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- A pair of great pieces on nutrition in the NBA: Grant Hill on the caveman diet. Boris Diaw on the cartoon caveman diet.
- The Kings’ Isaiah Thomas, is creeping up Sebastian Pruiti’s rookie rankings.
- The Knicks offense has struggled to put the pieces together with Carmelo Anthony and Amare Stoudemire back from injury. Everyone’s eyes are on Jeremy Lin and Anthony, but is Stoudemire taking enough blame for his lack of production?
- This is an incredibly cool set of visualizations demonstrating which player combinations are used most frequently by each team. The Pacers are relying heavily on their starting five, thank goodness.
- The Grizzlies have been without Zach Randolph almost the entire season. With his return imminent, the team is in about as great a position as they could have hoped.
- Congratulations to Dan Devine, the new associate editor at Ball Don’t Lie.
- Rajon Rondo’s value is tied, heavily, to the players who surround him. Any team that trades for him needs to make sure it’s making an honest evaluation of the pieces they plan to put around them and the style of play they’d like to pursue.
- Forgive my inarticulate metaphor, but SportsVU is like a drug dealer. Every so often they materialize and drop just a little taste of the incredible possibilities of their visual data collection system.
Last weekend I attended the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. It was an incredible event and I learned a ton. However, the most impressive part of the entire weekend was the revelation that for every crazy idea you or I come up with, that seems impossible to measure or resolve, there is someone, somewhere with the creativity and technical know-how to make it a reality. Writers from all over the web were there, including a large contingent from the TrueHoop Network. Below are some links to the best recaps I’ve seen this week of the different panels and presentations.
- Here are the two pieces I wrote for TrueHoop about the conference. The first is on the several research presentations on different analytic methods for determining the way players fit together. The second is about the disconnect between the analytics community and the ‘average fan’.
- Michael Pina on The Analytics of NBA Fans, the overall experience and what the lessons of the conference mean for the Houston Rockets.
- Beckley Mason on what visual data tracking and spatial mapping can tell us about evaluating shooters.
- Eddy Rivera on the value of playoff experience.
- Jovan Buha with some ideas for getting fans actively involved in franchise management.
- Jim Cavan on making sure statistical analysis has productive outcomes besides just creating neat graphs and tables to look at.
- Zach Lowe on visual tracking to determine speed. Who’s the fastest point guard in the NBA?
- Joe Treutlein on how to squeeze more out of the box score.
- Charlie Widdoes on the curse of the competitive franchise.
- Rob Mahoney on using data to redefine roles and positions.
