Ebbets Field
Media musings
Basketball gets its Principia
By DAVID BULLA
Ebbets Field Editor
Back in the early 1980s, many sports fans, sports writers and scholars became excited when Bill James began to publish his annual analyses of major statistical trends in major league baseball. James, who lives in Kansas City, Mo., was a long-time fan of the Royals and was a mathematician who owned a personal computer. He started entering massive amounts of hitting, pitching and fielding stats from all of the major league teams. He saw how certain patterns emerged. Or he formed hypotheses and tried to prove them by seeing if the data might head in their directions. James� annual baseball books became best-sellers.
Not too long after James made a fortune with his baseball books, similar attempts were made in several sports. Barry Jacobs, a free-lance sportswriter whose articles have appeared in The New York Times, joined forces with Durham Herald Atlantic Coast Conference basketball beat writer Ron Morris to create a Jamesian book on ACC hoops. The writers borrowed heavily from James, including the featuring of a players� rating systems based on criteria established by then Georgia Tech coach Duane Morrison. Morris eventually left Durham for the Tallahassee Democrat, but Jacobs kept the annual ratings system going and eventually the ACC threw its weight behind the book. As time went by, though, readership surveys showed that most ACC basketball fans did not care about the arcane statistical analyses. Rather, they were interested primarily in player and coach�s profiles.
Enter the aptly named Dean Oliver, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who is trying a scholarly approach to basketball with his Web magazine The Journal of Basketball Studies. The Web magazine has a basketball feel. After all, it�s a small irony that the editor has the same name as the University of Iowa�s point guard. Oliver, who received his undergraduate degree at Cal Tech and his master�s and doctorate from UNC-CH (in engineering and environmental engineering, respectively), says his Web site was �Originally developed with the intention of understanding how to construct a good basketball team.� His audience includes coaches, scouts and serious fans. Oliver�s methods �are actually applicable to a large number of subjects, including environmental engineering, management science, chaos theory, and financial risk analysis,� he says. Thus, Oliver, who has been a player, coach and scout, applies mathematics and science to the study of basketball. Furthermore, he takes simply assertions or questions and tries to prove or answer them. For example, a math teacher in North Carolina asked Oliver to figure out the probability of a high school player making it to the National Basketball Association. It turns out that the answer is not as easy as �you have one in a million chances of making the NBA if you play high school ball.� Rather, Oliver, a Stanford, Calif., native, couches his conclusion in the following language: �a minimal NBA draft pick outplays his opponents in college about 82% of the time.�
Oliver�s homepage is done in frames and navigation is easy through seven major links: articles, coaching/scouting, basketball hoopla, methods, statistics, feedback and his agenda statement. The meat of this site comes on the articles page. His latest area of study is defense. Oliver has come to the conclusion that defense is less meaningful than offense. He makes his point this way: would you rather draft a great offensive player (Michael Jordan) or a great defensive player (Dikembe Mutombo) when you are trying to build a championship team? Of course, this is a false choice. One chooses Jordan, not just because he is a great offensive player, but because he is also a great defensive player (the best in the history of the game not named Russell). Mutombo is a great defensive player, but is usually a liability on offense. Coaches want players who can dribble, pass, shoot, defend and rebound.
The site has only occasional articles because his essays are based on quantitative research. Oliver also said that he is writing more on other Web sites and in print journals. His JOBS articles are worthy of interest for anybody who wants to study basketball in depth. Dean Smith, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Portland Trail Blazers have all used his work. The site is long on words and short on frills -- the way a scholarly site about basketball ought to be. The true basketball state freak will want to read the page on Possession Scoring System. Reads like a hoops Principia.
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