have to talk about analytics in a much more creative and qualitative manner. This is a weird task seeing as analytics is nearly synonymous with a quantitative approach to a problem. That being said, I have had an interesting time developing a relationship between analytics and the idea of intuition through a personification technique. I am also expanding on the idea of analytics through a free form poem. I still have to come up with two more types of creative pieces for this assignment. I am thinking about a song, but that seems hard. I am also considering doing a picture type of thing. I think that I could come up with a cool way to portray the basketball floor that shows how the development of analytics has changed the way that people play basketball.

Ballin Blog Post #1

For my Independent Reading book I have chosen The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons. This is a book that I have been meaning to read for about two years. Since I started getting overly interested in following sports, Bill Simmons has been my favorite writer, columnist and podcast host. I am very excited to read his 700 page history of everything basketball, a piece that will give me future context for everything else of his that I read.

The thesis that guides a lot of the analysis is the idea that success in basketball is not about basketball, more specifically it has much less to do with what goes on on the court than many observers realize. He sights things such as the era of cocaine and the development of social media as turning points in how the game of basketball was played and how the average players developed. Next, Simmons dives into many of the complicated basketball controversies and debates. He argues the Bill Russell is better than Wilt Chamberlain, he repicks the MVP trophies according to his opinions, and he comes up with a more elegant solution to the problem of the NBA Hall of Fame.

Clearly, I will write my expository essay about some basketball related topic. The research should not be much of a problem. I follow a lot of basketball blogs and have access to many of the statistics. I think that analyzing ideas in basketball is very interesting and relevant because it is always developing and we get new, totally accessible, data every single day. Even better, we are in the middle of the NBA playoffs right now.

There is clearly a lot of research to be done on the topic of basketball, and I have a few ideas in mind about topics that I could pursue. My first idea was researching some advanced analytics that experts are using these days to compare players. There are about six or seven analytics that have been designed by ESPN over the past decade to enhance our understanding of what makes a basketball player good. It accounts for the ideas that some parts of the game are very hard to measure. Traditional stats do not include important defensive mechanisms. Additionally, passes and spacing are heavily undervalued. These all encompassing stats avoid this problem by assessing the overall impact of a player while he is on the court.

Another idea I had was analyzing players that were playing today and trying to compare them. I could write a research paper on things such as my MVP or Defensive Player of the Year pictures. I am interested in using what I have learned from this book and translating it into making an argument for myself.

It will be tough for me to translate this into a fictional piece, but maybe I will write a story about basketball or something. More to come on that idea.

From Belief to Disbelief and Back Again

       As my grandfather told me when I first started reading 1984 by George Orwell, the first sentence foreshadows a lot of the philosophical controversy in the book. Because of this, I will attempt to analyze the first sentence and see if he is right. It reads, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" (1). The phrase "bright cold day in April" is strange because April is normally warm. Also the fact that it is a "bright" day makes the reader think that the sun must be out, implying that the weather is warm. The next odd discrepancy is that the "clocks were striking thirteen." The old clocks that "strike" a time generally are analog and only go up to twelve. The clock striking thirteen implies that this society must be on military time. The number thirteen cannot be a coincidence. Thirteen also carries serious connotation in society today, it is symbolically a very unlucky number. These two weirdly contradictory phrases in the first sentence, do in fact foreshadow the Oceanic philosophy, specifically an idea called doublethink. To be a complacent member of society, one must be able to reconcile a fact that clearly contradicts their memory and the world around them with the idea that whatever Big Brother says must be true. Likewise, the reader must reconcile these weird and potentially logically flawed opening descriptions with the idea that the author gets to decide what is truth and what is not in his novel. The thirteen is present to foreshadow the bad luck that Winston experiences later in the book. He is captured and tortured for most of part three.
       With the conclusion of 1984, I have recognized the interconnectedness of all the objects I traced in my three previous posts. First I have realized that the power symbolized by the telescreen is instrumental in the Oceanic philosophy of truth. Big Brother's ability to change facts at will rests on the fact that the Party can convict people of thoughtcrime at a moments notice. The telescreens also allow Big Brother to convey any message to all the Party members at a moments notice. Even the slightest dissent in the belief of truth can cause massive turmoil in this society.Another two themes that are closely tied are the idea of truth and Winston's love for Julia. When Winston feels that the truth is set in stone, it coincides with his passionate love for Julia. Perhaps this is because this is an illegal thought and Julia symbolizes Winston's desire to break the law. Likewise, when Winston begins to agree with Big Brother's idea that the truth is fluid, he and Julia lose a lot of their chemistry and their relationship tails off.
       One thematic conclusion I came to through reading this novel is that there does not exist an exact truth to every event. Big Brother attempts to control the memories and written records so that it has full control over the "truth" of the past. It seems that Orwell portrays this concept as ridiculous. Orwell presents both sides of this truth issue, and I did not finish the book feeling as if either side was entirely correct. A statement that is articulated many times though, even by O'Brien in his monologues to Winston, is that the truth of an event lies only in the observer. For that reason, I have come to the conclusion that there cannot exist an absolute truth to any event. This is especially timely with our discussions of The Things They Carried and Atonement currently going on. Both of these authors present their texts without declaring an absolute truth. They seem to feel that the storytelling truth is what is relevant, and that storytelling is a very subjective process.
      In terms of close reading, I am very proud of the way I read this book. It is easy to go into this book with an anti-socialist viewpoint already established, and then disagree with everything that Big Brother stands for. Instead I read and reread both the Goldstein philosophy about society and O'Brien's dictation about what Big Brother stands for. Many of these points are eye opening, especially the quest for power. This is a fundamental struggle in society, and it humanizes the motives of Big Brother. Another pitfall readers can run into with this book is relating it too much to the society that we are set in. The reader has to remove themselves from the bounds of our world, even though both universes seem so similar. This was something I attempted to do. In the first 100 pages I attempted to identify objects and characters that would take on layered meanings as the text moved on. I wrote about some of these in my blogs, and I was able to closely follow many moving parts.
       I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in political philosophy. To fully understand the socialist philosophy, one needs to immerse themselves in the culture from a relatable viewpoint. This book was my first up close look at socialism. It is incredibly interesting to grapple with how the inner Party is able to govern so effectively with six million members and very little structure. I am also amazed by how much this got me thinking about truth. I am not sure I really know what the truth of an event is anymore. As Winston gets persuaded to become obedient, I could kind of relate to his switch. This book is gripping and full of intrigue.

Julia

One of the most polarizing characters in 1984, by George Orwell, is Julia. She is first introduced as a mysterious character that follows Winston around: “The girl with dark hair was sitting immediately behind” (11). Soon after this, Julia makes contact with Winston and convinces him to come meet her in private so that they can make love. Winston has very complicated feelings towards Julia, that seem to shift with relation to his hatred of the party. Winston confronts Julia about how many times she’s had sex before and responds: “His heart leapt. Scores of times she had done it; he wished it had been hundreds--thousands. Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope” (125). This is a weird reaction to have about a lover. In a very animalistic sense, humans want to feel as if their sexual interactions are unique and special, especially since these two claim to be in love. This passage struck me as odd because Winston seems to enjoy the act of defiance more than the sense of intimacy.

It seems as if Winstons emotions slowly change as he spends more time with Julia and starts to value her personality. Eventually they meet up again out at an abandoned church and, “The sat talking for hours on the dusty…” (129). As Julia and Winston start to interact more, they enjoy each others company. At this point I am still confused as to whether or not Winston likes her because she is dangerous and forbidden, or because they connect on another level.

Winston and Julia are offered a chance to become a part of the Brotherhood later in the book. O’Brien asks them a series of questions to gauge their seriousness in the organization. He asks, “‘You are prepared, the two of you, to separate and never see one another again?’...’No.’ he said finally” (173). This is a big revelation in Winston’s emotion with regards to Julia. He has finally gotten access to a strong rebellion movement that he doesn’t need Julia for. Although it takes much deliberation, he agrees that his desire to be with Julia trumps his dedication to The Brotherhood.

Finally, Winston is captured at the end of the book and his faith in Julia is put to the final test. After a long period of torcher, he is asked a few questions by O’Brien. “‘Can you think of a single degradation that has not happened to you?’...’I have not betrayed Julia’” (273). Not twenty pages later, Winston finally gives Julia up as he is being tortured, “Do it to Julia! Not me! Julia! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me! Julia! Not me!” (286). I am hesitant to say that Winston’s love for Julia is symbolic of something more than just love. It does heavily coincide with his philosophy with respect to truth though. Before he meets Julia, he only disagrees with the party in his mind and his journal. As they fall in love, he starts to passionately disagree with and disobey the Party. He essentially gives up Julia when he is tortured into becoming an obedient member of the party. This reinforces my thought that he is in love with Julia because she is forbidden, not because he enjoys her personality.