Basketball Statistics Blog

Friday Press Clippings:
Playing the Basketball Numbers Game

From Raptors Club.com/ By Fox Sports
Download source here: ' Playing the numbers game '

"... 'I always say there's a gut you have to listen to,' he said. 'It's your gut instinct on draft picks, on trades, on who might play and give you a chance to win that night.' ..."

"... Just as baseball fans long ago began to recognize that traditional statistics were lacking, Basketball fans and insiders alike are on the same path. ..."

"... Triano points to blocked shots and steals as ambiguous statistics and places charges taken and deflections made as more valuable numbers that don't show up in a box score.

The goal for quantitative analysis now is to determine how everything interacts on the floor. As Morey says: "We want to know if a guy was open because of bad defence or was he open because one of our guys set a good screen.". ..."

"... About a third of NBA teams are already heavily invested in quantitative analysis and another third - such as the Raptors - are dabbling, says ESPN.com columnist John Hollinger, who helped popularize the approach for fans. ..."

"... The best known of a crowd of like-minded analysts, his signature breakthrough was PER - or Player Efficiency Rating - a catch-all measure for player performance.

It set the league average at 15 and recognizes LeBron James - his PER of 31.7 in 2008-09 was third best in the past 35 years - as an emerging legend. ..."

"... It's not clear how many of the league's players are paying attention to the shift, but mention that teams of very smart people are trying to figure ways to measure the so-called "little things" and their interest piques. ..."

"... Many of those questions are being raised by Basketball's new stat geeks - such as the two young men with laptops in hand who sat in at the Raptors' practice last week and made their pitch to management later - and sometimes the answers are confusing at first. ..."

Read more articles in Raptors Club.com/.

To read Today's 'Press Clippings' in Spanish, click this week above on the 'Español' tab or afterwards click here: ' De equipos, entrenadores y estadísticas ' por Jugones.com.

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