So, after receiving a good bit of positive feedback on my NBA analysis on a forum I frequent (SpursReport.com), I’ve decided to throw my hat into the vast frightening abyss that is the blogosphere. So allow me to be the first to introduce (’cause who the heck else is going to?) “Little White Statistics”, an NBA blog with a statistical focus.
Why statistics? I don’t know. For some reason I just have a tendency to look at things from a statistical point of view, even though I know they’re not always useful. To me, when you analyze something statistically, one of three things happens: it proves nothing (or nothing interesting), it “proves” something that isn’t true, or it proves something that is true. Here’s hoping the latter happens most often here.
If statistics aren’t your thing, don’t worry - I’ll be posting a brief overview of the only parts of stats that are relevant to sports, and I’ll also include an offensively large ‘TAKEAWAYS’ section in most entries, where you can see what the stats showed without actually reading about how they showed it.
Kicking this thing off right before the end of the season is probably a dumb idea, but hey, that gives us an entire off-season to look back at the year before. In the coming months, there are two primary issues I’m going to look at:
- One, which I’ve already started, is an obnoxiously in-depth look at score differentials throughout a game - that is, at what point a first-quarter lead actually starts to correlate to a win, if different teams are more likely to overcome deficits, if good production in a certain quarter more frequently translates to a win, etc.
- The second is a more in-depth look at the topic addressed by Christopher Reina’s study, which says that “the Lakers were 38% more likely to win during the regular season when Kobe was not a high-volume shooter and their offense was more balanced, which is a staggering differential.” The study was thoroughly lambasted by the fellas at my personal favorite NBA blog (Yahoo!’s Ball Don’t Lie), and I’d like to look at the statistical viability of some of their criticisms - specifically, to correlate Kobe’s shot attempts on a spectrum to their percentage, not just an either-or over-under 20 shots criteria, and to look if there’s a negative correlation between Kobe’s shot attempts and his teammate’s shooting percentage. On that latter one, I’m hoping to be extra-spiffy and specifically look at his teammates’ FG% per-quarter, to try and answer the age-old question, “which came first, Kobe hogging the ball or his teammates shooting like crap?” (or, in more statistical terms, does Kobe’s high-volume shooting prevent his teammates from getting into a rhythm, or does his teammates’ lack of rhythm force Kobe into high-volume shooting?)
So, jump on for the ride, hopefully it’ll be fun. Like Brent Barry says, statistics don’t ever tell the whole story, and I’m certainly not one to tell you that everything I’m going to prove here is completely and undeniably true. I just hope to shed some light on some different areas of the game and maybe find some subtle nuances that hadn’t been observed. Like, which quarter is it most important to perform well in to win a game? We’ll answer that, and many other questions, in the next few weeks as part of our first study.
But enough about the blog, on to what really matters: me. Because naturally that’s the reason you’re here is to read whatever is that I write. I could spew Lorem Ipsum’s all day and you’d be hanging on my every dolor-sit-amit, right? …right? Ok, so no. But in case you’re interested, I’m a soon-to-be alumni of the Georgia Institute of Technology with a degree in Computer Science - which is currently only being applied to writing text-parsing applications to get the data out of sites that post box scores and the like, since I don’t have the database that ESPN’s Hollinger is so fortunate to have.
I confess to a bit of favoritism in the NBA - I’m a diehard San Antonio Spurs fan and a casual (bordering on bandwagon) Atlanta Hawks fan (when they play their games a mile away from your apartment, you have to be somewhat of a fan). But while it’s pretty common knowledge that statistics do lie, they typically lie pretty evenly in everyone’s favor, so my favoritism shouldn’t affect it. We won’t have to worry about my Hawks favoritism infecting my analysis because there’s not a statistic in the world brave enough to say something good about the Hawks. Stats tend to be pretty favorable towards the Spurs though, so I’ll try to balance any Spurs-positive comments with some Spurs-criticisms too.
Or I’ll just let the stats speak for themselves - fortunately, I don’t set out to find stats that will prove a certain hypothesis, I set out to find stats that’ll answer a certain question. Going into an analysis, I don’t have any hope for what it will or will not prove (other than hoping it’ll prove something, and preferably something interesting). So with any luck my favoritism won’t actually affect anything.
I do have to take a moment to thank a couple people - my friend James for helping me come up with the title of the blog (which, in case you haven’t gotten it yet, is a play on the phrase “Little White Lies”), my friend Sunira for helping me set up the domain and hosting and software and all that, and my friend Stuart for designing the lovely lady that will soon be adorning the top of this blog.
Did I forget anything? Surely I did. But fortunately this brave new world of ours lets us literally go back and edit what we’ve already said, effectively changing the past. Is what you’ve ready here really what I wrote? Have dozens of bad jokes been removed before you got the chance to groan at them? Did I change the descriptions of what I plan to do so that I can say ‘I said I was going to do this 3 months ago!’? In the words of Ball Don’t Lie, that’s for you, dear reader, to figure out.
-DJ