Posts tagged "Non-ZenGM"
Review of Dean Oliver's "Basketball Beyond Paper"
Dean Oliver is possibly the most famous basketball analytics guy. For any Basketball GM users who haven't heard of him - way back in the early days of basketball analytics, he invented some of the advanced stats you see in the game, such as ORtg and DRtg, and the Four Factors in box scores.
His new book Basketball Beyond Paper was just released, and because I'm a super important basketball person, I got a copy a week early, so I already read it and wrote this review! (Okay, that's not quite true, I am not a super important basketball person and I just ordered it on Amazon and they sent it to me early for some reason.)
Which NBA players take the most shots with their foot on the three point line? (hint: not James Harden)
I'm going to deal with a very important question today. Which NBA players sacrificed the most points by taking shots with their foot on the three point line? This may seem like a silly question, but given the well-documented difficulty of assessing whether a player's foot was on the line or not, I think it deserves a serious analysis.
Most Improved Player award
Basketball GM has long had awards every season - MVP, Rookie of the Year, etc. But Most Improved Player (MIP) has been missing for a while. That's because MIP is harder to compute than other awards. You don't need just this year's stats, you need prior years too. And you also need to understand context - is a player actually improving, or just recovered from an injury? Or maybe he's an established star coming off a bad season? Or maybe his numbers went up, but only because he got more playing time without really improving? It's complicated.
The effect of a blocked jump shot on future jump shots in the NBA
If an NBA player gets a jump shot blocked, does it change the way he plays the rest of the game? You can imagine there could be a psychological effect like a loss of confidence, or a conscious/subconscious decision to try harder to avoid being blocked again which could harm shooting efficiency. Basketball statistics legend Dean Oliver recently Tweeted the claim that it has a big effect on Steph Curry and basketball players in general. But is it actually true? And how big is the effect? Let's look at some data.
The correlation between spending and winning in the NBA: trends by year and by team
Money is the topic of the moment in the NBA, what with the unfortunate lockout and all. One relevant question is how much the budgets of different teams affect their abilities to win. The Lakers and Knicks, in the two biggest markets, can spend pretty much anything and still turn a profit. The Grizzlies and the Bobcats, not so much.
But how does spending correlate with winning for NBA teams?