Suggestions for newcomers?

[thesoxman101]

Hi, I was wondering if any of you guys could recommend good books, or starting points for people interested in learning a lot of the in depth NBA Statistics used here. One book I hear mentioned a lot is Basketball on Paper by Dean Oliver. Do you guys agree on that book, or are there better / other one's? Thanks.

[Mike G]

You can look at http://www.basketball-reference.com/ to see how those stats look.
You can browse this forum for discussion of various stats.
You can revive threads that pique your interest, by posting questions and suggestions.
Above all, have fun.

[DSMok1]

Hi, I was wondering if any of you guys could recommend good books, or starting points for people interested in learning a lot of the in depth NBA Statistics used here. One book I hear mentioned a lot is Basketball on Paper by Dean Oliver. Do you guys agree on that book, or are there better / other one's? Thanks.

Basketball on Paper is a good place to start.

Basketball Reference and their blog is really useful. The advanced stats headquarters. Unfortunately, no additional work now being done on their blog, but still certainly look at their blog archives. Their glossary is very useful and good: http://www.basketball-reference.com/about/glossary.html

For particular stats, there are pages here and there covering them. For adjusted plus/minus, look at this post (which I wrote): http://godismyjudgeok.com/DStats/2011/n ... ilization/

The archives of this forum would be really useful, if I ever got them posted online...

[Crow]

About half to maybe 2/3rds of Basketball on Paper is still relevant. Lots of the pages of data is for players long moved into the history book so unless you are into history I'd skip most of that.

I would not put much or any weight on its defensive rating. I almost never hear anyone use play% and I have never been swayed or intrigued by it. This book opened the discussion on skill curves but only opened it.

Read the books based heavily on them if you want but I wouldn't put much reliance on the PER or Schoene numbers.

Reading what was recovered or recently added here would be my main recommendation but using the links section and checking stuff from 10-20 other current sites would be good too.

The best NBA statistics book is one that is still to be written.

[huevonkiller]

I don't particularly care for APM it seems very unreliable, and instead I try to use an amalgamation of various advanced stats.

I don't think we're quite at the point in APBRmetrics where we have a definitive end-all stat.

[EvanZ]

Read my primer!

http://www.d3coder.com/thecity/advanced-stats-primer/