recommendations??

I prefer books myself, but on this one I'd actually start by looking for blogs. Lots of the recent statistical analysis is really driven by bloggers/nerds rather than academics who write books. I'm pretty sure that I have found some decent posts in the past when I was looking for specific things.

Often sites that list advanced statistics (basketball reference, espn, nba.com) will at least share the formulas if not explain the rationale. You might also try fivethirtyeight.com and harvardsportsanalysis.org, I think I've found some decent stuff in both places.

Also, regarding stats, some of the key concepts I like are lineup analysis, offensive efficiency, defense weighted as heavily as offense, per possession stats, and delta on opposing player offensive efficiency. Those all play off of each other.

I cringe when I see formulas that use steals and blocks as their only means of measuring defensive performance, or when someone thinks that a player who scores a lot but shoots an atrocious percentage is an elite player.

Yea I've stumbled across a couple blogs/forums but haven't gone into them much in depth yet.

But yes great, thanks though, I'll look into them some more.

I did a search on Amazon and found a couple books:
Basketball Analytics: Objective and Efficient Strategies for Understanding How Teams Win
Basketball on Paper: Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis

I did another search for the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (the biggest conference in the world for sports stats geeks) and their site is great. They have ton of the content from old conferences recorded or logged, and have a blog too.
Sloan Homepage


Also, we ought to keep this thread alive and transition it to a continuing discussion of bball analytics. I just started a linear algebra class (one of the important fields of math for data science) on Coursera and when it finishes up in a couple months, I want to get my geek on and dive into heavy sports stats analysis.

Charles Barkley may know.

I have Dean Oliver's Basketball on Paper and Dave Berri's Wages of Wins, and I would suggest doing the reading of blogs before you invest any money in the books, or else you'll get really board.

Someone just sent me this link today, and most of the articles probably aren't of interest, but there is one by Berri that might. It is on Pg 7, and I think the link only lasts for a few days.


There is a fine line between using analytics to better explain why a player like Shane Battier is really beneficial to a team, or why the Warriors this year are really very good on defense, versus a statistical reasoning of why Hamed Haddadi should be playing 33.5 minutes per game.

FiveThirtyEight is live blogging the Sloan conference

Link

http://fivethirtyeight.com/burrito/#brackets-view