Chasing Perfection: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the High-Stakes Game of Creating an NBA Champion Read Online Free Page A
a way to summarize what had happened in a game.
So-called advanced basketball statistics, in the way that we currently understand and continue to evolve them, date back at least as far as 1959, when then-North Carolina head coach Frank McGuire authored a book called Defensive Basketball. In it was a section written by then-assistant coach Dean Smith (who would go on to his own Hall of Fame career as the Tar Heels’ head coach) that discussed how to evaluate the effectiveness of a team’s offense and defense not by its raw totals of points scored or allowed, but by how many it tallied orconceded “per possession.”
North Carolina set offensive and defensive scoring targets in that era on a per-possession basis, with Smith writing in the book that the Tar Heels wanted to keep teams below 0.63 points per possession while scoring more than that figure. Their methodology at the time considered an offensive rebound to create a new possession, and the book emphasized that defensive rebounding was crucial so the Tar Heels would end up with more possessions—read: more chances to score—than the opponent. Those “extra” possessions on both ends lowered the points-per-possession target below modern averages, as any possession that ended with an offensive rebound would be included as worth zero points. Today, in order to keep the number ofpossessions as equal as possible for both teams, offensive rebounds are considered part of the same offensive possession.
However North Carolina was defining possessions, Smith is widely cited as the first person to understand that the pace of a game had a significant role in determining just how good or bad a team was on either end of the floor, because composite statistics and averages don’t take into account how many opportunities a team had during the course of a game. If two different teams each average eighty points a game, but one plays at a pace of seventy possessions per game and the other plays at ninety possessions per game, the team with the slower tempo has a much more effective offense (rounded to 1.13 points per possession) than the faster team (0.89 points per possession). The most lethal offensive teams (like the 2014–15 Golden State Warriors) play at high-possession tempos while registering great points-per-possession numbers, but most teams have a tradeoff on tempo versus efficiency once they speed up to a certain level.
The modern origins of basketball analysis, though, stem from baseball—more specifically from the work and impact of Bill James, widely considered to be the Godfather of advanced sports statistical analysis. Shortly after graduating from the University of Kansas in the early 1970s, James began positing about baseball in new and unusual ways. After finding resistance from traditional media outlets who didn’t really understand or appreciate his work, James started self-publishing his now-famous annual Baseball Abstract in 1977 (and continued doing so until 1988). From there, James went on to publish a sizable number of additional books, and was hired by the Boston Red Sox as a consultant in late 2002. As of August 2015, he was still with the club in an advisory role.
James is responsible for a huge number of statistics that either have maintained their relevance or served as a launching point for additional study, and in the process, his baseball work spurred others to try to mimic significant parts of it for basketball. Among James’smost famous concepts were runs created, which attempted to identify a specific player’s responsibility for his team’s run-scoring; Pythagorean winning percentage, which used run differential to establish what a team’s record “should be” versus what it actually was; and win shares, which was a catch-all statistic designed to gauge a player’s contribution to his team’s success, allowing for cross-position and cross-era comparisons of players.
Right as James was coming to his decision to cease publication
So-called advanced basketball statistics, in the way that we currently understand and continue to evolve them, date back at least as far as 1959, when then-North Carolina head coach Frank McGuire authored a book called Defensive Basketball. In it was a section written by then-assistant coach Dean Smith (who would go on to his own Hall of Fame career as the Tar Heels’ head coach) that discussed how to evaluate the effectiveness of a team’s offense and defense not by its raw totals of points scored or allowed, but by how many it tallied orconceded “per possession.”
North Carolina set offensive and defensive scoring targets in that era on a per-possession basis, with Smith writing in the book that the Tar Heels wanted to keep teams below 0.63 points per possession while scoring more than that figure. Their methodology at the time considered an offensive rebound to create a new possession, and the book emphasized that defensive rebounding was crucial so the Tar Heels would end up with more possessions—read: more chances to score—than the opponent. Those “extra” possessions on both ends lowered the points-per-possession target below modern averages, as any possession that ended with an offensive rebound would be included as worth zero points. Today, in order to keep the number ofpossessions as equal as possible for both teams, offensive rebounds are considered part of the same offensive possession.
However North Carolina was defining possessions, Smith is widely cited as the first person to understand that the pace of a game had a significant role in determining just how good or bad a team was on either end of the floor, because composite statistics and averages don’t take into account how many opportunities a team had during the course of a game. If two different teams each average eighty points a game, but one plays at a pace of seventy possessions per game and the other plays at ninety possessions per game, the team with the slower tempo has a much more effective offense (rounded to 1.13 points per possession) than the faster team (0.89 points per possession). The most lethal offensive teams (like the 2014–15 Golden State Warriors) play at high-possession tempos while registering great points-per-possession numbers, but most teams have a tradeoff on tempo versus efficiency once they speed up to a certain level.
The modern origins of basketball analysis, though, stem from baseball—more specifically from the work and impact of Bill James, widely considered to be the Godfather of advanced sports statistical analysis. Shortly after graduating from the University of Kansas in the early 1970s, James began positing about baseball in new and unusual ways. After finding resistance from traditional media outlets who didn’t really understand or appreciate his work, James started self-publishing his now-famous annual Baseball Abstract in 1977 (and continued doing so until 1988). From there, James went on to publish a sizable number of additional books, and was hired by the Boston Red Sox as a consultant in late 2002. As of August 2015, he was still with the club in an advisory role.
James is responsible for a huge number of statistics that either have maintained their relevance or served as a launching point for additional study, and in the process, his baseball work spurred others to try to mimic significant parts of it for basketball. Among James’smost famous concepts were runs created, which attempted to identify a specific player’s responsibility for his team’s run-scoring; Pythagorean winning percentage, which used run differential to establish what a team’s record “should be” versus what it actually was; and win shares, which was a catch-all statistic designed to gauge a player’s contribution to his team’s success, allowing for cross-position and cross-era comparisons of players.
Right as James was coming to his decision to cease publication
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