Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.Marie Curie
Welcome to the beginning.
For several months now, Arturo Galletti, Andres Alvarez and I have had a vision.
As traffic on The NBAGeek steadily grew, and as more and more basketball insiders started approaching us, we came to the realization that the NBA, like Major League Baseball before it, was starting to undergo a statistical revolution. It hasn't yet reached the point where Brad Pitt will be playing Daryl Morey in a major motion picture, but the change is coming.
Slowly but surely, people are coming around to the idea that maybe points per game isn't the best way to measure how good a player it is.
And yet...we're still too far away from the goal.
I'll put my cards out in front of me: I think most of the "advanced" metrics used to analyze basketball performance don't...measure up. One can find a lot of "advanced" formulas for basketball performance, but most have serious flaws. The NBA's Efficiency Rating and ESPN's PER both place value on shot attempts, even when they don't go in. Measures like plus/minus and advanced plus/minus suffer from the fact that there is no good way to separate a player from his teammates, and there is no statistically sound way to solve what a statistician would call the "multicollinearity problem".
Things are further compounded by the sheer mass of data. We have shot charts and usage rates. Soon we'll have breakdowns of every single possession, and where every single player was standing at every second of the shot clock. We are hungry for knowledge, and we're drowning in data.
We think we have solutions to this problem. The three of us have decided to combine efforts and found Boxscore Geeks because we think we're at the forefront of this revolution. We've all spent a lot of time in the last few years working with some of the brightest minds in sports economics, and we're aiming to provide some of the best basketball analysis on the internet.
But there's still a lot of work to be done (you may have noticed the tag). I promise you that we'll be making many upgrades to the site in the coming weeks. I'm doing a lot of software engineering, Dre is building lots of data, and Arturo is locked in a basement laboratory madly cackling and coming up with new tools and theories. We have a ton of features planned for the site, including fantasy leagues, prediction tools, forums and more. And we'll also be branching out into other leagues and even other sports. Soon we'll have numbers for the WNBA, the NCAA, and more.
To start you off, we're going to have a huge season preview of all 30 NBA teams. Keep coming back, as we'll add more and more of them to the previews page. We're starting things off with the first of many shockers: our pick for the worst team in the league. If you are expecting Philadelphia, click through for a big surprise and read our first preview!
We hope you're excited for the start of this season as we are. We've only got 8 days, so I hope you're not too busy at work for the next week, because you'll have a lot of previews to get through!