Basketball on Paper: Rules and Tools for Performance Analysis
By Dean Oliver
About Dean Oliver Himself:
"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
Book Description
Journey "inside the numbers" for an exceptional set of statistical tools and
rules that can help explain the winning-or losing-ways of a Basketball team. Basketball on
Paper doesnt diagram plays or explain how players get in shape, but instead
demonstrates how to interpret player and team performance.
Dean Oliver highlights general strategies for teams when theyre winning or losing,
and what aspects should be the focus in either situation. He describes and quantifies the
jobs of team leaders and role players, then discusses the interactions between players and
how to achieve the best fit. Oliver con-ceptualizes the meaning of teamwork and how to
quantify the value of dif-ferent types of players working together. He examines
historically successful NBA teams and identifies what made them so successful individual
talent, a system of putting players together, or good coaching.
Oliver then uses these statistical tools and case studies to evaluate the best players in
history-such as Magic Johnson, Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Charles Barkley-and how
they contributed to their teams success. He does the same for some of the NBAs
"oddball" players-Manute Bol, Muggsy Bogues, and Dennis Rodman-and for the
WNBAs top players.
Basketball on Paper is unique in its incorporation of business and analytical concepts
within the context of Basketball to measure the value of players in a cooperative setting.
Whether youre looking for strategies or new ideas to throw out while watching the
ballgame at a sports bar, Dean Olivers Basketball on Paper will give you amazing new
insights into teamwork, coaching, and success.
From the Publisher
Basketball stats and strategy for coaches and fans alike.
more info
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