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.