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

of his annual abstracts, a handful of basketball-related analysts started working on what became dubbed as APBRmetrics—honoring the Association for Professional Basketball Research—with many of the earliest practitioners working on offshoots of James’s seminal stats that could apply to basketball. Here are some of the biggest names in the early advancement of basketball analytics, in approximate order of their time of prime impact:
            •     Dave Heeren is considered one of the forefathers of the basketball analytics movement. He created and further adapted TENDEX, which is credited with being the first linear-weight basketball metric. A linear-weight metric assigns positive values for good events and subtracts value for negative events to come up with a relative figure for player performance. It is fairly easy to calculate and understand even if it is not as nuanced or complete as a nonlinear calculation like wins over replacement value. Heeren once worked as a statistician for the New York Knicks but is better known for his annual basketball books called Basketball Abstract that were popular in the early 1990s .
            •     Martin Manley became prominent in the same time period that Heeren did, and published his own annual books called Basketball Heaven. The output of his player evaluation formula, which was nearly identical to Heeren’s but also included theimpact of turnovers committed by a player, was dubbed “Manley Credits,” and became the basis for the NBA’s own efficiency rating. Sadly, Manley, who also wrote for the Kansas City Star, may be most well known for how he died, committing a meticulously planned suicide outside an Overland Park, Kansas, police station on his sixtieth birthday in 2013, and leaving behind a detailed website that explained why he took his own life.
            •     Bob Bellotti was the inventor of the points-created metric, an offshoot of James’s runs-created formulation for baseball, which attempted to define a player’s contributions in a single calculation. He also wrote a series of books starting in the late 1980s, with a 1988 publication called Basketball’s Hidden Game earning him initial entrance into the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks. He consulted for Milwaukee for nineteen years before switching to the Washington Wizards when Bucks general manager Ernie Grunfeld moved to that franchise.
            •     Bob Chaikin created a computer analysis/simulation program called B-Ball, which used statistics to try to suss out player impact and successful lineup combinations. Beginning in 1992, Chaikin has worked as a statistical consultant, analyst, and/or scout at various times for the (then) New Jersey Nets, Miami Heat, and Portland Trail Blazers. Since 2008, he’s been back with the Heat, where he also does college and NBA Development League statistical evaluations.
            •     Jeff Sagarin and Wayne Winston are former MIT undergraduate classmates who worked together to create WINVAL, which is credited as the first attempt at an adjusted plus-minus metric for players. Sagarin is best known for his college football (and other) rankings systems that get prominent play at USAToday. Winston is a statistics professor at Indiana University who once taught Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban in college. The Mavericks adopted the WINVAL metric shortly after Cuban bought the team in 2000, and Cuban credits the system for part of the Mavericks’ subsequentsuccess in that era.
            •     Dean Oliver is considered basketball’s best proxy for Bill James. The Caltech-trained statistician was one of the forefathers of the APBR movement, first breaking new ground in his writing at his own site, the Journal of Basketball Studies, in the mid-1990s, and later as the author of the seminal basketball analytics book, Basketball on Paper, which he published in 2003. The book brought significant attention to what