Basketball Statistics Blog

This Week Basketball Book & eBook eBA DVICE !

Basketball on Paper: Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis By Dean Oliver "... I wrote the book under the influence of award-winning books like "Guns, Germs, and Steel," "Good to Great," and "Ender's Game." Now that it's 3 years after Basketball on Paper went to press, a couple years after the description here was written, and a year or more after the book got me a job in the NBA, I wanted to add an updated description.

I wrote the book in the hopes of presenting a scientific _method_ for approaching basketball.

By "method", I mean that it doesn't present a magical all-encompassing rating for players, but rather a _structure_ for basketball as genetics provided a
structure for understanding life and biology. ...... "

"... The possession-based concept introduced early in the book allows you to evaluate strategy, the chemistry of a team, and, yes, who are better players. It doesn't matter whether it's the NBA, WNBA, college, high school, or the international game - the methods apply and I've applied them. The book focused on the NBA and WNBA because that was where the statistics were most readily available going back more than a year or two. That is changing and I have already seen foreign leagues incorporating my work into their game.

This structure does introduce formulas, nothing more complicated than the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division that I learned through baseball cards when I was 10 years old. For coaches who want to avoid these, I actually recommend reading the last chapter first because it summarizes the conclusions of the previous chapters.

For people interested in player evaluation, the book has numerous lists of player stats, how many wins and losses they contributed, and how they did it. This includes players as far back as Bill Russell, but as recent as Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O'Neal, and Allen Iverson.

For baseball fans, I should say that Bill James' work on Win Shares in baseball paralleled mine in basketball, though we did take slightly different approaches. Bill has even said of the book, "Excellent writing. There are a lot of math guys who just rush from the numbers to the conclusion. . .they'll tell you that Shaq is a real good player but his team would win a couple more games a year if he could hit a free throw.

Dean is more than that; he's really struggling to understand the actual problem, rather than the statistical after-image of it. I learn a lot by reading him." I am happy to say that experts in statistical evaluation of baseball (like Bill), football (like Aaron Schatz and Ben Alamar of Pro Football Prospectus), and basketball are all communicating about the common goals we have for doing scientific evaluation of team sports, where analogies to business team environments and global politics abound.

I realized as I wrote the book that there were a million projects that I could do from what is in the book. Those projects have come about and grown even before I joined the Seattle Supersonics in October of 2004. Evaluating strategy has grown so much from the basics in this book. Player evaluation, especially as they move from one league to another, has evolved. And, with the experiment of the 2004-05 season, I got to show how the work significantly helps coaching a team.

That season, I joined the Sonics with a fixed roster that was universally picked for last in their division. I worked with the coaches, management, and players to provide a different perspective to their own backgrounds, one that complemented their own expertises. At the end of the season, we won our division, we upset the experts by winning our first round series, and we gave the ultimate NBA champions one of their toughest playoff battles.

I felt that we should have won the championship -- perhaps naive, but also a measure of the belief I had in not only the work in Basketball on Paper, but also in the ability of the staff and players I worked with.

Now that I do work in the NBA and apply new tricks of the trade, I can't really write another book sharing my secrets. But Basketball on Paper contains the framework, the basic insights, and a lot of the numbers for understanding a lot more about the beautiful game."
Dean Oliver

Read the complete review and an excerpt at the eBA Portal ! And ...!

You'll can also browse this book in a Google Books 'limited preview' !

 • Author: Dean Oliver
 • Format: eBook & Book
 • Binding: Paperback
 • Number of Pages: 361 pages
 • Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
 • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
 • Publisher: Potomac Books Inc.
 • Publishing Date: November 30, 2004
 • eBook Edition: December, 2010
 • Language: English

 • Also available: In the new 2010 eBook edition

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Un Nuevo Lunes... Un Nuevo Libro Recomendado por eBA ...

Estudio Observacional de la Competición en Baloncesto Por Miguel Angel Gomez Ruano click here to read the full review !

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