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